Prove it
My favorite sales book by a million miles is Solution Selling by Michael Bosworth. To try and summarize it would be to do a disservice to the author and the sales method, so I’ll not do that.
A fundamental tenet of the book, however, is this: You don’t pull out your product and start demonstrating. No matter how good you are at it.
There is a point in the process in which you ask the customer how she will want to evaluate your product, so you can prove the product can solve her critical business problem. You write everything down, and neither agree nor disagree to do anything. It’s done this way so you can continue the buying process or even bargain for something from the customer down the road. (But I promised not to summarize the book.)
If you sell software, and you ask a customer how she will want to evaluate your product, would you agree that she will almost always want to see a demo? Of course.
So—the purpose of the demo is to prove to the customer that your software can solve his or her specific business problem. I like the sound of that.
The purpose of the demo is to prove to the customer that your software can solve his or her specific business problem.
So why would you spend an hour going through all the whiz-bang features of your software? Even if the software is really whizzy-bangy?
Could your most effective demo last five minutes?
Solution Selling. Mike Bosworth.
