Peter Cohan’s Great Demo! methodology will help you improve your sales pitch. It helps you put the bottom line up front.
Peter Cohan from Second Derivative offers some of the best sales demo/pitch training and hands-on learning that we have seen. So we are honored to offer these interactive workshops to startups.
Have you ever seen a bad software demonstration?
We help software companies make their demos crisp, effective and compelling, to help you achieve your sales and marketing objectives and make your revenue numbers.
How do we transform your demos? Here’s the recipe.
Do the last thing first.
Do the last thing first.
Traditional demos often take 20 minutes or 40 minutes or 60 minutes or longer to get to the point what we’re proposing is very simple and very effective.
Turn your demonstration upside down and present that end result.
What good thing you can present to your customer right up front, right away, so they see where this is going. In fact, they may say, “Wow, I can see this. This makes sense. Now, how did you get to that end result?”
The rest of the process is one of peeling back and revealing the layers of complexity, but in accord with your customers depth and level of interest.
There are two major challenges with traditional demos.
- Insufficient qualification and discovery.
- Challenges with the organization of the content.
The biggest single cause of failure in software demonstrations is an insufficient understanding of your customers situation.
How can you possibly present a solution if you don’t have a reasonable understanding of the customer’s problem? We help you to develop skills and methods that uncover the information you need to present a clear, incredible demonstration.
Further, we explore proven processes to discover and articulate tangible measurements of value. This information enables demos to be focused, targeted and clear to avoid
- show up and throw up,
- spray and pray
- living in the land of hope.
Have you ever been watching another company’s demo and find yourself thinking, “it only takes a few minutes, where is this going?”
Traditional demos often introduce the names of multiple fictional characters. They show how you navigate, how to customize the interface, and then they attempt to weave a long, tortured story to embrace the needs of multiple players. They present functions and features, options and alternatives, often running out of time before you get to that “ta da” screen at the end of the whole demo.
They often find that people have left the room well before that took place.
The Great Demo! methodology presents the most important deliverables up front, so the audience can see clearly what’s in it for them.
Proof for each point is presented using a minimum of steps, followed by peeling back the layers in accord with the audience’s depth and level of interest.
Traditional demos present information in a unidirectional fire hose like flow. Great demos engage the audience in a bi directional, two way conversation. Traditional demos show far too much boring audiences and causing executives to leave early. Wait, wait, don’t go away. We haven’t shown you the best stuff yet.
Great demos present what the audience needs to see in a compelling sales pitch.
Related Blog Posts
- A Great Demo Is A Conversation Driven By Mutual Curiosity
- Recap of “How To Give a Great Demo” at CoFounders Club Wed-Apr-16-2014
- More Effective Discovery Conversations Lead to More Effective Demos
- Extracting Insights From A Competitor’s Software Demo
- Ten Tips For New Product Demos
- Ilya Semin of Datanyze on Value of Great Demo Workshop