In this Revenue Today podcast episode, host Jared Robin moderates a panel of revenue leaders—George Soto, Tyson Goelttz, Ed Jaffe, and Joe Caprio—to discuss the mechanics of team selling and how to run effective demos in today’s hybrid sales environment. The conversation covers the importance of coordinated roles across the customer journey, using objective debriefs to surface concrete feedback, and practical tactics for virtual meetings such as keeping cameras on, reading audience cues, and handling end‑of‑meeting capability questions with confidence. The panel contrasts virtual and in‑person meetings, arguing that face‑to‑face interactions boost qualification and win rates, and shares a “life‑hack” for getting prospects to turn on their cameras. They also dive into post‑demo follow‑up strategies, including sending specific, reproducible assets, personalized email outreach, and leveraging recorded demo clips to build persona‑specific demo libraries. Throughout, the speakers share anecdotes, metaphors (e.g., a dance), and actionable recommendations aimed at sales, marketing, and RevOps professionals looking to improve demo execution, team collaboration, and deal velocity.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
If you've done everything right beforehand, then that, that should be, as you mentioned, implied, and it should not be as, as much of a surprise because it's clear that they need your solution, right?
I've been in some meetings where the customer or the prospect actually stopped the seller and said, We're running up on time. I've seen enough. Let's start talking about next steps. You know, you've done a great job up until that point. If the customer's letting you run till the end of the meeting, showing feature, feature, feature, not talking about what are we gonna do next, red flags all over the place.
Well, you know what's amazing too, when you get those questions at the end of the meeting, when they ask, can you do this? Yes, we can. And that's the end of the answer. You don't, we don't always have to show the answer. If you've done your job, whether you're the AE or the SE and you've built some credibility with the audience, they should believe at that point. If they don't believe you, that's a separate problem. Then you haven't done your job. But if you've done your job, then yeah, yeah, we can do it. And it's amazing how much you can get through in those last few minutes of the meeting. If, you know, the SE doesn't show software and/or the AE doesn't say, oh, uh, George, can you just go show them that? Meanwhile, like the SE hasn't prepped the thing and they're like scrambling to show it. And yeah, that's, that's another problem as well. We could do a whole hour on just that problem.
Well, I think we could also do a whole hour on best practices around doing this virtually, right? Because, you know, you don't know if your prospect is texting, right? Or looking at something else or whatnot, right? And I know that's a sort of qualitative nuance that's a little more difficult to sort of navigate. Tyson, real quick, 'cause I know we're running up on time here. You know, in terms of team selling, any sort of quick points around what team selling should look like and then how to run a great post-meeting debrief?
There's been a couple of metaphors or analogies tossed out. I use the kind of the dance piece and, you know, choose metaphor or analogy of your choice. Just know it is not just one person. You are kind of the success is a culmination of everyone doing their individual task across the customer journey. I think the debrief, which I'll just spin on for a second, Joe mentioned it earlier in another context, but I love objectivity. Like, when I get it, when we get into a debrief and we say, I think you did that really well, or, oh, I think I really dropped the ball here, it opens us up to all this subjectivity and you're just, you're spinning on things that are hypotheticals or maybes. What's great is when you can say, hey, as the AE, Joe was my SE. Joe, when you went down this feature path, I noticed the customer kind of sat back in their chair and they showed a level of disinterest. Great, let's talk about how we can address that. Or Joe, when you started to go through this, they leaned in, they started to ask some really assertive questions. Awesome, totally objective. So if you can anchor on the objective pieces and try to toss aside subjectivity of I think or I feel. When possible.
Tyson, I spent 2 years at Chorus, the call recording software. I've done a million film review sessions, and I'd go on site with my customers and be like, outsource sales enablement just to get them to buy our product instead of the competitor's product. So I've run millions of film review calls. The biggest mistake that category makes right now is they record the screen when you're showing your screen. And when we're just talking and it's like the Zoom gallery, you can see the faces. As soon as you start doing the demo, yeah, it's either missing completely or it's off to the side or it's just the speaker's face. And how do you do film review when you're not looking at the other team? You know what I mean? It's like doing film review but not actually watching the game. It's crazy. It's crazy. If I want to hear your demo, I've heard it a million times. Like, it's about the customer, to your point. Like, oh my God, all my feedback, I try to couch it in like, the customer reacted this way, the customer did this after, you know, that's what it's about. Yeah. I don't give a shit if I like your demo. Yeah.
Well, to that point, Joe, it's kind of George's question about like virtual meetings, be on camera. And I don't, as the, as the sell, as like the presenter, I don't like, I want the audience to be on camera, but I'm going to be on camera either way because I want them to see me and see how I'm reacting to things. And, you know, those meetings tend to be, you'll be on camera for like 7 minutes and then they'll come on camera. Great. But if you're, you know, when you start as the salesperson and you're not on camera, your customer's never gonna go on camera. And then, you know, you don't know what they're doing. To George's point, you don't know what they're doing. At least if I can see you, I know you're probably, you're at least looking at your screen, hopefully looking at me. And there are lots of things you can do to get the audience's attention. But if I can't see the audience, I don't know how to adjust what I'm doing based on the little things they're doing. They're sitting back, they're sitting forward. If I don't know that, I'm missing a massive piece of data to really make an impact. Yeah.
Here's a Joe Caprio life hack. I don't think I've had a meeting with a customer's camera off in years. The way I do it is I start with my camera off. I don't say, hey, can you hear me? Until I see that it says Ed is connected to audio. And then I go, oh, hey Ed, it looks like you're connected. And then I turn my camera on and 100 out of 100 times they turn their camera on too.
Well, there's another qualifying variable that's sort of been lost over the last 3-ish years, right? Which is if you take an in-person meeting, Right. Versus, oh, I'll just jump on a Zoom call.
Yeah.
Right. There tends to be like a higher, right, like higher propensity of qualification there.
And so I spent, yeah, George, I spent 10 years in manufacturing sales before I went to startups and all I did was in-person like meetings in the boardroom. And then when I got to a startup for the first time, everyone's on Zoom and I'm like, how are you guys doing this? Like, aren't you lost? And they were right out of college and they were like, didn't know what they were missing. When Ed talked about standing up in a physical meeting, oh, I had a flashback where I would legit, if the meeting meeting's going off the rails, I'll just stand up and kind of take 2 steps off to the side, then all of a sudden everyone's looking at me and now I own the meeting again. And one more, one more free tip: in-person meetings dramatically increase your win rate, but the truth is it's because those are your buyers and they're willing to invite you into their business. And the deals that are lukewarm, they say no thank you when you're like, hey, why don't I come on-site for the next one? They say no thank you. And so it's, it's like Asking for the in-person meeting is what's going to tell you who the buyers and the lukewarm deals are. And so what I used to do is just say, let's do it over Zoom. And then I would email you the next day and say, it turns out I'm in Jersey next week anyways. I'm gonna come by in person. And I would just storm the castle and do in-person meetings.
Amazing. Well, I know we got actually 2 minutes more, so maybe we'll do a quick rapid-fire, um, You know, kind of statement on post-demo follow-up. So maybe, Ed, why don't you kick us off here? Any sort of maybe one tip around doing a killer post-demo follow-up? Maybe those are assets, messaging, etc.
I actually think it comes down to, you know, that it's what Tyson said, being able to have those really transparent conversations. And I think what that does come down to is Relationship, but empathy for the role. So that's, I know that's like a crazy idea, but you know, as the SE, I try to think about what is the AE like, what's driving this? Okay, well, they're comped much more on, you know, on this deal winning than me. So that's where they're coming from. And for the AE, where is the SE coming from? And if you can look at it from their perspective on the meeting, you can give much better feedback cuz you kind of know, at least even if they did something you didn't like, you know why they were doing it. And that makes a much better conversation.
Tyson? Send them an asset they can reproduce and share. Obviously, your reprise can obviously do something like that, but I think be specific. They're gonna forget half the things you talked about very quickly, so be specific. You said this specific line, and then it'll help them re-trigger the so what, why they're on the call in the first place.
Joe? Send an email to everyone that was there on one Email and then reply to each individual one at a time. And that way everybody feels like they have a personal connection with you and you have a right to go back to each individual and ask for help on the deal later. Record your meetings and send a clip of the recording so your champion shares it with their peers and build a persona-specific demo library or a case study-specific demo library. So you had clickable asynchronous demos you can email out to your customer that match the persona segments that you pitch them to.
Fantastic. Thank you so much to all of you for joining us today. We'll go ahead here and wrap up. Thank you so much for the folks who have attended. Thank you to, you know, Rev Genius and the team there for putting this on. Of course, if you're interested in learning more about Reprise, definitely check us out or you can write us. And yeah, it's firstname@reprise.com now. I'm pretty sure, Tyson, that's that one goes to you. Now, if not, it's first name dot last name at reprise.com. And of course, we'll follow up as well, just in case anyone wants to connect and talk demos.
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