In this engaging webinar, Rew Dickinson and Justin McDonald break down what makes a demo land or fall flat. Through a live coaching session featuring both a “bad” and improved demo, they highlight how focusing on the prospect, not the product, is key to delivering value-driven presentations. Learn practical strategies to shift from feature dumping to storytelling, how to equip champions to sell internally, and how to reframe demos around audience, annoyance, and the afterward (AAA). This session helps elevate presales performance at every level.
Well, great to be here with you.
I appreciate it. Great to have so many friends on the attendee list here.
But, I am Justin McDonald, the co-founder and CEO of Saleo, as some of you heard, based here in Atlanta, Georgia.
I got my start. I always like to say this if you’ve not been on a webinar with me, but I got my start in presales twenty years ago. Everything that Saleo is, is through the lens of the presales community, the presales role, the persona, the things that we struggle with.
And so, we developed a live demo technology that actually injects demo data into live products that allows great storytelling. Chris, I see you said there, I’d love to ensure storytelling is driving the mechanics of a good demo.
That’s exactly what Saleo does, if you are familiar with us.
If not, we’re a live demo automation technology.
Excited to be here. Excited to see this first version of Rew’s demo as well.
Yeah. The bad version.
Alright.
And for folks I haven’t met, I’m Rew Dickinson. I run a global presales training company.
When I was in presales, the only real training that you had available was product, product, product, product, product, and occasionally some demo training. But it was the other skills that I wanted to get better at.
Frankly, storytelling is a big one, as well as just helping solve the client’s problem quicker. And, I did a presentation at Demo Fest recently. We were talking about brevity, because there’s a lot of SCs where our blessing and our curse is we know so darn much about the product, but how do we communicate it simply? So that’s what I’m passionate about. I love the SE community.
Did a lot of time as a sales rep as well, but I’m back here to help out with SEs, and AEs from time to time. We do train both.
If you have a sales kickoff coming up, let me know because I know those things are typically product, product, product. We do a lot of fun sessions, interactive sessions at those.
So, Justin, let’s get right into it. You want to just get into the demo?
Let’s do it. Bring out your best presales hat.
I dig it. You know, I’m going to have to dust off the hat here because it has been a bit since I’ve given a demo.
But we’re not going to do the sales rep thing where we go into a forty five minute intro on slides. So what we’re going to do here is I’m going to run through a demo.
And just for context for everybody on the line, what I’m going to show you all is OnceHub. This is if you’ve ever been to the Alpha Presales website, there’s a booking page on that website, and it has calendar links on it.
It’s also what I use to go and send out calendar invites or give people my availability. It’s basically the same thing as Calendly, if you’ve seen Calendly.
So nothing great.
By the way, just to kind of level set as well, just so you all know, when Rew and I were planning this, we said, hey, we could put out some slides on why a bad demo is a bad demo, but why don’t we actually just give one? I think one of the things about this webinar or this session is you’re actually going to see things come to life. It’s going to be visual.
It’s going to be real. And so instead of just a slide that explains why there’s a bad demo, Rew’s going to walk through a version one that is, let’s just say mediocre and then what a great demo looks like.
So we wanted it to be more real life, realistic, and something that was tangible.
Yeah. One hundred percent.
I was at a SolCon in New York City, and I was asking some leaders there, what would be helpful for you for content? And they said, don’t just tell me what a good demo is. Show me a good demo and tell me why.
So this is not theory. This is application.
That’s what we’re going for here, and the best way to learn it is to see it. So, Justin, I’m going to go and share my screen, and I’m going to walk through a little portion of the demo.
As I’m doing this, for everybody on the line, I want you to drop into the chat and let us know what are some good things, what are some bad things. We’re going to learn from each other here.
Alright? So feel free to throw tomatoes at Rew’s demo, if you will, as we go through this. Alright.
And without further ado, Justin, what you’re seeing on screen is the OnceHub platform. And along the left hand side, you’ve got a number of different tabs that you can click into.
So, for example, if I wanted to see the analytics, to go and see all the meetings that have been created this week or next week, I can go ahead and see that. What I have here is meetings based on the past seven days, and I can click and view any one of them in here.
I can look at when they were created, or I can sort and filter based on the actual meeting date. And you can change out your time duration and filters and other things like that and apply that and view all this information.
But where I want to spend our time here is in the bookings page. Now when you look into the bookings page, you can see here there’s a relationship between event types and booking pages.
So think about a booking page as the thing you’re going to send out to prospects when they want to go and book time with you. And the event types, you can give them any number of those event types.
So there’s a one to many relationship between booking pages and event types. So for example, if I wanted to create a new booking page, I could go in here and let’s say I wanted to go and create a customer success meeting or something like that.
Then I would go and just tab off, and you can see it pre-populates the internal label and creates a link for me. Then I have a number of different event types that I can associate with it.
So I can go ahead and save and edit. Any questions on that, Justin?
None so far.
Okay. So then I can go and make edits to the customer success meeting as well.
And, for example, if I wanted to go and add or remove event types, I can do that here. Maybe I want to give people options for a fifteen minute meeting or a thirty minute meeting, and then I can go and select save.
And then what I can see is if I go back into the customer success meeting and I click into it, I can click to view the link where I can see what it’s going to look like for the end user. So they can go in here and they can set these, these options to be able to select maybe a thirty minute meeting, and then they’ll see the calendar.
Any questions on that, Justin?
No. Slightly bored, but, no question.
Okay. So that’s all I have, for you, Justin.
Let’s see here. Folks in the chat, “when is this over?”
Ha, I love that.
Alright. Justin, thoughts thoughts on that demo? Any questions?
Kidding aside, it was, I’ve said this before I think, Rew can talk and people will just listen because he’s got a great cadence. He’s got a great presence. You know, this whole setup here is amazing with his whiteboard and standing up.
But, outside of that, I mean, you went right into it. It was just all features and functions.
There was no setting the stage. There was no understanding of why we were here, what we were about to look at, what’s the actual persona, the audience that we’re talking to, you know, what are the pain points? What are we actually here to solve and who are we talking to? What value am I going to come away with? And once we land this plane, what do I expect to know? So it was just a lot of features, a lot of functions, and very little value.
Yeah. Obviously, the “any questions?” Rough.
I’m seeing the stuff in the chat. Why do I care about the booking page? Good stuff here.
Listing features and the and not the value.
Yeah. I think you also have there’s just a lot of, I always say the demo data is a story.
So we’re trying to communicate value and correlate and be relevant to the buyer like your demo data has to look good. Right? You have a lot of career meetings and Alpha Presales meetings that have nothing to do with the audience or the buyer. Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes.
They were just very generic. So that in itself was, you kind of gloss over when you see generic data.
Yep. Alright.
So let’s look at this and let’s do a little bit further breakdown here. Before we get into the specifics of the good and bad, I want to talk about what’s really happening in a complex sale.
And this is different from going to the Apple Store and buying a phone from there or Samsung or whatever it is, going into Walmart and having a transactional sale. But what’s happening in an enterprise sale is something like this.
You’ve got a sales team right here, and that sales team would consist of your sales rep and off in the SE. And then you’ve got a buyer right here.
And I’m going to put buyer in quotes. Does anyone know why I’m putting buyer in quotes in this context? Anybody have any ideas why I might be calling this the quote buyer? Yeah, it is a little presumptive in that it assumes they’ll be buying. But, really, what’s happening here is they’re not often the buyer.
Drop in the chat how often are you giving the demo to the person who is actually going to sign the check for the software? What percentage of the time do you have the so called economic buyer in that meeting with you? I’m seeing some really low numbers right now.
Yeah. 1% as high as 10%. I think they’re spot on too, by the way.
Yeah. This is funny. I actually asked Chat that recently. I said, what percentage of the time are you in the room with the person who is the economic buyer? And it said, it’s about 15 to 20%. And I said, cite your source. And then it said, oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to mislead you. We don’t actually have any evidence of that.
So there’s a lesson there. Don’t listen to everything that Chat tells you. But, yeah, what’s really happening in enterprise sales is this.
You are having this conversation with the buyer, but then your job is to convince that person. But what happens after that? They’ve got to go to the next person.
Maybe that’s the economic buyer or maybe that’s further on down the road. So all this time, you’ve got to play this sort of telephone game of what’s going on.
Justin, what are we thinking about this?
Yeah. I think this is critical.
Because you may be demoing to a buyer that is not writing the check, especially if you go through that first flow, right, where it’s features and functions.
You have to equip that buyer with a concrete understanding of what’s being delivered, the outcomes, the values that the actual product’s going to deliver. And then they have to find a way that they can take it up to their C-suite, to this economic buyer, and actually relay it.
So that internal equipping and enabling is so critical.
And by the way, it’s not on them. It’s on us as sellers to do that effectively. And so you have to really package it, create a concise story and find a way to translate that well so they can grasp it and then take it up.
Yeah. And so this is such a challenge because when the bigger and more complicated our cell is, the less we have to focus on the features and function and the more important that story becomes.
So we’re going to go and talk a little bit about this and how we start to solve that problem and improve the demos. But also kind of improve this whole process of communicating value through the organization. I was at a sales kickoff in January or February. And we played this fun game where I gave somebody a product pitch, and it was very feature-function focused. And then I had each person, I pulled up about three or four volunteers, and I had them all play different people within this journey.
And so, at first, we went and brought them up on stage, and we had the salesperson pitch to the director. And they gave their pitch, and then I said, great.
And then when I waited about fifteen, twenty minutes, continued on with this sales kickoff. And then we brought in that director, and we brought in the VP.
And we had the director give the pitch to the VP. And as you can imagine, that pitch wasn’t that great.
Then we waited about another fifteen minutes, and we brought back in another person. And now the VP was going and giving the pitch to the C-suite.
And that was the ugliest message you’ve ever seen. And that’s what happens the more we are focused on this feature-function type sale.
So what we’re going to do now is talk about the mindset shift that we have to have, and that’s this: the best SE’s don’t focus on the product. They focus on the prospect. And we’re going to give you some items here that will help you be more focused on the prospect.
Because how many of you, the only training that you get is on product. I mean, I’ve been in the SE.
It’s just product, product, product.
Let’s give the SEs more product. And all we know is just product, product, product.
It’s so easy to talk about the product. We’re so good at it, and we just want to be focused on the prospect.
Yeah. And it’s a profound statement, to your point.
If you’re presales, you have a natural love for product. It’s all that you’re trained on and it is literally the medium that you use to do your job.
You are in the product and you’re giving a demo of the product that you’re showing and you’re also selling. So it is very difficult for presales teams to shift from that mindset because ultimately, it is all about the product, but that’s not how you should communicate.
That’s 100% it. And for any of the folks that are in leadership, I would ask you this question.
Are your SEs guiding the conversation with their speech, or is the product guiding the SEs conversation? Because there is a difference there. We regularly see people put up the product on screen and their voice follows the product rather than the product following their voice.
We have to tighten up our voice and our story and let the product follow it rather than vice versa. Now I’m going to give you a formula.
This is a prospect focused messaging formula. And what this formula is, is there are three questions.
Number one question is who is the audience?
Number two question is what is the annoyance that that audience is facing?
And number three is what happens after they resolve that annoyance?
In other words, it is audience, annoyance, and after. And if you think about this before you get into pitching your solution, this is going to help you make that shift from being very product focused to being very prospect focused.
Now, this is the concept. Let’s actually make it real here.
Justin, let’s talk about that demo.
Justin, who was the audience for that demo that I just gave?
It was unclear. Quite unclear.
You mean it was just rambling? Yeah.
You went right into a dashboard and some features.
There was no audience established.
Brutal. It makes sense that it was feature-function.
It had no alignment to an individual. So let’s tighten that up.
Hopefully, most of us know who our audience is going to be before we jump into a meeting. And, look, there’s always people that get added later on, but, generally, we know who the company is and attendees’ general roles.
So let’s target this a little bit. Let’s say, for example, we’re selling a calendaring solution to sales teams because we know that sales teams are constantly sending out calendar invites.
Right? We have a lot of meetings. So if we know our audience is sales teams. Justin, what’s a software company we want to sell OnceHub to? What do we want to do here?
Let’s, let’s do Snowflake.
Alright. Snowflake it is.
So if we know we’re selling to sales teams and it’s Snowflake specifically, Justin. What are some of the annoyances that a sales team faces?
What are some of the annoyances that you think a sales team faces when it comes to scheduling things? What do we think, Justin?
By the way, I love this framework of annoyance.
Right? I think the term pain and pain points is just overused. It’s thrown around.
Sometimes you glaze over when you hear pain. I think the root of some of that pain is just straight annoyance, so I love the concept in general.
But, yeah, as it relates to annoyance for scheduling, it’s just constant back and forth in email between the buyer and the seller trying to establish times and set up the next meeting. And it’s only compounded when it’s more than a one to one.
Right? If you’re doing a larger demo with multiple teams, it becomes exponentially harder.
Yeah. I literally just did this this week.
It was a back and forth. Oh, I gotta reschedule. I gotta reschedule. It’s just this back and forth.
Finding another slot.
Agenda conflict.
Chasing calendars, reschedules. It’s super annoying.
We just want to do our work.
So we’ve got an idea of what the annoyance is here. What would the ideal afterword be here, Justin?
Quick and easy, fully automated, one email, one link. Everything fully automated and set up.
Love it. Quick, easy, automated, one link.
Good stuff.
So it’s worry free. Right? It’s Hakuna Matata.
Nothing you have to worry about. Just an easy one link that you can send to other folks.
Alright. So we got an idea of that framework.
And what that helps us do is to mentally focus more on the prospect and less on the specific minutiae of the product. So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to try that demo again.
But first, let’s just recap what we did here. If we want to tell our prospect story and be prospect focused, we now know who the audience is.
It is Snowflake. It’s the sales team at Snowflake that we’re giving this demo to.
So, Justin, you’re going to play that role as we go through here. Okay?
And then we know what their annoyance is. Justin kind of highlighted this already. And here’s the bonus.
One of the things we did before this is Justin is the cofounder of an excellent company called Saleo. If you have never seen Saleo before, we threw this together in probably ten minutes yesterday, and we customized this demo with demo data that Saleo was able to go and put in that would make it more real and specific to Snowflake.
So when I go through this on a second round, not only are you going to see a tighter story, but you’re going to also go and see better data in it. Justin, anything to add there?
No. I think just kind of, ad lib here, true story.
Rew and I were talking about how we can make the demo better in prep yesterday. I said, well, that data is pretty rough. It’d be great if we could just tailor it.
Rew said, I would love to do that.
I said, well, why don’t I play SE and implementation manager? And I literally said, well, I’ll just give you access to Saleo. I would use our AI and change out a few things.
So it is probably rough compared to how our customers use us, but then you got the B squad in me just handing it over, setting it up in probably seven to ten minutes. So true story, but it’s pretty cool what happened.
Oh, it was awesome. Team, it was so cool.
Justin goes and dives into the product. Going oh man, I haven’t done this in a bit. And, me going and dusting off the demo skills here was fun.
I think we both got back into the SE role pretty quickly there.
So we’ll get back into character. I want you to go and critique this again.
There’s going to be good and there’s going to always be room for improvement. So let’s hear both in the chat as I go through here, and you can see how we’re going to go and change this up.
So, Justin, you ready to go?
Let’s do it.
Alright. Justin, I want to walk you through the solution in OnceHub.
Before I do, when we work with sales teams, what we typically see is one of two things. Either they have an existing solution for calendaring and scheduling or it looks a little bit like this.
They want to schedule time with a prospect, so they go to their Google Calendar and they find some times and then they type it in the email. And then they go back to the Google Calendar and they find some more times, type it in the email.
They get one more set. They type that up.
They send that off to the client. Hopefully, one of those things works and then they have to go back in their calendar, send out the calendar invite for the prospect.
Justin, how does that compare to what you guys are currently doing?
It’s very similar. And it’s only compounded when we have multiple people.
If it was just a one to one. It can be easy, but we’re trying to schedule a whole team or a whole buying committee.
It could be quite painful.
So, yes. You are describing what we’re walking through right now.
Yeah. Alright.
So if it works for you, I’ll jump in and kind of walk you through the future solution here.
Let’s do it. Alright.
So when you log in to the system, you’re able to see all of the navigation along the left hand side that you need. Where we’re going to focus our attention right now is in the bookings pages.
So if you want to go and create a new link and create a new booking page that you can just send one link out to people, you can simply click here and then set up a new booking page. Super simple point and click.
Maybe we want to go and create a booking page here, and you want it to say talk to sales or schedule a meeting with sales, whatever it is. So you could just simply put that in for the public name here, and then you can select the different event types, add an image, whatever you want, and then you click save and edit.
Now that’s going to generate that booking page for you. However, you may also want to associate different event types because the reason why you’re talking to sales is going to be different based on your needs.
So if I wanted to, I could click in here. What you see now is all of your different event types for discovery calls, or maybe you want to offer the client a pricing discussion, or maybe a technical validation or business case review.
You can select all of these different options and click save. And now, if you go back to preview your booking link, you can see that right here, all of these options are listed.
So if folks want to have a pricing discussion, they simply click on it. They’re able to go and select a time and then schedule that.
This is great, by the way, because that whole list you had before was around your business, not Snowflake’s business. So our entire sales process, you captured really well in the types of meetings we would have.
So that looks great.
Yeah. Now as an example, we work with Databricks as well.
The average sales rep over there is spending about twenty minutes of time scheduling meetings.
Now they’re spending five minutes per day with meetings. So in other words, every sales rep is saving fifteen minutes per day, and that comes out to a week and a half of time back in their year to be focusing on selling.
Now I’m curious, how does this compare to what you all are experiencing internally?
Yeah. It’s painful for every rep and quite honestly, it’s even more than just a sales team.
It’s the CS team. It’s the implementation team.
So it is painful for many different people. And again, it’s something we haven’t solved yet.
Awesome.
Alright. So what did we see there?
What were some of the things that went better? What are some of the things that still need improvement? What are folks getting there? What’s the cost of the missed meeting because of the lost back and forth?
Yeah. I think one of the things that you did well, you set the stage really well, you understood who I was. So I think that’s fantastic.
Secondly, you actually described some ROI and value that we could derive from your solution in OnceHub.
Before, it was just right into the features in the demo. So it was great to quantify the ROI, communicate it back to me, and then help ensure it resonated with me.
Good stuff.
So what is that story is the thing that the buyer can then go and pass along. Right? Because they can go to their leadership and say, at Snowflake, they save fifteen minutes a day.
Would you like to get a week and a half worth of more selling time out of the year? And what CRO is going to say no to that. Right? I really liked Art’s comment here.
Since we know this is sales, right, this goes back to audience. Since we know the audience is sales, there’s a huge cost in poor scheduling.
It’s that you miss sales opportunities. That’s not always the case for the back office people.
Right? So we focus just on the time savings. But if you’re aligned to a sales team, talk about the revenue loss or the revenue opportunity gain.
It’s a great way to think now from the audience. Because if we’re not thinking about the audience, we’re not thinking about that benefit and value.
Great stuff. Alright.
So let’s do a quick recap on this. What did we do here? There was better engagement, but here’s what we saw.
Number one, it was audience focused. So it’s focused on Justin’s needs as a sales team at Snowflake.
I don’t know if any of you caught this, but I set the stage and I talked about the annoyance. So, Justin, I walked through and I said tell me if you all saw this.
This was just a great example of a customer bringing themselves into pain. I said, Justin, this is a process where you typically go back and forth between Google Calendar and your Outlook or your Gmail and you type things up.
And I said, how does that compare? Now what I was doing is I was discussing other people’s pain. And then you brought yourself into even further pain because you said, actually, it’s worse than that because when there’s five people you have to schedule, it’s even more complicated.
That’s what you can do if you’re better at talking about these annoyances. Because then people say, oh my gosh.
That’s exactly what I’m going through. And then they bring themselves into more pain.
That’s why annoyances can be really valuable there. That was just funny how you did that.
And in the real world, there’s nothing better for someone in presales or an SE to have that happen. Right? It’s you just don’t want to say you have them right where you want them.
In a sense, it’s like, hey. They have legitimate pain.
And I think we can solve it for them, which is exactly what you want to do.
So it’s great.
Yeah. And we forget that.
Right? We don’t think the average person isn’t thinking, oh my gosh. I’m walking around in pain every day.
But then you remind them of what it’s like to schedule calendars, and it’s just brutal. Nobody wants that.
Alright. And then at the end of the after, we showed the pain through the story.
And that story’s key because that helps to go and pass that between the different people that are going to make the decision on that buying committee. So that’s what we’re looking for as we go through here.
Now we’re coming into the home stretch here. So we want to do just a quick recap.
This is some of the coaching moments for the folks that are on the line on things you want to go and coach your team.
Number one is just that mindset shift of that the best SEs are not focused on the product. They are focused on the prospect. A great way to do that is if I was an SE leader and you want to coach your team, before you go and see a demo or you’re prepping for a demo, you can ask them who is the audience, get them to start thinking about the annoyances, and get them to talk about what the afterward is.
It’s also a great thing to do as a debrief after a demo. So, Justin, let’s say, you and I are working on this and, Justin, you are the SE leader and you’re coaching me, you would ask me questions like, who was the audience for that demo that you just gave? And I’ll tell you it’s sales teams.
Then you ask, what do you think are some of the annoyances that the sales team faces? And that’s probably a question that an SE leader hasn’t asked me often. They probably ask why did you demo this portion of the product? So this is a reframe that we can do as leaders in asking these questions.
What are the annoyances that the people that you were demoing to are experiencing? It will get your SEs thinking from the perspective of the prospect rather than the product. And that is the change that we want to see made.
Alright. Justin, any comments before we wrap this thing up?
No. I think it’s great.
I think, tying back to the annoyances. It’s easy for an SE leader to talk about pain or dive into the discovery that’s been done and then how that translates to the demo.
But if you ask the question of what were they annoyed with or what was the annoyances, it changes the game a little bit. Okay, how am I correlating it back to what I’m showing in the product and how I’m speaking to it. So I think it’s just a great question to ask and uncovers quite a bit.
Yeah. It’s a pain. Oh, they have a lot of manual processes. But they know how to navigate it.
Like, give me more than that.
If you enjoyed this, you will love our newsletter. This is primarily for presales.
The good news is if you sign up for this, it’s going to go and ask you for your role, and then we’re going to send you out relevant content that is specific to your role. We’re doing that about monthly right now, give or take.
If you like free content, go for it. We sell absolutely nothing to individuals, so don’t worry. No sales pitch there. Just nothing but free value.
So you can go and sign up for that. And then as I mentioned previously, we do some SKOs.
So, we have a little free offering here and that is this: you all have a sales kickoff coming and my January’s and February’s are usually a little crazy running around to these different events.
Now if you’ve ever been to a sales kickoff before, if there’s any SE’s on the line here, you know what these typically are for SE’s. We sit around, bored out of our minds while the sales team gets awards, and then we get just this inundated with product updates.
So they tend to be very dry and not interactive like this. If you would like some SE specific training or breakout session, please let me know because that is what I do.
If you scan this barcode, it’s going to send me an email, and the email is going to say, send me more info about sales kickoff. If you send me that email, I will send you more info about sales kickoff, and you can just forward that to whoever is planning your sales kickoff.
If they book me for kickoff, I will give you $250 at your sales kickoff event. I would love to see you in January, February, whenever it is.
Yeah. And if you’re interested in following Saleo, we love the presales community. We love building software for the presales community.
Thought leaders, industry experts, coaches, we do content quite a bit. And so feel free to go to LinkedIn, follow Saleo.
Awesome. Thank you all.
Thank you so much. We appreciate you joining.
