A demo that overcame a "no budget" objection by showing live functionality instead of slides. Most demos fail because they look identical to competitors. Cut your deck to 8 slides, skip the 30,000-foot overview, and show what the software actually does.
My favorite demo ever started with my main point of contact telling his team, we don't have any budget. Now we're taking an early look at a potential long term solution. This wasn't a surprise to me. He'd been really a blunt with me prior. I knew the situation we were in, but I still couldn't help but think, okay, challenge accepted. Sure enough, about a half hour after the demo I got an email. Hey, great job on the demo. We need to get our hands on this now. I'll figure out the budget. In today's video I'm going to talk about the common mistakes that reps are making in their demos leading to bad outcomes and how I was able to do the opposite in this demo to drive the ideal outcome. We were able to find budget out of nothing to accelerate a deal. So the first main problem with demos is your competitor's demo looks the same as yours. The reality is your competition does like 80 to 90% of the same stuff you do. And so when you go do your demos it looks mostly the same. And when things look mostly the same, buyers assume that they are the same and that leads to price war discounting, lowest price wins. And so let's talk through how we can make your demo look different and how you can present better than the competition. One piece is on the slide decks. Like I'm not anti slide, so I'm not opposed to PowerPoints. However, you should probably cut 70 to 90% of the slides that you're currently showing. I have a very firm 8 slide rule regardless of the complexity of the deal. I don't think you should ever need more than eight slides for a pre demo presentation. This means you have to eliminate the company history and awards slides. Like nobody cares about the awards that your marketing team paid some company to give them. You need to eliminate the customer logos page. Nobody cares that you work with Facebook and Microsoft because literally everybody can claim the same right? Definitely. Don't show heavy feature slides. Anything that can be shown in a demo is more engaging in the demo. Don't share through slides what you can show live. You should only be using slides that allow for additional discovery or provide overall platform context that you're not going to be able to cover in the demo. To set the table for a demo then as you're moving into the actual presentation of the technology, you gotta kill the 30,000 foot view. Okay? The 30,000 foot view is what gets somebody interested in seeing the demo. It's also covered in your marketing emails. It's covered on your website the 30.
