Sales teams know that most of the time “the best demo wins,” and your sales demo environment is a critical part of that win. However, what do you do when your demo environment is littered with generic demo data, empty tables and graphs, and placeholder images, icons & logos? Over the past few weeks we’ve heard of a number of companies who have spent millions of dollars to improve their demo environments, only to fall flat on their faces ensuring their data is up to date, the environment is functioning, and the data met the expectations of their prospects.
According to the Gartner article “4 Best Practices for Sales Demonstration Success” by Craig Rosenberg, Craig smartly lays out the 4 best practices for sales demonstrations, the second of which is to customize the demonstration to make it relevant, and the 3rd to prove the product can solve their problems. Read on to see how Saleo can help you fix your bad sales demo environment, and start following these best practices for sales demos.
Customizing Your Sales Demo Environment
In order to create a winning sales demo, your demo environment needs to be immaculate and most importantly, it needs to be relevant for each sales demo performed. Data needs to be current, clean, personalized, and relevant. Images need to reflect the buyer, and the content should reflect them as well. Many companies spend millions of dollars getting these environments right, but Saleo can help you perfect your demo environment in minutes.
Starting with missing, or empty data? Saleo enables you to insert data into tables, graphs and more, even if they are empty, enabling you to show your prospects new features, instead of asking them to “just imagine it.”
You don’t need a big close, as many sales reps believe. You risk losing your customers when you save all the good stuff for the end. Keep the customer actively involved throughout the presentation, and watch your results improve.
Harvey MacKay
Some SaaS products show the customer’s company logo and the user’s faces as avatars or icons, and may even feature other personalized images or icons in the experience. If your product sells to a lot of different verticals as well, your demo environment may be personalized towards one specific vertical, but would be difficult to demo to a competing vertical. Saleo’s image replacement tool allows you to quickly and easily swap out any image across your product for a new one in seconds.
The final step to a personalized demo is the text. It could be the name of an advertising campaign, a folder structure, a graph’s key, the content of tables, or even greetings. Making your the data in your product reflects your buyer should be your #1 priority. Saleo allows you to change all of these in a matter of minutes, with no coding required.
Unlike other solutions, complex demo environments are our specialty. Our solution was built from the ground up to let you build your personalization on top of whatever data is there, without forcing you to create whole new environments for each use case. Additionally, Saleo allows you to create the perfect demo for the perfect buyer, and share it out to your team to scale your efforts quickly!
Proving Your Product Can Solve Their Problems… When Your Demo Environment May Not Be Up to the Task
In any good pre-sales strategy you collect information and do sound discovery. It could be the main objectives your prospects are looking to solve with your tool, main challenges they are looking to solve, what they are currently missing, or what their goals are. This is where personalization of your sales demo environment becomes so important. Take for example a customer trying to demo their sales engagement tool but their environment has old data, empty graphs, and outdated company logos.
As a Saleo customer, that rep can immediately go into their product, and ensure their demo environment has all the data they need to make their sale, in minutes instead of days or hours.
A rep can use Saleo’s graph designer to quickly insert years worth of data into graphs, showing their customer what using their product is really like. They can update their tables to show their tool targeting companies similar to the buyer’s interest. Titles of sections and charts can be updated as well to make the environment look like it’s ready to be the new home for your prospect! You can even drop their logos or avatars in to make it seem like their user is ready to go.
You need to be able to paint a picture in a conversation. The lost part of sales is the storytelling side.
Richard Harris
Demoing with a sales environment that is tuned to your prospect needs and goals drives greater sales alignments, win rates, and customer satisfaction. Focusing on areas that resonate with them will ensure you win more customers. Ready to start personalizing your sales demo environment today? Request a demo to get set up with one of our sales demo specialists!
