Josh Roth

Firstly evaluating why a client is difficult is key. Are they difficult because they have high expectations? If so, GOOD! These clients are critical to your success because they will give you tough and honest feedback most won’t. These clients should be added to your advisory board and kept close. If they’re difficult because they’re not communicating well, seek to understand. Ask questions, dig in deeper. Not everyone you work with will understand exactly what you need to help them be successful, so tell them and then ask questions to dig deeper.

Asking is the best policy here. Surveys make another ask of your customer and I don’t believe making repeated asks of your customers, especially during a cycle, is a productive policy. Rather, make the ask at the end of your demo “what did you see that you didn’t like? What would you have liked to see more of?” Building a deal checklist to understand how you’re tracking in a deal can be helpful for you to use data to see how a deal is tracking (and the momentum within the deal).

This is where your RevOps team and enablement teams should be sharing in ownership. What objections come and more importantly why? What other deals can you find these in (leverage your CI tool here) and what enabled your team to speak clearly to these objections and move forward. The ways to detect where this is happening through data is to work with RevOps to understand how deals move through each stage and what the conversion rates are within each stage. Then, enable the team to understand why deals don’t move forward, DQ the deals you don’t want, speak with specificity to the objections of the deals you do want.

How you want to leverage data within your demo: - look at the industry your prospect is in - understand the use case - look at other customers you have. What are in the same industry and use case as you’re demonstrating Understand what success will look like then configure your demo environment to show what success would look like and fill in the gaps with the features and strategy that lead to the outcome desired by your current and prospective customer

Quantifying your solution is key. Your buyer, regardless of function/ industry are fighting for less budget and buying power than they’ve had for 5+ years. A way to quantify value is through a co- built value analysis. A value analysis built by both you (sales) and your customer(s) (ideally your economic buyer) to quantify the solution that your product will drive will make a prospective purchasing decision a more binary decision.

Think this question gets a bit ahead of itself. A demo is not a discovery call. You should typically not be demoing your software before running, at the minimum, initial discovery. Your discovery and what you learn then leads you into your demo. Having an understanding of who is on the call can be done async. On your demo you should continue with discovery. Show a piece of your software and connect it to your customer’s challenge. - how is what you’re showing tied to a strategic solution for your customer? - What did your customer share that leads you to believe that the part of the solution you’re showing is the right one? Demos are an important part of the sales process, ensure you have the information to make the demo productive