Look. If you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
– Eminem
These are truly some moving words from one of the great philosophers of our time.
But despite the fact that we pulled a random quote from Eminem, these lyrics do pretty accurately describe what the live sales demo is.
That’s because the live demo really is your single best chance to show your prospects that you understand their pains and have a solution that will save them time, money, frustration, or some combination of all three.
And if your live demo delivery sucks? Well, you may need to snap back to the reality of your unimpressive pipeline and huge quotas, and start figuring out new ways that you can close deals.
Or you can figure out what’s killing your demos and how you can improve them.
But don’t freak out. I know your palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. You may even have vomit on your sweater already stained from mom’s spaghetti. (Help, we can’t stop.)
We’re here to help. Here are 5 of the top live demo tips to make sure your prospects lose themselves in your demo.
1. Start the live demo with a bang.
If you want your prospects to be impressed with your product, start the live demo by showing them the most interesting and relevant value.
This may sound obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how many live sales demos we’ve been on where sellers start the call by talking about their own company. Yuck.
Nobody wants to hear when your company was founded. Not even your mom who made you that spaghetti.
And that advice that so many people espouse about saving the best feature for last to wow your prospects with some sort of product demo grand finale?
Leave the grand finales for the July 4th fireworks display. Instead, get straight to the point and start your demo off by showing the one BEST reason why this prospect NEEDS your product. Then spend the rest of the demo unpacking it and showing them more useful features.
Instead of building toward the end, start with the best and richest part, and gradually fade out.
Because by the demo finale, your prospect has likely already tuned you out and is probably thinking about their next meeting anyway.
2. Focus the live demo on your product’s value.
The goal of your demo is to leave your prospect understanding what they stand to gain from utilizing your product. It’s to show them the value you can provide them.
But at the end of the day, practically you need to do this by showing your prospects the actual product and features.
So here’s our advice: Don’t fall into the trap that so many sellers get stuck in by showing prospects tons of features and forgetting to focus on their value.
The features are there to serve a purpose. They were made to save the prospect time or money, or to boost their efficiency in some way or another. So focus on that part. Focus on what they stand to gain and then quickly show them how they can do it.
3. Keep your demo call short and engaging.
Walnut research found that prospects spend just 6.5 minutes on average viewing each demo. This number varies slightly depending on the demo type, size, quality, or industry.
But regardless, people simply don’t want to spend so much time at once viewing your product.
And even though our research found that the average time spent on live demos is 2x more compared to off-call demos, the 30-minute calls most sales reps book with prospects to walk them through their product is still way too long.
A great way to solve this? Create short, personalized, and interactive demos with a demo platform like Walnut. Show only the most important features. Stick to the point.
And no, we aren’t biased.
4. Engage your audience as you go.
Unless you happen to be the world’s greatest rapper (Eminem), it’s unlikely that people want to hear your voice rambling on for 30 minutes straight.
Instead, engage your audience throughout the demo by calling them out by name, asking them questions, and checking in to make sure you aren’t showing them features they’re not interested in while skipping the stuff that really matters to them.
If there’s a specific feature that could be relevant for a certain role, call out the person who stands to gain. So before diving into a cool feature, you can say: “Hey, Marshall, based on your position as rap king, I think you’ll really love this feature that helps you to easily keep track of the lyrics to your raps while you perform.”
And once you show the feature, follow up by making sure Marshall understood what you said and how it could help him drop bombs and not keep on forgetting what he wrote down, when the whole crowd goes so loud, and he opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out.
(Are we taking this Eminem thing too far?)
5. Be nice.
Nothing stinks more than commission breath.
And nothing will make a prospect less comfortable than listening to you try to convince them they need something that they don’t.
So try to forget about the crippling anxiety from those high quotas hanging over your head and be a nice person. Start by actually listening to your prospects and understanding what they need. Offer your advice and listen to what they think about it.
If they push back, stop and process what they said before responding. If you don’t have a good response, maybe they’re right and they don’t need your product, or maybe you need to tell them you’ll get back to them with an answer. Worse than not knowing something is pretending you do when everyone knows you don’t.
Likewise, if you lose the deal by being honest and sincere, it sure beats acting like a jerk, not getting the sale, and leaving prospects with a bad taste in their mouth that’ll prevent the sale from ever happening in the future.
So stick to your morals, be real, and become an advisor instead of a salesman.
Be the demo you want to see in the world.
Just like Gandhi said, if you want to see good demos, you gotta give good demos. So put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and think about what would make a demo experience positive for you and offer them that.
Because honey, here’s no time for more bad demos.
So start improving the way you demo by using interactive product demos that are personalized for each prospect’s unique needs. Your sales team and your prospects will be so relieved.
Want to create engaging interactive demos that’ll boost conversions? Get started with Walnut now!
