Sales demos are critically important to winning new business. Your ability to deliver an impressive demonstration of your product can be the difference between whether your company can survive or not.
You can explain how great your product is, but if you can’t back up your words then you’ll be unable to close a deal. Before agreeing to sign a contract, most will want assurance that the product does what it says and that this is relevant to their specific business.
Knowing you need to blow the potential customer away with your demo is one thing, but it’s another to understand how to take a mundane sales demonstration and turn it into a successful sales experience.
1. Customize the demo for the customer
If you want the customer to buy them they need to understand how it’s going to work for them and a generic company used for all your demos will not cut it. It should be at minimum customized for their industry but to really make an impression it should look like it is aimed at their precise company.
The less they need to use their imagination, the easier it is for them to see themselves working with you. Attention to detail such as using their logo and branding can be the difference-maker here. Yet while this sounds great, you might think it’s far too time-consuming to be practical. For some clients, this might be true but especially in the early stages, each newly signed client can represent a significant win. Sales experience platform Walnut is a highly recommended platform for customizing your sales demonstrations. Furthermore, you can duplicate an existing demo that you have, and then edit it over and over again, creating different versions for your different leads.
You can speed up this process by using software that allows you to change the basic elements quickly across all the pages in the demo. Walnut.io creates interactive templates that can be easily updated in a few clicks to change color, styling, and brand templates. Potential clients won’t know it’s this easy for you and will be impressed that you made the effort specifically for them.
2. Take them on a hero’s journey
The structure of the demo itself is important. You want to ensure you are telling a compelling story that they can buy into. According to Yuval Noah Hariri in Sapiens, our ability to tell stories is the very reason we outcompeted the neanderthals. Stories are engaging and memorable thus the perfect way to present information.
The basics of good storytelling haven’t changed throughout history. For your demo, you want to start with explaining a common problem the customer currently faces and what effect this has. Then your product is the hero which solves this product and helps the customer achieve their goals.
You want to use your prior conversations with the customer to inform these stories to ensure they resonate as much as possible.
3. Make your demo resistant to connection issues
In times gone by, you would take your laptop to a client site and connect it to a larger screen in a meeting room. You’d use an online demo as a last resort for clients who were too far for traveling to them to be reasonable. You could have the entire thing offline to ensure everything went to plan.
Yet the pandemic meant this is now a rarity. Most demos will now be done across Zoom or Google Meet. This exposes you to potential lag and overclocking issues when sharing your screen as your computer struggles to cope. We’ve all heard someone tell us something isn’t normally this slow when sharing their screen and it’s hard to know whether they are telling the truth.
There are a few ways to minimize this risk. You can use an ethernet cable rather than WiFi to ensure an uninterrupted fast connection. You should close all other open windows.
For even greater reassurance of zero connectivity issues, you can host your demos, we turn again to Walnut. They provide encapsulated environments with guaranteed zero downtimes and loading time issues, as they host demos on the Cloud. This provides peace of mind that your demo will be clean and you can focus on your personal delivery instead.
4. Communicate next steps
How you end the demo is the icing on the cake and can be the last bit of temptation to secure the potential client. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to agree to work with you.
Outline the exact steps they need to take to buy your product or service so there’s no guesswork for them. You can give them the answers upfront to the questions they are likely to have around prices and your availability.
Send a follow-up email after the conclusion too where you thank them for their time and give the highlights of what you think they were most interested in. You can also use the opportunity to improve upon any of the answers you gave within the demo that you thought could be misinterpreted.
Wrap up
Using these tips, you can have demos that impress your target customers and improve your lead conversion rate.
Remember to think of your demo as a story that is personalized to your client’s needs. The amount of research you do into your client affects how compelling this story is. You can use different cutting-edge software to ensure no downtime during your demo and to aid rapid customization of your demo environment.
Once these tips help you win one client, your confidence will increase leading to even better results in the future.
Image: Depositphotos
This article, “4 Tips for Turning Standard Sales Demos Into Successful Sales Experiences” was first published on Small Business Trends