How successful are your demos?
Demos are a key part of business life but how successful are your demos?
In this episode of the Better Presentations More Sales podcast I’m sharing with you tips and ideas to help you deliver better, more successful demos – and you can apply the tips and ideas to presentations and sales pitches.
Here is a summary of those tips and ideas:
Do your research and be well prepared
Start by explaining what’s going to happen, how you want your audience to be involved, how long it will take……
Before you dive in to the demo check ask your audience to remind you what they’re envisaging their need is for your product or service – in other words why are you there to do a demo in the first place
Don’t start too quickly – give the audience a chance to latch onto your pace and then you can gradually speed up if you need to
As you proceed with your demo you need to keep your audience involved, particularly if you are delivering online. If you say something like ‘Any questions so far?’ there’s a good chance they will say ‘No’ so you have to ask open-ended questions that they need to reply to eg ‘What are you thinking at the moment?’
Try not to think in terms of traditional sales objections – instead think temporary barrier which needs removing, so I might say something along the lines of ‘is there a particular reason why you can’t envisage your teams using this product or service?’
Many deliverers of demos feel the need to deliver exactly what they have prepared and this in itself can be a barrier to success, so you have to go in ready to be flexible, ready to leave bits out if they clearly not needed, ready to deliver in a different order to what you might have planned, ready to take some tricky questions during the demo which you might prefer to save to the end.
Establish the buying process – this is really important and I think one of the best ways of doing that is to simply ask: ‘Apart from yourself who else is involved in the buying process and how does it work?’
Finally and crucially before you leave the demo, pitch or presentation clarify and agree precisely the next step
Ask yourself: ‘What do I want to achieve today?’, ‘What do I want the outcome of today to be?’
This is episode 218 of the Better Presentations More Sales podcast – the previous 217 episodes are available on your usual podcast app or you can listen and download them via this link.
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