#89 - Playbook: Running a Killer Demo

Foreign.

Everybody. And welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. My name is Armand Farouk. I'm here with my co host Nick Siegelski, and we have another Playbook episode. Not what you do in your discovery, not what you do in your negotiation, but what do you do in between? At some point, you're usually showing some sort of product. Maybe it's software, maybe you're selling pipe cleaners. I don't know what it is, but we're gonna go through a couple things on how to do a demo. The four sections we got right here are, number one, what is the intent of a demo? Number two, before the demo, how do you set yourself up for success? Number three, hey, it's showtime. We're in the demo. How do you run a phenomenal demonstration? And then lastly, number four, we'll do some quick hits and common pitfall to avoid. Alrighty, Nick. Why should people listen?

Well, the demo is one of the most critical parts of the entire sales process. Up until the demo, you're just talking about how you can help. The demo is the piece where you're actually proving that you're going to solve the issue that is at hand. And for most of us who are in competitive deals where a customer is contemplating multiple products, the demo is one of those foundational pieces where you either win or you lose. So that rolls us right into what is the intent of a demo. Maybe we can start, Armand, with what a demo is not.

So a demo is not an it or a security evaluation, number one. So it is not for you to get deep, deep, deep, caught in the weeds unless you're towards the end of the sales process. And number two, it is also not a training session. What do you do in a training session?

You.

You show everything. Because people need to know how to use the product. This is not a training session. John Barros, our good friend over at Make It Happen Mondays, he talks about selling the 20%. In other words, you should only be selling the 20% of your product. That solves their most important problems.

Well, one of the areas that salespeople struggle with demos is they either think it's a training session or. Or they start talking about, like, the features of what the software can do, which intuitively would seem right. I'm demonstrating software or a pipe cleaner, and I'm explaining what this thing can do. But that's not actually your job as a salesperson. Your job is to then add context and explain why what you just showed is important. And so one of the things that I always lean on when I'm showing a demo is anytime I mention a feature or an element of the software that I'm showing you is I say, and that's important to you, Armand, for these three reasons. You have to translate what you're demoing into the impact. Otherwise people are sitting there being like, okay, why is that important?

Exactly Right. So let's walk through the four different types of demos. This brings us over to how do you set up your demo for success? Okay, there are four types of demos. Number one is the five minute harbor tour demo. And in the five minute harbor tour demo, you're usually doing this along with the discovery call. You are only showing them the so what? In other words, let me show you super quickly I can solve your problems. You are not showing the how I can solve your problems. Number two is you have a technical deep dive and that's usually when you're pulling in a solutions engineer and you're going deep and that's when you're going through workflows and hows and really getting them to think, hey, day in the life of your software, this is how I would use it. Number three, you have the big team demo, right? And that is typically a really tricky one because now what you're doing is you're keeping it high level where you're trying to hit on all the different people and functions in the room and you're not getting dragged into any one deep function and you're usually going to do some breakouts afterwards. And then lastly, number four, you have your executive review demo where you're only only focused on the features that solve for business outcomes. In other words, you're not talking about integr and permissions. All right, so now we know that those are the four different types of demos and you have a sense of what you might be showing in each of those. So, Nick, how do we actually start to prep for our demos from here?

When you're talking with the customer, they say, yeah, I'd like to set up a demo. Can we set up something with the team? You've got to know a couple things. The first thing is who the heck is going to show up to this demo? Who's going to attend? Because you're going to show a CFO very, very different things than you would show an accounts payable specialist. It's important that you ask who's going to show up in that room. Then you've got to understand. Well, Armand, we've talked about a lot of different elements of how the software can help with the problem that you're struggling with, is there anything in particular you really want us to make sure that we show in this demo? You also should be asking the inverse. Is there anything that we should avoid? Because you might hear, well, our CFO has a report that they're using, so don't show that report because they like what they created themselves. You've got to understand expectations before you walk into that big screen share.

And here's what most people screw up is they'll be like, great, who's going to be in the room? And the person says, the cfo, the accounts payable specialist, maybe the controller, I don't know, maybe on our HR team there's someone that wants to be involved. And sellers say like, awesome, what do all those people want to hear about? And what you realize is all those people want to hear about different things. And then you go into that meeting with eight different perspectives to show and inevitably you lose people or your demo gets totally derailed. If you hear that there are people in radically different parts of the organization or in radically different levels of power, it is on you as a seller to tear that room apart and break it out into two or three separate conversations. Do not do a demo with the accounts payable specialist workflow while the CFO wants to see the exec dashboards and get out of there in 15 minutes.

Well, and to that point, for some of my most important demos, I want to have one on one touch points with every single person who's going to attend in advance. Because that is how I inoculate myself against walking into the room and having those two people who want to see totally different things be like, well, this was a useless use of my time. So what I will usually do, and not everyone's comfortable with this, is when I get the attendee list for my demo, I'm going to call each individual and I'm gonna say something like, armand, this is Nick with 30 minutes to President's Club. I see you're on the attendee list for our demo next Tuesday. And I'm trying to be proactive instead of reactive here and make sure that I'm really prepared for the demo. Is there anything in particular you really wanna make sure that we cover in that session? And I'm gonna call each person and a third of them will pick up. And so after I call, I'll send a similar email. And about half the time I get a litany of bullet points back from people. And now I know, okay, here's what's on everybody's mind. And a lot of salespeople hear what I just described and say, well, that's extremely. You haven't even met those people yet. So here's the deal. If they're showing up to a demo of your thing, they probably have some degree of interest in it. And most folks want to have their voice heard. And so by giving them an opportunity to have their voice heard, one, you're making them feel better about, like their relationship with you. Two, you're getting an opportunity to do discovery with every single person. And there's all this beating our chest about the importance of multi threading. If you don't ask, you're not going to know.

And this brings us to the last point is guess what? You might not always be selling these deals alone. So if you're selling with a sale engineer or a solutions consultant, you're going to take all of that information that we talked about gathering, plus all the prep that you've gotten from those one to one interactions. And you need to make sure your SE knows at least three things. Number one, in previous calls or email interactions, what are the problems that this customer has discussed that they would like to see solved? Number two, you need to understand who is in the room and Mr. And Mrs. Se, who do you need to be catering to in terms of the cast of characters? And then number three, you need to understand the desired outcomes or objectives of this call and then you can use those three things to build a demo path with your se. So you can say, okay, based on these problems and these people, we're going to start here so the CFO is happy, then we'll go over here, so the controller is happy. And then we'll round it out so that everyone's happy at the end of the demo because everyone needs to know about this functionality. So the extra bonus points here is a lot of people go into demos completely blind or they expect that the conversations will have the same momentum that they did when you had an amazing discovery and an amazing demo with your champion. But guess what, that's not the case when six people get added to the room. And so what you need to do is after that first demo with your champion, you need to do what's called the Champion Sandwich. What you're going to do is you're going to schedule a meeting prior to that big team demo with your champion. And this is a great place to be like, hey, we're about to go to that six person meeting. Can I shoot you a text? And can we sing for five minutes beforehand? And you can get on a text basis with your champion. And you're going to ask your champion the same prep questions right here. Who's in the room? What do they care about? What are the big personalities in the room? What are going to be the pitfalls here? You're going to get them on the same side of the table. All right, that's the first half of the sandwich. And so now they're thinking not about how do I evaluate you, but how do I help you help me look good in this next meeting. And then the second half of the sandwich is in that meeting, in that prep meeting. You're going to schedule a debrief, one on one with your champion for right after the demo. And you're going to say like, hey, I would love to hear your feedback on how that call went and anything else you think we might have missed so that we can stay on top of the follow up right after that meeting. And that's your champion sandwich. Way too many people get ghosted by having a six person demo. And then we're like, all right, we're going to follow up with you afterwards. And no one actually takes a step forward to schedule that call. And you have an opportunity to create a champion sandwich so that you never get ghosted and you get feedback before and after the big demo.

You should never be eating an open faced champion sandwich because then it's not really a champion sandwich. It's not so I can be like, oh, how was the demo? It's so we can address all of the action items and outstanding stuff. And that makes them look really good because they were the ones setting this demo up. And speaking of that, we need to show a good demo to make our champion look great. And so there's a couple different best practices when it comes to the mechanics of that demo. The first one that I always think about is when you get onto the zoom, okay, you should maybe want to show up a couple minutes early, test your audio, video, whatever, but show up and don't immediately hit the screen share button so that your slide deck is showing because people are going to start to come into the room. Usually for me, they come in right at the top of the hour or a couple minutes late. And so you have that first five minutes where you're making small talk with people. What you don't want to do is have your big slide deck with the 30 MPC logo there and people only see the tiny bubble of your head. You want to start the conversation with your smiling face and a conversation look if you've got 30 minutes scheduled for a demo and you end up having this amazing 27 minute conversation with everybody, trust me, you're going to get another at bat. They're going to be like, oh, well, that wasn't a demo. We just talked about all of our struggles and how Nick can help. Like, start with a conversation because you'll hear stuff that you hadn't heard otherwise. One of the things we also talk about a lot when it comes to, like, meeting management is you want to break the participation seal with each person. So as each person comes into your zoom room, you need to engage them and get them to speak. There's two reasons. One, if there's like an audio problem, you want them to figure that out in the beginning of the meeting, not midway through, when the CIO has an important question but can't get their mic to work. So ask each person. Hey, thanks for joining us, Armand. I know I emailed you advance, but is there anything else that you really want to make sure we cover today? Ask each individual, not the whole group. When you go one to one, you actually get responses, not when you ask the whole group. So talk to each person and get them to engage.

All right, so here's my favorite way to get the room engaged right at the beginning. So I don't love slides, but here are four slides that I use in every single demo. Again, they're never used in disco, but they're absolutely used in that big team demo. Number one, first slide. Who's in the room? Because everybody hates. All right, we all know each other. Let's do 10 minutes of introductions of all of these people who already know each other. So put all of their faces on a slide with their names and titles. That's slide number one. Slide number two, you're going to recap by the end of this call. What are the four problems we're going to solve for your business? Okay, not the features we're going to show, the problems we're going to solve, the impact we're going to have on your business. Slide number three, one slide maximum on what the heck your company does, because you cannot rely on the fact that your champion has briefed the rest of the team. Okay, this is not allowed to include your NASCAR logo slide. And then lastly, number four, the money moment, the demo wish list. You're gonna take all those faces you had on slide one and you're gonna put em on this slide. And you're gonna put blank text boxes next to all of their faces and you're Gonna start working the room. You're gonna say, hey, Jane, you're the CFO over here. Typically you care about things like X, Y and Z. Now that you know what we do, what do you wanna see? Oh, Nick, over here, you're in accounts payable over here, right? Give me a sense, like what, what do you wanna see? Like, I know you have this problem around entering those out to the people who haven't paid you. Whatever the nonsense accounting stuff you do, what do you think would be important? Right? And now you're working the room and people are totally getting a kick out of it because they see their faces and get really good at taking live notes on these calls. And now as you go into the demo, you know exactly what people want to see, and immediately they're already engaged.

Okay, so now you've gotten the wish list, it's time to show the demo. Now, it's really important. We talked about this in the beginning. You're not showing a training. So if you're starting the demo showing, well, here's how I log into the program, or here's how I set up a new user. You gotta throw that in the trash. It's really important to go in for the kill right away. So if the CFO said, I'm really having trouble generating this particular profitability report, the first thing you should be showing is, Jane, you mentioned you're having trouble generating this report. I'm going to generate that right now. Click, click. Here's that report that we mentioned. Boom. Now, what's Jane going to say? Oh, how did you get that? So start with the end in mind. Show them the thing that gets them to sit up and says, oh, my gosh, how did you get there? We talk about this on cold calls. Also, you are earning the attention of your audience. Even if you have an hour demo set aside, do not expect that you have earned an hour of their attention. Each minute there is sand falling out of that funnel and you've got to earn them to lean in more.

That's exactly right. And the next thing is, as you're getting those big, big going in for the kill moments, do not zoom past them because usually there are only a couple of going in for the kill moments. You're usually leaving Discovery with three or four meaty problems. And so way too many people. They give people epileptic seizures by how many screens they click on. Your goal should be to get through the demo in as few screens as possible. More software is more confusing to your buyers. Keep in mind they have never seen your software and they are now watching you madly click through all of these workflows. And you're also probably demoing through multiple workflows that anyone would use in a given day. And inevitably you're going to give people software fatigue where they feel like it's more software than they actually need. And if you've ever lost a deal because of that, it's probably because you showed them way too much software.

Well, you're so right about that. You've seen your software hundreds of times, you've been through a boot camp, you're on trainings every month to see what's happening in the new release. This is the very first time that the people you're demoing to have engaged with your thing. And so if there's anything you take away on how to show a better demo, it's actually not how to do your pre discovery, it's not how to structure the demo, it's slow down, slow down. When you show a new screen, instead of immediately showing all the things you can do with that new screen or function, just pause for a second and let the audience calibrate around the layout of the screen. Other things that I've seen folks do to show better demos, to highlight what they're doing, is I've seen somebody change the color of their mouse. I have a white mouse normally, but I've changed it to a hot pink magenta color. So it's really easy for the audience to see where I'm clicking. Clicking in Zoom, there's a tool where you can like post stickers or arrows. And so I'll use that when I'm showing a demo, when I'm showing where I'm clicking or what I'm trying to highlight on the screen, you know that you're going too fast. If the audience starts saying stuff like, wait, how did you do that? Or how did you get here? Wait, where did you click to make that happen? Because if you go too fast, the audience gets overwhelmed and they start to revert back into how did he do this? Which is very, very close to the dangerous land of giving a software training, which you ain't doing.

And this is all in the light of how can we make sure these eight people who have never seen your software understand what the heck you're doing. The last pitfall that people typically run into is they demo in terms of features or things you can do instead of demoing in terms of the stories that they told you in discovery. An example of this, let's use my product at PAVE or compensation tool. I could say something like a manager can go in and they can view all of their direct reports and submit compensation approvals. And that is a very sterile, accurate description of the feature. Or I can say, hey, Nick, so let's walk through the day in the life of Diana. One of the managers that you mention on your team, Diana is going to walk in and the first thing that you mentioned is that she's not able to understand, like, hey, when was the last time one of my employees got a comp increase? And so I can show you that right here. So Diana can make a smarter decision around comp. And so I'm walking through the workflow in terms of, terms of the stories and the problems that they told me so that they can be like, oh wait, we're already doing this, but it's ten times better. Now I can see how this fits into my day. Instead of forcing them to mentally, one, understand what the heck they're looking at, two, understand the feature, and then three, try to adapt their workflow into your feature. You do all that work on their behalf.

That's why those real world examples are really, really key. You want the audience to be engaged and feel like, oh, this could work for me. Now you've got to actually keep that audience engaged because even if you're telling these great stories and showing a nice smooth, slow demo, that's not enough. We talk a lot about asking questions in discovery and it's no different when you're asking questions in a demo to get the audience engaged. Now if you've ever listened to a sales podcast before, you know, you shouldn't be saying any questions, Armand, because it's sort of a patronizing, lazy question. People are just gonna say no even if they do have questions. And so before we even get into the questions you should be asking to keep that audience engaged, there's a reason you ask questions, and I think of three main reasons. The first is you wanna check for understanding. You wanna make sure what you just showed and how it attaches to the use case you solve for is clear. Because if it's not okay, you might need to show again. Even the best demoers aren't totally clear. Sometimes your audience just doesn't get it and you've gotta show something again. So that's piece one. Number two is you should be engaging in what we call demo scovery. If you're only doing discovery before the demo and after the demo, you're missing a really amazing opportunity to ask real time discovery about how the customer does what they do today and how it attaches to what you showed. And then third is you're keeping them engaged. If you talk for 60 Minutes in your demo and the other person or people don't talk at all, oh, man, you know, they're on email or they're checking their Instagram or scrolling through TikTok.

That's right. And so let's talk about different types of questions that you can ask in a demo. And so think of it simply. You can ask questions in the past, you can ask questions in the present, or you can ask questions in the future. If I wanted to ask a question in the past, I'm going to use past tense questions for the purpose of saying, hey, you mentioned that you have this problem and we just walk through that problem and how you would solve it inside a pavement. I'm curious, how does that feel or does that align with what you had in mind? And so what I'm doing is in past questions, I'm bringing up problems they brought up in discovery and I'm just validating, hey, I told you I could solve this problem. Did I solve the problem for you?

Great.

Those are past tense questions. Present test questions. Those are the best questions to use for demo discovery. Think of it this way. You go and I ask, you want to interior design your house and ask, do you like granite or quartz countertops, or do you like contemporary layouts, or do you like more traditional type of layouts? And you'll give me some answers in discovery. And then I actually bring you to the showroom and I can now start to ask you questions like, do you like this contemporary layout or that contemporary layout? Because we have something to look at together. And so I'm in demo discovery mode, and I'm going to start saying things like, hey, your lawyers are at the end of the week, they're entering their timesheet and can you give me a sense of like, what does that look like right here? And then I will live demo that to you so I can get them engaged. And it's an interactive demo. And then of course, you have future questions. And these ones are the best for saying, hey, let's get them thinking about how they could use this tool today. And so a future question would be like, I'm presenting to an executive. And I'll be like, hey, let's say you're presenting to an executive today. You go into the meeting with your CEO and you pop open the dashboard. What are the kinds of things that you'd want to add to this dashboard so that your CEO feels comfortable and they have all their questions answered. And now you're actively talking about using the tool together. And so three different types of questions, past, present, and future questions.

So you're doing something really special and nuanced there, which is giving a reason for the question. That last one you gave, you said, hey, you're popping open the dashboard with the CEO and you want them to feel like they've gotten their questions answered, the CEO in that scenario. And what you're doing there is you're not just saying, oh, how does this compare to your current workflow? Because you always need to have a reason to back up the question that you ask. And what you've done there is you've said, hey, what I show you next is going to be informed by what you tell me now. So, like in the present tense question, where it's like, hey, your lawyers are putting together their timesheet at the end of the week. What does that look like? The reason that I ask is I want to make sure what I show next is mapped to their workflow, or I'm showing how we're different than that. You should always give a reason because that incentivizes the person you're asking the question to. To give you a real answer. Because if you tell them, hey, the path we go down here, whether we look at the quartz or the granite, is going to be informed by what you tell me, people then have a vested interest in actually giving you a good answer to that question.

All right, so, Nick, we've gone through a couple of different things here. We've gone through a before our demo. What do we need to have? We've gone through the storyline of the slides you need to cover to bring everyone up to speed. Then we've talked about showing the things in the right order and showing as few things as possible and asking questions along the way. The demo comes to an end. Now what do I do?

There's a couple things you gotta do. One is what you just said. Recap what you just showed. You gotta tell them what you told them. It goes all the way back to your high school English class. You need to recap. Hey, here are the five things that we showed you in today's demo. Then what you need to say is going back to that 8020 rule we talked about in the beginning. Let them know there's more there. And you say something like, hey, we didn't show you every single nook and cranny and crevice of what this thing can do. We were here today to show you how we solved for those five specific use cases. There's a lot more we can do. And if anybody wants to do a breakout session and go really deep into this thing, I'm happy to do that. And I'm doing that for two reasons. One, if there's something we didn't show, I want them to know we've got more here. And two, I want to plant in their mind that this thing is even more powerful than what we just showed, which is true, because you shouldn't have shown everything. Now I need to start to get feedback. And so one of the things that I'll ask is, was there anything that we didn't show or cover today that you were really hoping to see? And if Armand says, well, yeah, you know, there's another report that I'm trying to run frequently. Cool. Now there's an opportunity for me to follow up one to one with Armando and show him how we do that. I'm getting another at bat with an important person. I also want to start to ask for feedback. If I'm setting this up with an upfront contract. And I say, usually these go one of two ways. You might hate it, you might love it. I want to say, hey, in the beginning of this call, we talked about, you might hate the demo. You might love the demo. I guess I'm curious. Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst thing since canned bread, 10 being like, send me a docusign now, how are you all feeling? And it's not about getting a 7 or an 8 or a specific number. So you can tell your boss, oh, yeah, that was an 8. That demo is definitely an 8. It's because that question actually helps get better feedback from them than how do you feel about the demo? Arman, I know you do a good job setting breakout sessions with everybody.

Yeah. And so here's the thing is you have all these wish list items that you got on the front end. You probably got peppered with questions along the way. If you did a good job, inevitably there is no way you could have covered everything. So grab the bull by its horns, take control of your sales cycle and be like, hey, on top of all the problems that we said we were going to solve here, it sounded like there are two or three other areas the team wanted to go after. Right. And so why don't we do this? Let's set up two smaller room demos with you, Mr. Accounts Payable, and you Mrs. Control over there. So you can see this and schedule and align on those breakout sessions on the spot. You might not be able to schedule them right there, but at least align that those are the future demos that need to be had. And now you can get into a slightly more intimate environment where you're not demoing to 17 different people.

So if the CIO is in that meeting, you better believe I'm saying, hey, Armand, usually CIOs have a bunch of questions for me about security and infrastructure, and I imagine doing due diligence on that is something that's important to you. Do you want me to reach out to you to schedule some time to go through those things so you can check that off in terms of your evaluation? What I'm doing is I am planting and seeding all of the other things that I know need to happen in my sales process so we can hammer them out after the fact. You start to create momentum when you do that. All right, so we've talked about all sorts of great things here, Armand. Some wonderful things folks should be doing in the demo. We promised we'd give a couple miscellaneous demo tips, so let's get some from you.

All right, so number one, you get thrown into a room of 10 people. What do you do? The first thing is don't get thrown into a room with 10 people. Again, going back to our first tip, break out those meetings as much as possible, but it's not always possible. Let's be realistic. And so in your upfront contract, before you show any software, you say, like, guys, we have a big room here. We're gonna go through what everyone wants to see. And I will be wholly transparent. There is no way in heck we're going to be able to cover everything of what everyone from the controller to the CFO wants to see. And so we're gonna keep this high level so that everyone can get a little bit of a taste of what we have to offer here. And then what we'll do at the end of this call is we'll align on a couple of breakout sessions to schedule afterwards where we can go deep. So you're setting your next steps at the beginning of your call so that you can, one, scratch the itch and tell people, hey, don't pepper me with 3,000 questions along the way. And then, two, let people know that, hey, I'm not hiding anything from you. I'm gonna go deeper along the way. All right, Nick, what's number two?

Okay, so another scenario that happens where you get dragged into the weeds. Let's say you did what Armand just Described, which does help prevent you from getting pulled there. But occasionally you're gonna have Armand who's on there. He's the junior sales rep watching the demo of Gong, and he's got 47 questions that are like, totally irrelevant. And he keeps asking them. And you can tell everyone else on the call is like, why is this Armand guy speaking up so much? You need to isolate Armand. And I'm not saying you kick him out of the meeting, but what you should say is, armand, hey, you've got some really awesome questions here, and I want to make sure that we address them all for you. Given that we've got a room of like 12 people right now, I want to make sure we keep things relevant to the entire group because we've got the CRO here and the VP of sales here. Do you want to schedule some one on one time? You and I can go super deep in this thing and I can make sure we get every question you have answered. You might not word it that exact way, but what you don't want to do is insult Armon and say you're an idiot for asking all these questions. You want to make Armon feel like he's important. Hey, I bet you've given a ton of thought to this. You clearly have some really good questions. Why don't we set some time to go one on one, you isolate him, and then you get the demo back on track.

The key here is yes. And people try to handle objections head on where you disagree with prospects. Your goal is to agree with them. And so if they're ripping you apart on integrations, you're just gonna be like, yeah, this is super important stuff to cover. I think this is so important that I don't want to do a disservice to you right now by covering it in 30 seconds, because there's more depth here. Why don't we like carve out a full 30 minutes to go through everything around integrations just so we can show you everything else, and then you'll at least have like a full set of questions in front of you. And so I'm making them believe that, that I'm agreeing with them and listening to them, when in reality, I'm trying to bring the meeting back on track.

When I was selling legal ERP software, Armand, I had about, I don't know, 40 different modules that I could potentially show. And we wouldn't always have a very, very clear path in terms of the order we were going to do things. It was just the nature of the demo and so what I realized I should never do was say to the audience, hey, what would you all like to see next? What would you like us to cover next? I instead then started to use the word typically. Hey, we just showed you our reporting functionality. Typically, what folks want to see next is X. And whatever X was was in what my mind was like the most compelling thing. And so when you make a suggestion and give them low hanging fruit, most people will take the low hanging fruit. And so if you want to steer and guide the demo towards your best stuff, make a suggestion that actually applies at any point in the sales cycle. When you make a suggestion, folks will follow the path of least resistance. So offer a path of least resistance that's good for you.

And your last tactical takeaway for demos is when you're in that big room or when you're doing any sort of demo, maybe you're doing a demo with an se. You should not be losing these deals alone. If you're demoing to four people, you should have at least a 4 to 1 ratio. So if you're in a room of eight people, you should have at least two sellers in there. That means if your SE is taking on a 1v8 and you're sitting there toiling away on slack, you are not being a helpful deal quarterback. You should be reading the room along the way. You should be looking at the Zoom gallery view the entire time and not even looking at their software. You should be reading the facial expressions of every other person in the room and finding people who are disengaged. And then you're asking those people questions along the way or suggesting or nudging your SE in the right direction because you observe that the room is or is not digging what is being shown.

I can't tell you how many demos I've been on where I saw the furrowed brow of the CFO and I said, armand, it looks like we might have screwed something up on this screen. Or I called out that, hey, you've got a look on your face that makes it look like you might have a question. You've got to be doing that. The worst thing you could do is expect your SE to talk for an hour straight. At the very least, give them a breather, say something, pull people out, let them reek. It's hard to show software. It's hard to be a solutions consultant. Your job as a salesperson is to manage the hey, let's connect what they're showing to the story that's real and then giving them a second, just recalibrating take a sip of their LaCroix before they show the next screen.

Alrighty, folks, so we've gone through everything in the world on how to do a demo. We went through four main buckets. Number one, we talked through the intent of a demo, which is really just to prove that you're not lying about the problems you can solve and showing the 20% of the features that solved 80% of the problems. All right. Number two is when it comes to setting yourself up for success, know the type of demo you're in and prep the heck out of your se. Or prep the heck out of yourself with who's in the room? What do they want to see? What's the objective of the call? Number three, it's showtime. Before the demo begins, don't start with slides. And then when you do start with slides, make sure you understand who's in the room, what problems you came to solve, and what the heck your company does. And get that wish list. And then, of course, as you're in the demo, start with the big going for the kill moments in the first five minutes. Show as few screens as possible and ask a lot of questions along the way in the past, present, and future. And lastly, of course, we talked about a couple big demo pitfalls. What not to do. Don't get peppered with a million questions. Use the yes and to get them into that next call. When you end up in a room of 10 people, try to set the expectation up front that you're not gonna go super deep and control that room the entire way through. Alrighty, Nick. That's it. How can people help us out?

So we've done a lot of different Playbook episodes. We've done a cold calling Playbook. We've done cold emailing Playbooks. We've done a How to be a machine Playbook. Ways to set up your routine and your day so that you can be an extremely effective and efficient salesperson. Oftentimes, people who listen to our Playbook episodes are new listeners of the show. And so if you haven't listened to those old Playbook episodes yet, heck, I listen to the cold calling Playbook episode usually, I don't know, once every two or three months because it helps remind me of stuff that I've learned from Armand that wasn't fully ingrained in my brain. So if you haven't listened to those Playbook episodes recently, they're really our best work. We work pretty hard on them. So go give those ones a listen. Subscribe to the show. We'll see you. Next week on 30 minutes to President's Club.

Sa.