It’ll be alright on the night… the art of the demo

So good luck with your product demos. I guess demos really act as accelerators of the sales process. Done correctly it can move you quickly to a close, done badly it you can move you quickly back to thebeginning.

Preparing for the big demo

Preparing for the big demo

Being in tech sales has certain pluses and minuses. One of the pluses is that you get to see lots of cool technology before the guy on the street. One of the minuses is that you sometimes get to demo state-of-the-art stuff before all of the wrinkles have been ironed-out.

If I had a pound (or dollar) for every time I’d sat in a customer meeting trying to divert attention while an applications engineer colleague desperately tried to get a piece of kit to work I’d be a rich man.

Although to a certain extent this comes with the territory there are some things you can do to minimise your chances of embarrassment…

• Don’t just do a demo because you can. That would be a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” strategy. Have a very clear understanding of what the customer needs, what you want to show them and how this will advance the sale.
• As the old British Army adage says “Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. Do a dry run before the customer meeting. Do this far enough in advance of the customer meeting that you can fix any problems that you might find. In the dry run replicate exactly what you are going to show the customer.
• If you have one, take a spare. If the demo is a really important one (for instance you are going to be on stage at a major trade show) send the spare via a different route. That way if your luggage gets lost or stolen you aren’t left empty-handed.
• Take all the hardware you will need. If you rely on hooking-up to a piece of customer equipment it might not work the way you expect.
• Don’t let anyone else tinker with your equipment! I can recall several demos where an apps engineer had to stop and hack for 10 minutes because someone else had used the machine and changed the Unix directory structure.
• Be open with the customer about the state of the product. Better to explain in advance that they are really lucky to be seeing something hot out of the labs… but it’s not quite there yet, than to give them the impression it’s tried and tested… and then watch it fall over.
• Get feedback from the customer as you go along…

“Is that useful to you?”,
“Does that explain how you would implement feature xyz in your abc?”
“Is that enough performance for you application?”.

• Try and get feedback on other demos they may have seen from competitors. Be subtle… ask how yours shapes-up, not for exact data on your competition.
• If the customer doesn’t seem to be liking something ask them why. It might be something that you can easily rectify or a simple misunderstanding.

So good luck with your product demos. I guess demos really act as accelerators of the sales process. Done correctly it can move you quickly to a close, done badly it you can move you quickly back to the beginning.