In this engaging discussion, Ron Whitson, author of “A Friendly Human in Presales” and Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Thomson Reuters, joins Justin McDonald, Saleo co-founder and CEO, and Jim Tocci, Senior Account Executive at Saleo, for a conversation about the enduring power of relationships in the sales cycle. Learn how skills like active listening, empathy, and authenticity can help sellers stand out and foster genuine buyer engagement.
Read the full transcript below for actionable takeaways, fresh perspectives, and a conversation grounded in real-world experience from leaders with deep Presales and Sales experience.
Let’s kick things off. I’m eager to jump into this discussion. I know Ron and Justin are too.
Hello everyone. My name is Jim Tocci. I’m an account executive here at Saleo.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, good night, depending on where you’re at in the world.
Thanks for joining us today for “AI Can’t Do This: relational capital as your sales superpower”. We’re excited to get into discussion around the power of soft skills and how you can coach them in your team with my good friend, Ron Whitson, author of “A Friendly Human in Presales” and also the Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Thomson Reuters and Justin McDonald, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Saleo.
Before we dive in I have a few reminders, we’re going to leave time at the end of the session for q and a. However, we invite you to submit your questions or comments anytime during the webinar through the q and a window.
Today’s webinar will be recorded and we’ll make it available to everyone after the event. With that, I’m going to hand things over to Justin and Ron to introduce themselves before we jump in.
I appreciate it, guys.
I think there’s few people on the call know me, but I’ve been doing presales for twenty seven years. I had a stint at IBM with three years as a seller because I wanted to add that to the resume.
I love everything about presales. I’m really excited about some of the things that AI can provide to us, but I don’t think it’s going to replace us completely.
And so I’ve got some very strong feelings on that. But, I’m currently at Thompson Reuters.
Got a great opportunity to work for the team there. We’ve got some amazing things we can do, and Thompson Reuters has some really incredible solutions for people in the tax space, in the legal space, and in the risk space.
So check us out when you get a chance.
Love it. Thank you, Ron.
Again, appreciate you joining and taking the time to do this. Justin McDonald, for those who don’t know me, co-founder and CEO of Saleo.
This topic’s near to my heart.
One, AI is advancing rapidly. I think the human element and relational capital is so critical – where we show up in value, how we support customers, how we actually execute the presales process.
Two, for those who don’t know my backstory, twenty years ago I got my start in presales. So I was actually an SE, and the entire genesis of Saleo, pioneering the live demo space came from some of that experience being an SE. So it’s a persona.
It’s a role that sits close to my heart, something that we’d love to solve for and work alongside. So really excited for this topic and appreciate you being here, Ron.
Thank you.
Yeah. And I’m especially glad to be here and talking about this. You know, on the topic of relational capital.
I think, Ron, I think we need to tell the story of our friendship. Would you agree?
Absolutely.
So this is a true story, by the way. I only tell true stories.
Yeah. That is fair.
You are a storyteller. My relationship with Ron started by a fateful cold call, well over two years ago.
So March 2nd, 2023 at 03:36PM to be exact – I have my notes on this and I put a star next to it because I knew Ron was going to be one of my close friends as soon as he picked up.
I could just tell in his voice. And I think, Ron, you could tell there’s something special about my voice as well.
Would you agree?
No. There was definitely something special.
And the special thing was that I actually answered a cold call for once. Anybody who knows me knows I don’t answer cold calls. I don’t respond to cold emails.
It’s just, I’m a very busy person and I don’t have time for that. However, on this one fateful day, my wife has an appointment.
I’m sitting out in the car waiting, and my phone rings. I was kind of expecting a call, but not this one.
I answer it and I’ll never forget. Jim says, “hey, Ron. This is Jim Tosi with Saleo. Do you have a minute?”
Now sometimes I can be a bit of a smart aleck.
So, of course, my response to Jim was, sure. 59… 58… 57…
Right. And Jim pops out a couple of sentences that immediately hooked me because this was a problem that I was working to solve.
I’d been spending the last three years trying to solve this problem around demo data, working with my good friend and who I used to call my right arm, Warren Villanueva. So this was very timely.
Again, the hook was fantastic. So I said, please tell me more, and that started the conversation that resulted in Saleo being selected and implemented.
So I think it worked out well for everybody.
I agree. And, I mean, I basically got a new best friend out of it.
Would you… I mean, again, I might be overstepping.
A new friend. Yes. Absolutely.
But you know you know what, guys? If we’re talking about relationship capital and stuff like this, this just isn’t working for me right now.
Hang on. I got an idea.
Hang on. What? Ron.
Jim scared him off.
I came on too strong.
Internet issues, Wi Fi. What’s going on?
I think I did scare him away.
Yeah. Totally.
There you go. That was a short flight from Dallas!
How about that?
Hey Ron. Good to have you, sir.
Good to be here.
If you’re going to do a webinar on human connection, relational capital, what better way to do that than in person.
At my home away from home.
Thank you for making the trip down here. Appreciate it.
Yes. Well, with that, let’s kick off with some questions, since we’ve got the legendary Ron Whitson here along with Justin McDonald.
I’d like to start things off in my moderating debut by asking a question that is one that many ponder. So many in presales come from a more technical role.
I’d say, sometimes they struggle with the skills required to build relationships. I’m not saying that personally.
But, Ron, what soft skills make the biggest difference today, in the buying cycle, would you say?
This is something that is really relevant for me because that is me. I was the very technical person who got their first presales role.
Thank you, Shane Phillips. Good buddy of mine.
But, I had been a database administrator, programmer, wrote code and all that good stuff. And, Shane calls me up to say, there’s this thing called the sales engineer. I think you’d be good at it. I think you’d like it.
And he was correct. The soft skills that I didn’t bring to the table, number one, realizing what sales really was, which is building these relationships and being able to have the ability to influence and convince people about a solution that you’re representing.
My first go around in the role was, I’m going to show up and do the perfect technical demo. And I could do that.
That was easy for me, and then I was surprised that people didn’t buy after this perfect demo for them. And so it really was a lot of learning around how do you forge those interpersonal relationships? How do you maintain those relationships? How do you get yourself to a position where you can influence people on those decisions? And so it becomes a lot of the skills and again, people refer to these as soft skills all the time.
I think our engineer brain, when we hear soft skills, that doesn’t tell us anything. We’re looking for the recipe book. We’re looking for the instruction manual. Plug slot A into tab B, that kind of stuff.
That’s kind of where the book came from because these are all the lessons I had to learn about actively listening. Technical people are notorious for cutting someone off because we know what they’re going to ask before they ask it sometimes.
Being able to be memorable, investing time, having empathy, all those types of things. So I think, especially in today’s AI first world, that human element is even more critical than it’s been in the past.
As it relates to soft skills, which makes the biggest impact in the sales cycle. I actually did an article on this a couple of months ago. As I look at the best SEs that I’ve worked with, what I think is the litmus test for what actually works, how does this come through.
I think there’s three things; emotional intelligence. That’s one of those things where you have technical aptitude, you’re very pragmatic, you have technical details. Sometimes it can be very ethereal. What does that actually mean? But being able to master emotional intelligence, how to read the room, how to learn to connect with buyers.
Number two is situational awareness, which goes hand in hand with high EQ. But how do you adapt to the sales cycle, pick up on certain queues, understand how to pivot, and adapt based upon what’s happening in the demo, the responses you get, overall, how are things landing in the actual sales cycle? How are you telling the story? So having that awareness obviously plays well in a sales role as well as presales, but that situational awareness is so critical.
There’s been so many moments in my career where I’ve seen SEs make the mistake of having this preplaned path. I’m going to show this. I’m going to show this. Next, I’m going to do this. And they’re missing all of the cues that the buyers are giving, based upon questions, based upon body language, based upon overall needs or pain points, that you initially thought were the case, and you built your entire script and flow around that.
And then as you’re going through the actual demo or the discovery, you have to adapt on the fly. You’ve gotta be able to pivot.
100%. And I’m glad you said that about the prepared script, because I think I see this in a lot of people who are newer to presales or early in their career.
Their objective is delivering a script, doing the demo. And what’s most important to them, a lot of the time, is getting through that outline, getting through the script.
I think as you mature in your presales profession, one day you’re going to hit that switch where your objective is no longer just getting through the stuff. Your objective is exactly what you’re talking about, reading the room, understanding the opportunities, and really being open to listen.
The objective is not to do the demo. The objective is to accomplish whatever goals you need to accomplish to move this opportunity forward and earn that trust and build those relationships.
It’s a subtle switch, but it’s a really, really important one. So if you’re showing up and you’re worried about your demo and your outline, that’s fantastic.
It means you’re prepared, but that’s not the objective for the meeting that you’re in.
I think much of what we’ll talk about today is how the downstream effects, overall symptoms and impact of connecting, building relationships, is being the superpower behind the selling motion. This is going to be such an incredible strength compared to what AI can do and some of the automation that’ll take over in the sales cycle. But so much of those downstream components come from one thing – how do you teach people? How do you learn to care about the buyers? Because if you’re naturally curious, if you care for others, if you want to actually make connections, you can’t fake that.
I think there’s this natural inclination where it’s learning to become a great human in one sense, but also just really caring about the customer, the buyer, having a natural inclination to want to know more, want to better serve them. And then if you get to that point where you can build a skill set or even just the care factor, the symptoms from that will encourage you to be a better seller and have more relational capital.
Love that. And just to tie this back to the opening with Jim, I mean, that phone call started a relationship.
Really important story that I want to share about Jim is that it came across as someone who really cared. He was aware of the problem I was trying to solve. He had familiarity with it. He was coming to me with a solution.
And that approach, that standpoint, that perspective made it a little bit different, made it a lot more interesting to me. Again, it was from the standpoint of caring about a problem I’m trying to solve, not, hey. Let me let me sell you some software. Or at least it wasn’t initially, maybe later.
But, initially, it was that standpoint of caring. I just want to call that out, too.
I’ve cared for you from the very beginning. So let’s be honest. To take it off script a little bit, something you said earlier triggered this for me, Ron.
You have the soft skills and relational capital of talking to a prospect, to a customer. But what about the soft skills of interpersonally dealing with an internal salesperson? I know that’s a can of worms to open up, but I’d love to get your perspective on that.
Listen. It all comes down to the same thing, and it’s a concept of empathy. And I write about this in the book.
It’s one of the timeless behaviors I write about. But in the book, I mentioned this phrase that almost everyone’s familiar with, to walk a mile in another person’s moccasins.
And it was credited for a long time to just Native Americans. It sounds like something Native Americans would say, and I’m, like, point 23%, so I can claim that.
But, really, it’s from this beautiful poem called, Judge Softly, I think. And in today’s fast paced world, we’re always so busy and we all have our stuff that we have to get done.
It’s far too easy to not spend a second to think about the perspective of the other person. So I think that empathy is really, really key.
When a seller is talking to me and they’re frustrated because things are not going the way they want them to go, I understand that. Again, that was one of the reasons I took the sales job because I wanted to build that empathy.
But they’ve got an objective. I’ve got an objective.
We just have to have that discussion. And this ties to something else I think is really amazing in the profession.
Back in the day, you know, we’d fly somewhere together. Jim and I would fly somewhere. We would probably meet somewhere, because we live in different areas.
But we jump in the car. We’re talking about the meeting.
We go to dinner that night. We’re talking about the meeting.
We get up the next day, have breakfast. We’re talking about the meeting.
We go do the meeting. And the meeting isn’t an hour or thirty minutes in a box like this. It’s four hours around the table. Maybe even bringing in lunch.
Then afterwards, we jump in the rental car, because there wasn’t an Uber and you’re driving and, of course, we talk about the meeting as we go back to the airport.
We’re missing out on that today. The sellers and the presales people are not having the time to forge these relationships so we can talk about what works and what doesn’t work and how do we get better and just really get to know the person.
So, long winded answer to your question, but the soft skills for dealing with our AE partners, our selling partners – we really need to take a second, understand what’s driving them, understand their objectives and their motivations, and have some empathy for the very difficult job we’re asking them to do.
I was going to say, obviously, it’s a partnership. You’ve got presales and sales working together.
In this age of AI, I think things can get fragmented. So how do you feel about the group together and especially coming from the presales angle, how can we maximize the relational capital we built and the human connection, as we go through the sales cycle, as you work together?
I mean, there’s lots of banter and talk of how much AI will replace the presales role, the sales role.
And there will be aspects of it. There’ll be portions of the funnel and the pipeline where it is better served. It provides automation and allows us to do more with less.
I think this subject right here is going to be the biggest unlock that AI will provide to presales and sales, and it’s not only just relational capital with your prospects and buyers, but it’s the internal relational capital.
Being able to have the time and attention to have those additional calls around discovery, of understanding the buyers’ needs, of legitimate solutioning that use to happen back in the day when we didn’t have to go from call to call from Zoom to Zoom. So I think one of the things that we hear constantly from presales folks is that their schedules are packed, back to back to back.
Our folks here are the same way. We get it.
It’s very hard to solve for, especially in a high demand market, a high demand product. I think finding ways to automate the task that AI can do, so that the sellers and presales can get together, have more relational discussions, solution for the customer, figure out the best flow, the best path, the best narrative, the best storytelling, all of that’s so critical.
And I think it’ll be a big unlock, in years to come.
Agreed. And maybe it’s just – invest the time in building the relationship, not just with prospects, but with internal stakeholders as well. Every investment I’ve made has really paid off in those areas.
I think that is a very common pitfall of most presales, because you have high technical aptitude, you know the product cold. You’ve got the demo flow.
Sometimes it’s a rinse and repeat. The word demo monkey came about for a reason.
It’s so easy to just jump right into it. As it relates to maximizing your human capital, your relation capital, I always encourage presales to take the time to be intentional.
Build rapport. Don’t just jump right into it.
Sometimes there’s a feeling of, I’m the presales leader. It’s the AE’s job to build the relationships.
I think it is those that can have a multi pronged approach, who get multi-threaded, who actually take the time to lean in, connect with the customer, and find unique ways to do so. It pays off.
Another off topic one here.
In that relationship with sales, presales and sales working together, how do you balance who’s leading the charge and the camaraderie and building the relationship? Is it hard to not step on each other’s toes with that? Because, I do find sometimes it’s tough to balance who’s going to be the relationship builder, for lack of a better term.
So I think the AE, the sales rep, traditionally is going to take the lead on that. But I think it’s sometimes an easy crutch for the SE to not be involved.
One of the things I’ve seen really great SEs do is lean in a different ways. I did a blog on this years ago, where once people start to get into stump the chump. And you get into areas where there’s lots of questions, there’s a little bit of doubt. The presales person makes an intentional connection with that particular buyer, that person, to do a one-off meeting to really dive into it.
This not only gives you an opportunity to isolate any concerns with the situation or the overall thought process with that person, but builds the connection. Most AEs are great at building relationships, but sometimes there just isn’t a connection with a certain buyer or with a certain prospect.
I’ve seen really great presales people lean in to bridge the gap on what’s missing with the AE, maybe it’s an off day, maybe the prospect isn’t jiving as well as they have in other accounts. Which is very normal.
So, as much presales can lean into building connections, LinkedIn requests, a quick email after the meeting with a recording of what was reviewed, just finding ways to be top of mind, to build connections and realize that it’s not just the AE. The team is selling, it takes a village.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll add two points.
The first one being, can you succeed as a presales person without doing these extra things? I’m sure you can. But if you want to take your career to the next level and really provide a benefit to all the people you’re working with, these are easy things to do.
And I like your point about maybe the AE doesn’t jive with everybody. That’s fine.
I need to have a relationship with the technical stakeholder. Doing those things, asking those technical questions, jumping in on stuff, those are great.
I think the other part is really about understanding how you get better at it.
You can succeed without it, but if you want to go to the next level, this is certainly a place where you could shine.
I think everybody’s worried, at least somewhat, that AI is going to replace their function down the road.
Things like the two of you are mentioning, you can’t replace that. But, one of the questions that people are wondering is how do we keep presales and or sales from becoming just another AI driven function? Hit a button and that’s the sales cycle.
I’ll give you my take on it.
At the end of the day, let’s see – today is July 10, 2025.
As of today’s date, it’s not agentic AI buying from agentic AI. It’s still a human being making that decision on whether this is a viable solution, whether we’re going to invest the money.
I think you have to build the relationships to have a chance to win the business. Now a good friend of mine the other day was telling me, he says, AI has done so much to shorten the sales cycle. And I said, no. I don’t think that’s correct. I think what AI has done is it’s taken educating your buyers out of your visibility in the sales cycle.
They’re still doing it. You’re just not in charge of it.
You don’t have any visibility or insight into that unless you’ve invested in some tools to do so. So, it’s just changed it and shifted it a bit.
One other point I want to make to the previous question, I lost thought there for a second. But I think the idea of, how do you coordinate these meetings and how do you avoid stepping on each other’s toes, to your earlier question, Jim, is we have to have those conversations.
We have to do a pre meeting call and establish those roles and responsibilities. But like we said, if we’re moving at this incredible break-neck pace and we’re slammed with meeting after meeting after meeting, then we’re not giving ourselves the space to do so.
Yes, the margin’s super important. But, yeah Jim, back to your question around will AI replace us. What can we do to keep presales from becoming just an AI function? I think the root of the answer is you need to add incremental value.
You need to add value, in whatever that looks like. And I have some ideas around that.
But if you’re not adding value, if you’re not providing some sort of uplift from an AI agent delivering a demo, which will happen one day. It’s going to happen. Then you become obsolete.
So how do you add incremental value? I think there’s this level of empathy and understanding that it’s not just about the technical win or closed won.
It’s more how do we find ways to intersect into better understanding buyers’ needs, connecting with the buyers. I think discovery becomes exponentially more important in the sales cycle as AI becomes more and more proficient at automating tasks and agents become better and better at what they do.
Really finding a way to lean in, drive personalization, pull out those key nuggets as a differentiator, between you and the competition, or that better resonates with their business or their pain points. So I think it’s adding value.
Back to the prior point, AI will free up some time. So how do you use that time to add exponential value, personalization, and relevancy into the sales cycle?
Yes, because it’s not the same demo over and over and over again. Right? That’s not the goal.
It shouldn’t be, as Ron said. There’s a lot of different kinds of demos.
You’ve got the technical demos with the technical audience. You’ve got your more executive demo, moving towards a more meaningful conversation. How do you train AI to do that? I think that’s going to be one of the harder things.
But really, how do you work with your team, Ron, in the different kinds of demos and being able to handle those different meetings.
That’s a good question. And I think this is a great place for AI to provide some of that space and some of that automation that we’re talking about. Those early top of funnel demos where you’re really working to educate someone. I think that’s a perfect opportunity to have some automated stuff.
The buying process has changed, the buying cycle has changed, people like to do a lot of research themselves.
I think those are great tools. But as you get further along in the cycle and the deal starts to mature, you’re going to have people who are starting to put more eyes on it. People who are the decision makers and the stakeholders, the people who are going to make the decision about if they’re really going to spend this amount of money on this tool?
They’re going to want to have real humans they can talk to, not some AI avatar. And the cool thing is for presales people, we love that.
I have to give credit to a friend of mine for quoting the phrase, smart people hate dumb tasks. The show-up-and-throw-up early demo, we hate that. Presales people hate that.
Sorry, Jim. But we really do.
Automate that and let me focus on the really interesting more technically complex demos, because that’s interesting to me.
I’ll invest time in that. I like that kind of stuff.
I think it’s not going to replace us. It’s going to make us even better and give us more time to do interesting things.
Yeah. And I think it’s that middle-to-bottom of the funnel aspect, I think AI will certainly push its way up top of the funnel and provide the most amount of automation at that stage first.
Then it becomes, what is most important when you get into an actual one-on-one demo? When you have a group of executives that are sitting there reviewing your software, and what is something that AI can’t do? It can’t do situational fluency. It can’t do awareness. It can’t read the room like a human.
So if you become a master at reading the room, of understanding what makes buyers tick, what’s driving certain initiatives, and then subtle cues. I cannot tell you how many times it was what was not said versus what was said, that was the biggest risk factor in a deal or the biggest component in influencing a deal or shifting the tides of power between the different vendors.
It’s so important to really master the people aspect, the relationship, the awareness, and understanding how to read the room.
I think reading the room is certainly more difficult on a zoom. I was kind of doing the crossed arm thing we’re all familiar with.
And back in the day, when you’re sitting around the table, it’s easy to see that. Things have become more difficult in our virtual world, but I think there are things you can do as far as asking open ended questions, calling members of the audience out to check engagement, and if they don’t respond, then that tells you something.
But you have to give space for that too.
That’s the greatest point I think – AI isn’t in the room. It can’t read the room.
That’s a real place that presales people can work on some skills and some knowledge and provide that value you’re talking about.
When you say read the room… What does it mean? I think there’s an aspect of know when to pause. There’s so many times you get in a situation where I’m picking up on that queue and do I react to it? How am I communicating with my AE, tipping him off, and ham and egging it as we go through and make sure that we’re coordinating and communicating correctly. It’s knowing when to stop, when to pause, when to pivot, when to adjust, when to reset, when to call an audible.
Those are all things that AI is not going to be able to do anytime soon.
So if you can master that from a soft skill perspective, from a relational capital perspective, you’ll do well.
Going hand-in-hand with what you’re saying, learning those soft skills, playing off of each other. What are other tactics or plays that presales and sales can run together to help build a more relational human connection and strengthen the outcome of a demo?
Jump on a call where you’re not talking about a deal. You’re just talking about each other.
You’re learning about each other. Learn about significant others. Learn about kids, hobbies, all that kind of stuff. Show them that you’re a human being who cares.
I think that goes a long way. I see far too often where a seller and an SE are on a call and something doesn’t go right.
And so who does the seller call? They call their manager, and they’re like this went on. Managers really can’t do anything about it.
You know what you should do? And if there are any sellers watching this right now, if that happens, be brave. Talk to the SE. Tell them what you thought needed to go differently and why, but then be prepared for feedback from the SE.
Say, you know what, Jim? Don’t show that slide. That slide’s horrible. It really isn’t what we do. You’ve got to have that kind of relationship.
Have these candid conversations, talk to each other about what’s working and what’s not working. That’s how you get better.
I think from a specific tactic for a play that’s worked really well in the past, especially in the Age of AI, you need to be the trusted adviser. We always encourage our team here to be honest, authentic, upfront.
I think presales best tactic and best weapon is “no”.
There’s nothing better than it just not meeting the mark, you not being able to deliver it. This feature, do you have this? No. We don’t.
There’s nothing that amplifies the yes, more than when you can be forthright and say no. So I always tell presales, do not be afraid to say no.
Maybe it’s a bit based on the sales culture. An enemy of sales, maybe not their best friend, but I think ultimately it’s better for the buyer. It’s better for the company. It’s better for the culture.
So don’t be afraid to say no. It’s one of the things I’ve seen work really well, and this is not just for presales. It could be for sales leaders. I’ve done it myself.
Find ways to connect in a virtual environment beyond just what’s happening verbally. One off direct messages. You gauge someone’s not quite interested. You’re missing the mark. Sending a one off message is just a really great tactic for presales, especially if there’s an AE portion, or the SE has already built a relationship. I think that’s a really good tactic to use.
Pushing for follow ups. Those meetings you have squirrely questions, they play stump the chump, pushing for those follow-ups versus feeling like you have to address everything on that call.
Trying to think what else.
I like the one Ron or Justin said earlier, about the one off meeting. Reaching out for presales and having that conversation away from the AE. So they’re not as worried about the commercial side of it potentially.
That’s one I need to work into conversations.
Yes. It works really well.
It disarms the situation as well, because sometimes you can get into solutioning on the fly. You’re not prepared.
So it gives an opportunity to build a relationships with those buyers in a one off capacity. And presales often has more credibility than sales folks. They’re more technical. They’re more trusted at times, inherently.
Same with services. Bringing post sales into a sales cycle is always valuable. Sometimes they have a little more trust.
So being able to leverage that, to have those one off discussions, to take something that seems really hard during a call, pulling it outside into a more one-on-one setting will not only help build relational capital, but advance trust and advance your deal.
Another thing I think about is your demo, your meeting, is not the only one they’re receiving. They’re receiving multiple.
So if you’re the only person that suggests, hey. Let’s dive deeper into that. Let’s have a follow-up call. That could be the differentiator that makes you stand out amongst the rest of your competition.
It’s a really easy thing to do. And I’ve never seen a seller get upset because I suggested we have another follow-up call, whether they were part of it or not.
Every connection is good for working an opportunity for lots of reasons.
One of the things that has worked exceptionally well in the past, and it actually reminded me of that concept you were telling me about when you flew to Australia and shifted the entire agenda in a way that went against the RFP, which no other vendor did. And it completely set you apart.
So it reminded me of an old phrase I heard back in the day which was, presales becomes the rudder. Learn to be a rudder.
As you pivot, as you adapt, don’t just always fit the mold.
There are times when you need to steer the deal, steer the conversation, adjust the demo based upon the input that you’re hearing. And having that literacy to do that, that situational awareness, is critical.
If you can find a way to do that and know when to use it, it can be the difference between winning and losing a deal.
The story is actually in the book. If you’ve read the book, there’s different sections where it says “story time” and it tells some crazy story that happened to me.
But this particular one, it was a week long trip to Australia. We’re presenting to a natural gas refinery on the Western Coast in a city called Karratha.
And it was a requirement to RFP demo. And these are usually the most difficult kind of demo to do because you’ve got a list of requirements and they’re scoring you during the meeting.
And this one was 215 different requirements and some where really, really technically deep. And so as I was preparing for the demo, I put a slide deck together where slide one was requirement one and slide two fifteen was requirement two fifteen, and they were all numbered.
And they were all labeled according to the section of the RFP so that my audience could follow along and score. But as I was preparing, I was really troubled because the numerical order was really confusing and jumped from area to area and from persona to persona.
And I didn’t think the story was very easy to follow. So I said, you know, I’m going to try something.
I reordered the requirements and put them in a way that I thought told a good story. And told my boss, hey. This is what I did. He says, well, we’ll ask them.
So at the beginning of the meeting, it’s like, hey, guys. You gave me your list of requirements. We’re going to see every one of them today over the next four hours. I’ve got them in the order that you’ve given, but if you’d indulge me, I’d like to go in a different order.
I’ll tell you every number so you can follow along, but I think this tells a better story. And much to my happiness, they said, we can go with your order.
And we did the demo and it went really well. We ended up with a $3,600,000 deal, which was really good.
But at the end of the demo, we’re sitting around chatting and having a discussion afterwards. They told us we were the only vendor that came in there and changed the order.
And the way we were able to do that showed them that we knew the requirements really, really well and that really made them feel comfortable that we understood their business and that was part of what won the deal for us. So there’s another story about personal protective equipment, but see me in person or read it in the book.
That’s good. You drive a great point about making it relevant.
There was a customer story last week one of the customers sent to us, where the reason that a prospect had selected them is that they were showing relevant data, relevant information that they’d picked up on in discovery in a way that the competitors weren’t. Totally different space.
But they’d use Saleo to bring relevant demo data, discovery information into the sales cycle and that very thing, the entire room said you guys are the only ones that actually took the time to bring our industry specific information, some of the use cases that we called out.
Having the flexibility to do that, it’s kind of like renumbering the RP. You’re adding personalization, relevancy to the deal. They just may see a vanilla demo from someone else. So how do you set yourself apart?
Or even worse than vanilla demo. I’ve seen demos to financial services companies that were not using financial services data. They’re using manufacturing data.
You want to tell me you don’t understand my business faster? I mean, come on. I think that’s one of the reasons why this tool that you guys have is so fantastic because, you can easily tell that relevant story with relevant data.
And it’s easy to do. I mean, really take the time to understand a little bit about the people you’re presenting to, do your homework, and I think that’s a great place that AI provides a big benefit.
Grab a 10k, throw it in your good buddy chat, and ask about questions that you could present in the meeting. There’s so much information out there.
The AI tools are a great way to summarize that information and digest it very, very quickly so you can be relevant when you show up for that meeting.
I think some people just do discovery for the sake of discovery. They’ll ask great questions and then they just never use it again.
What was the point of doing that if you’re not going to use it to personalize the demo, personalize the conversations?
Right. It was a checkout box. We did a discovery meeting. Yep.
The check boxes.
You know, we’re up on time here. I don’t know if we have any questions from the audience or the crowd.
Yeah. Let’s see here.
How can presales leaders position their teams as strategic partners when trust is an all time low?
I don’t know if you want me to answer that. No. I’m just kidding.
The first thing would be to understand why trust is at an all time low, see discovery. You already started there. If trust is at an all time low, then maybe something has happened.
I’m assuming this is meaning trust with the selling partners.
Anytime I run into that situation, the first question I go back is do these sellers understand the value that the presales people are providing? And the answer to that question likely is no.
What’s probably happened is the sellers aren’t receiving timely responses to requests for demos and things like that for a number of reasons. But if that is the situation, I think the first thing to do is make sure that the selling team clearly understands the value that the presales team is providing.
More importantly, as a leader you should go to your team and make sure they’re able to clearly enunciate the value that they should be delivering. If you’ve got some gaps, then assess those and coach. That’s what you get paid for.
But everyone has to be very clear about the value they bring to the table and the function they’re providing to the business.
You’ve gotta start with clarity there first.
Last one for the team. What is the difference between a technical demo and a meaningful demo, and how do you train for that?
Technical demo and meaningful demo. I think it’s meeting the mark.
Meaningful demo is really great storytelling. And how do you get great storytelling? You have to combine really good information that’s insightful, which most of the time translates into good demo data.
If you’re going to have a meaningful demo, it needs to be something that resonates, that hits the mark. And I always say, the demo data is the story.
If you don’t have the demo data, you really just have this blank canvas in this UI. So I think if you’re going to provide a meaningful demo, it’s the intersection of relevant storytelling and customer pain.
So if you can take discovery that’s relevant, industry specific, customer specific, you’re hitting the pain points. It’s then manifesting into the actual demo without just generic demo data, then I think that’s the best way to deliver a meaningful demo.
That was really good. But you want a sound bite?
Get ready to write this one down. This is said from the presales person’s standpoint.
A technical demo is focused on me. A meaningful demo is focused on the buyer.
So appreciate you all coming, by the way. Hope you enjoyed the webinar.
Thanks for flying out, Ron.
Jim, great job moderating.
We appreciate your time. Thanks for spending it with us. Bye.
