SaaS Sales Demos: Why Getting a No Is Better Than a Yes

0:00Hi, everybody. My name's Dustin Preyer, founder of Giant Rocket Ship. So, I'm going to go ahead and set the stage here. There's three main things I'm going to address. First is going to be an invitation. The second will be the presentation, and the last is going to be a request. So, the invitation is we are based out

0:20of New Orleans. If you fly into my town and you're looking for somebody to walk you around Bourbon Street and show you a good time, not me. I'm too old. But, I will take you to the best dinner you can get in the United States. So, that's an invitation. Just reach out to me. So, let's go forward with the

0:39presentation. I'm going to start off with that agenda. And so, I'm going to go through what you should focus on pre-demo, what you need to focus on during the demo, and the steps to get the most out of your time in the demo by your follow-through. So, first, I do want to address a comment she made that during that breakdown of the peer review, I'm making comments and helping people. That's not really correct. We're helping people in that peer review. We all fill out a form, and then we do a live review every 2 weeks of somebody's actual presentation in a sales demo to a

1:21prospect. So, one thing that I found during that process was people make it incredibly difficult to register for sales demos. They hide it on a contact page. They bury it way under the fold at the bottom footer. Right? So, the first suggestion I always say, and I would say this is over half of the people we've peer reviewed, registering for your demo should be loud

1:51and proud on every page on your website. Second, doing a sales demo is expensive. You could be doing much better things with your time if you have a bad prospect in that demo. Your form should not have a million questions, but it should let people self-select out of doing the sales demo. For example, and everybody that's in the group is B2B SaaS, you should ask at a minimum, if you charge per user, how

2:22many users they have. And in the drop-down, make it obvious it's really focused on large organizations if that's your customer base. Right? If you don't want to onboard a two-person shop, then your first selection shouldn't be one to five users. Right? Make it obvious to them that you're looking for 500 or 1,000 users. So, filter out early and often because they're taking up a slot that you could be using for somebody that's a

2:50better prospect. The next thing is, and I have yet to get this from any of the demos we peer-reviewed, I never get a reminder that I have a sales demo the next day. Right? It's important that people know they have a sales demo with you. And so, if you're like me, when you get these invitations in your inbox, a lot

3:11of times you're going to miss them. Right? Or you're going to get busy on a phone call. So, setting up automation for the demo, so that they get a reminder the day of the registration and the day before the sales demo, is something I have found is lacking in almost every peer that we've reviewed, including mine. I had to put that into

3:31place after I realized it was a problem. Now, this is something I was guilty of. I'm a technical founder. I love showing how cool and awesome and innovative my idea is, and so I would start my demos sharing the screen so that everybody could see how cool our portal is. [snorts] Right? But nobody cares. It's just mumbo jumbo to the person that sells demo cuz

4:01you haven't even talked to them yet. A slide deck is essential to keep the pacing of that demo going where you want to bring them. Right? So take the time to do a sales demo deck. And that is the primary driver of your demo, not the product demo itself. Of course, you're going to do a feature review, but remember the sales deck is

4:24what's really important there. The next thing is drive branding. You If you're going to do in paper click ads, if you're doing a lot of SEO, and you're posting on Reddit, you want people to start getting comfortable and used to what your brand looks like. And that sales slick is really going to drive home your color theme that you want them to memorize, your fonts, everything else. And it's going to let you really drive home exactly what the brand is

4:51you're pushing through. Cadence. So this is the biggest struggle, and this is where there's the most variance in the peers that have done the demos with us. The cadence of their demos is all over the map. There's a certain right and wrong way of doing most sales demos. Now, I didn't come up with this. Um of course, I stole this and it's because it works. Right? Most B2B sales demos should follow a cadence along

5:20these lines. Intro and agenda. Why an agenda? Most people are going to drop that slide. They think it's unnecessary, and they're wrong. Because in that agenda, you're laying out what people should be expecting from you, and you're also making it clear you're going to have an ask at the end of the demo. And you should tell them in the agenda, at the end of the demo, I'm going to ask if you're ready to sign

5:46up for a trial account. I'm going to ask you to enter a credit card. I'm going to ask you to do A or B. They should have clarity where you're bringing them in that demo. Something else I discovered was weak demos tended to be explanations to the prospect. Strong demos, every slide was where the presenter challenged

6:15the prospect. And the reason that is, I think it's in the next one, is that your sales demo is more about getting a no than it is about getting a yes. The most resource-intensive um customer for your B2B size is a bad customer. You're going to onboard them, you're going to train them, you're going to pay AWS hosting fees for the data, and then you're going to find out they just wasted your time cuz they were not

6:46really that good of a prospect. So, in every slide, you have questions that's further filtering who is actually going to sign up for that trial or that paid account. Cuz again, and I don't know B2C as well, but in B2B, customers are very expensive in your platform. Right? And so, you want to make sure you're spending that time on the right prospect. So, discover is where you ask

7:11a question. Right? You're going to say, "Hey, look, what we discovered, this is my problem story. Do you find that this is also true for you?" Yes, of course. And then they're going to Then you're going to challenge them and you say, "Oh, can you give me an example of that?" They have to produce evidence that they actually are experiencing that problem. So, one is they're proving to you that they actually are somebody that should sign

7:33yes. And then also, you're engaging them in the conversation and not just doing the a Two things there are two unsung heroes that people tend to gloss over. First, the intro slide. I'd argue 20% of your demo needs to linger on the intro slide of your of your deck. In other words, you should be doing a lot of discovery while your your sales

8:03deck is stuck on that first slide. You shouldn't be just powering through your sales deck. There's a lot of conversation that can happen in that first 10 15 minutes where you do not need to proceed until you get verifiable data from those guys that they're a good prospect and then they get engaged with you in the conversation. And I'd also argue the court the the the opposite is true, which is if you don't get engagement within the first slide, they're probably going to start looking

8:31at their phone by slide three. Being awkwardly quiet. I talk fast if I don't think about it. Now, I want to pitch I want each of you to picture what you do if you're in your car and a train is passing by. Hopefully your foot's on the brake. But the other part is you're not listening for the train, you're listening for when you can't hear the

8:56train. And that's when you know you need to look up and start getting ready to move forward. People subconsciously look for gaps in conversation to know when they can enter or exit the conversation when something has changed. If you want to draw the customer back into the conversation, you have to shut up. And it needs to be awkward because they're going to look up and they're going to re-engage at that point. A lot of times just cuz they're scared you asked them a question and they didn't

9:24notice it. Okay, define the problem. This is a key one. People make problem statements all the time. It's horrible because it's not emotional. You should have a problem story. Right? You should tell people craft a story that walks them through, "Hey, this is the problem I experienced. This is why I wrote this software. This is what it solved, and this is what it hasn't solved." If you just do a pro- a problem statement, that's not going to draw them into your conversation and

9:54your your presentation. One quick aside, something I really notice inside um of these peer-reviewed demo sessions is the way you talk to a decision maker is so different than the way you talk to an influencer in these. And a lot of times you're going to have both people um on the presentation. That's why the cadence has a section for benefits, decision maker, and a section for

10:18features, influencer. Influencers picture themselves using your software so that they can solve their problem. Almost without fail, decision makers picture themselves not being bothered by the influencer that I can't get the thing solved. There's a huge difference in what they're imagining during your sales demo. And so I would just say make sure your

10:42demo uh calls attention to that. The next important thing is every time they ask you an objection, that needs to go into your slide deck. Right? If they ask you a question or an objection, "How much does this cost? Where is this hosted? What's going to happen to my data?" You need to ensure that next time you put that into your slide deck. It's going to improve your credibility. They're going to know you know what you're talking about, and you're not going to have to guess what the answer should be. I've totally been caught flat-footed with questions, and then I just have to guess my way

11:21through what is going to work best in that situation, and it has never worked out for me. Finally, you do have competitors. Never tell a prospect that you're the first mover, that you have no competition. That's going to scare people off. Right? Nobody wants to deal with a company that is so ignorant they don't think they have competitors, or that they're solving a problem that doing nothing can also solve. And that's the two types of companies that have zero

11:51competitors. Finally, post demo. That's the graveyard for almost everybody in that peer review group, myself included. First thing, you need to have a next action from that demo. Second thing is you need to send them an email, have a little area that you can personalize, and it needs to go out that day. And last is put them into a drip campaign, because they may be

12:17busy after that demo. They may forget how wonderful your product is. So, you need to instantly onboard them into a drip campaign. Okay, that's it. Uh real quick call to action. I told you I was going to make a request. Again, we our peer group is focused on B2B SaaS. If you're interested in joining that peer group, we meet every 2 weeks, and come meet with me afterwards, and I'm happy to get

12:43you into the group. Okay, Dustin Puryear, any questions? Do we have time? We have time for one question. Uh thanks for the insights there. Really appreciate that, Dustin. We have quite a large software platform. And what we found is that you simply can't get through a lot of the solutions to these problems. So, you mentioned that the problem statement comes from the you know, from us. But we actually found it's much better if we allow them to define the problem in their words, and then we can show them

13:16solutions. Do you have any other strategies where you can when you have such a large kind of feature set to kind of scope that down, and and really drive home on the you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes that you actually do have with these prospects. Right. So, um and I had to fix my headset. If nobody can hear me, let me

13:35know. But, first, no more than three features. Never go over more than three feature features, and you need to pick out the features you're going to demo. Um I don't know that I would let them drive that bus because the struggle is you make it so in the weeds with your technical baby, um that the it derails the demo. I agree that first intro slide is where a conversation happens and taking notes and saying I need to show them these couple of things to address those concerns, but that should be 20 30 40-second blips in the demo. Did that

14:07answer your question? Kind of sort of. We can talk about it afterwards. [applause]