EcoOnline was already winning business.

But as their VP of Presales said before the first session of their Great Demo! workshop:

“We are winning business. But sometimes we are winning despite our demos, not because of them.”

That level of honesty set the tone for everything that followed.

EcoOnline’s global presales team, spanning the UK, Nordics, and North America, came together in one virtual room for a six-session in-company Great Demo! workshop delivered over three weeks.

For many on the team, this was their first formal presales training experience. Their skills had been developed the way many presales professionals develop them: on the job, through peers, through experience, and through self-teaching.

Before the workshop began, the team had already started building momentum by running a book club around the Great Demo! methodology. By the time the sessions started, they were not simply hearing a new approach. They were ready to apply one they had already begun to believe in.

Across six sessions, the team worked through the core disciplines of delivering demos that help buyers move forward with confidence:

1. Reflecting the buyer’s situation back with precision before opening the product.
2. Opening with the outcome the buyer came to see before explaining anything else.
3. Showing only what the buyer asked for and nothing beyond it.
4. Taking the shortest path to the outcome so the buyer stays focused on value.
5. Going deeper only when the buyer asks, including in RFP demos and workflow walkthroughs.
6. Speaking in the buyer’s language so every sentence connects to their world.
7. Giving the buyer control of what gets shown so the demo becomes a conversation.
8. Handling unexpected questions confidently without losing the thread.
9. Running a compelling demo even when discovery is incomplete.

The sessions included live demo practice, direct feedback, and application to the team’s real deals and real buyers.

What stood out immediately was the team’s level of engagement. Questions came from every region. Participants challenged ideas honestly, tested new approaches, and worked through how to adapt the methodology to EcoOnline’s specific selling environment.

You can feel when a presales team genuinely wants to grow.

This team did.

And the shift started before the workshop was even finished.

Between sessions, one of EcoOnline’s Solutions Consultants entered a customer demo with no discovery notes available. Instead of defaulting to a broad product tour, he paused and asked the customer what they were struggling with.

The customer identified three areas.

He showed only those three areas.

Nothing more.

The customer was completely satisfied, and the demo ended with ten minutes still on the clock. In the next session, he shared that he had to stop himself from filling the remaining time with more features.

“I had ten minutes left, and it really freaked me out because I still had time.”

That is the shift.

The demo became shorter, more focused, more conversational, and more valuable to the buyer.

As Andreas Ekholm, Senior Solutions Consultant at EcoOnline, shared after the workshop:

“It is now clear how to structure demos more consistently to get improved engagement in customer meetings. Our teams are now more than ready to tell a compelling story that the customer sees themselves in.”

EcoOnline’s presales team did more than learn a demo methodology.

They began changing how they engage buyers, how they structure conversations, and how they connect product capabilities to the outcomes customers care about most.

They were already winning business.

Now they are better equipped to win because of the demo.

If your team is ready to move beyond feature walkthroughs and deliver demos that are more focused, more relevant, and more compelling, Great Demo! can help.

Contact Great Demo! to learn how an in-company workshop can help your sales and presales teams create demos that buyers remember, value, and act on.

Below are ten lessons from the dating world that will make your demos unforgettable, and maybe even inspire you to explore Great Demo! training to master these techniques and leave prospects saying, “Where have you been all my life?” 

1. When Competitor Talk Kills the Mood

Imagine this: you’re out on a first date, and everything’s going well until your date starts going on and on about their ex. Suddenly, you’re wondering, “Why are they so focused on someone else when I’m right here?” In demos, trash-talking competitors have a similar effect. It can make you seem petty, insecure, and—frankly—a little desperate. Instead, focus on what makes your product amazing. 

Case in Point: One rep, eager to stand out, made a point of calling out competitors’ shortcomings. But halfway through the demo, his prospect started to look distracted. Eventually, the prospect chose to move forward with the competitor he had been downplaying. Why? Because the focus had shifted from his own solution’s strengths to everything his competitor was supposedly lacking. 

Great Demo! Insight: Great Demo! teaches you to position your product confidently, highlighting the unique value it brings—no comparisons, no distractions. 

Pro Tip: Say goodbye to “ex talk.” Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on what you do best and why it matters to the prospect. 

2. First Impressions Matter—Don’t Start with the Resume

Just like dating, first impressions set the tone. Imagine showing up to a date in sweats and kicking things off with, “So, here’s a bit about my career trajectory.” Yikes! In a demo, starting with your company’s founding story can have a similar effect. Great Demo! emphasizes beginning with the prospect’s challenges and goals—creating a connection from the get-go. 

Case in Point: One rep used to spend the first ten minutes of every demo talking about his company’s history, values, and market position. Prospects would lose interest before he even got to the product. After learning Great Demo!, he switched to opening with a Situation Slide focused on his prospect’s most pressing challenge. Engagement skyrocketed. 

Great Demo! Insight: Our training teaches you to lead with the prospect’s challenges rather than company history, making them feel like you’re here to solve their problem—not just showcase your achievements. 

Pro Tip: Before your next demo, research a specific pain point your prospect faces and lead with it. Watch engagement soar. 

3. Don’t Be the Clingy Type—Accept Rejection Gracefully

Rejection is tough, whether it’s from a date or a demo. But sometimes, there’s just no spark, and that’s okay. Imagine leaning in for a first kiss only to be met with a polite, “Not yet.” Ouch, right? Great Demo! teaches you to handle each demo gracefully and focus on ideal matches, rather than pushing every lead down the same path. 

Case in Point: One sales team had a high-profile lead they poured resources into. But the lead ended up going with a competitor. Instead of obsessing, they used it as an opportunity to refine their approach. Weeks later, they closed a larger deal with a prospect who was the perfect fit. 

Great Demo! Insight: Learn to gracefully accept a “no,” keeping doors open and using feedback to improve future demos. Great Demo! training develops resilience and focus so that you can handle each prospect with confidence. 

Pro Tip: After a rejection, seek feedback, thank them for their time, and keep the door open for future conversations. Every “no” gets you closer to the right “yes.”

4. Ask Questions, and Actually Listen!

Ever been on a date where the other person only talks about themselves? Exhausting, right? Don’t make the same mistake in demos. Great demos are conversations, not monologues. Through Great Demo!, you’ll learn to ask smart discovery questions and listen to the answers—uncovering insights that help you tailor your approach on the fly. 

Case in Point: A rep once struggled with prospects who’d zone out halfway through his demo. After attending Great Demo!, he started each call by asking the prospect about their biggest challenge. That simple change led to a more personalized demo and a better connection, improving his close rate. 

Great Demo! Insight: Great Demo! trains you to use discovery questions that uncover the issues that matter most to prospects, allowing you to adjust your demo in real time for maximum impact. 

Pro Tip: Start with, “What’s your biggest pain point right now?” Use their response to tailor the rest of your demo.

5. Stay Present—Don’t Check Your Phone!

Picture yourself on a date, and every few minutes, your date checks their phone. It’s distracting, disrespectful, and honestly, it feels like you’re the backup plan. In a demo, your undivided attention matters just as much. Prospects can sense when you’re distracted, and they may start to wonder if they’re truly valued. 

Case in Point: A remote sales rep got into the habit of checking emails during demos. A prospect noticed, ended the call, and chose not to move forward. After taking a Great Demo! training, he committed to eliminating all distractions during demos making his prospects feel fully valued, and saw his engagement rate skyrocket. 

Great Demo! Insight: Great Demo! emphasizes the importance of giving your full focus to each prospect. You’ll learn techniques for staying present, building trust, and minimizing distractions for a seamless experience. 

Pro Tip: Turn off notifications before each demo. Make your prospect feel like they’re the only person in the room.

6. Plan a Memorable Experience

A great date isn’t just a meal; it’s a memorable experience. The best demos are the same, they don’t just run through features but address the prospect’s challenges in a way that sticks. Great Demo! is all about designing demos that resonate, keeping you top of mind long after the call. 

Case in Point: A rep discovered her prospect struggled with reporting tasks. Instead of a standard feature rundown, she focused her demo on reporting capabilities, making the solution relevant to her prospect’s daily frustrations. They remembered her demo—and ultimately, her product—because it was meaningful to them. 

Great Demo! Insight: Great Demo! shows you how to make each demo memorable by centering it around specific challenges that matter to the prospect. 

Pro Tip: Identify one core issue they’re facing, and center the demo around it. Prospects remember solutions, not lists of features.

7. Don’t Rush—The Three-Demo Rule

Good relationships take time to develop. Rushing through every feature in a single demo can overwhelm your prospect. Great Demo! training emphasizes pacing and understanding when to go deeper and when to hold back, letting your prospect absorb the value of each feature. 

Case in Point: One rep was notorious for trying to cover every feature in one demo, leaving his prospects confused and overwhelmed. After taking a Great Demo! training, he learned to pace his demos, focusing on core benefits and reserving details for future conversations. The result? Prospects were more engaged and understood the product’s value more clearly. 

Great Demo! Insight: We help you structure complex demos, giving prospects time to absorb each feature’s value and building anticipation. 

Pro Tip: For complex solutions, consider breaking your demo into stages, covering only the essentials in each session.

8. Trust Your Instincts

In dating, you know when there’s a spark and when it’s time to pivot—the same is true in demos. Suppose a feature resonates with your prospect, Great Demo! training helps you recognize and respond. Conversely, if a prospect seems disengaged, pivot to something that’ll recapture their interest. 

Case in Point: A rep noticed a spark when he mentioned automation. Seizing the moment, he tailored his demo to emphasize this feature, ultimately sealing the deal. Great Demo! equips you to read cues and adapt, creating a more connected, responsive demo. 

Pro Tip: Pay attention to their reactions. Lean into what excites them, and pivot if needed to keep them engaged.

9. Don’t Lean in for the Kiss Too Soon

In dating, going in for the kiss too early can backfire. The same is true in demos. Asking for the sale before your prospect sees the full value can feel pushy. The Great Demo! methodology teaches you how to build trust and excitement first, so when it’s time to ask, they’re eager to say “yes.” 

Case in Point: A rep lost deals after pushing for commitments too soon. After learning Great Demo!, he realized the value of pacing. He focused on solving key problems, letting prospects see the product’s impact before moving to the close. 

Great Demo! Insight: Great Demo! training helps you build excitement, letting your product’s value take the spotlight before you move in for the close. 

Pro Tip: Hold off on the close until they’ve fully seen the value. Build excitement first, and the close will feel natural.

10. Watch Out for “Bad Breath” Moments

No one wants to be close to someone with bad breath, right? In a demo, “bad breath” moments happen when vague answers, dodged questions, or overselling creeps in. Great Demo! helps you refine your approach for a fresh, transparent, and valuable demo. 

Case in Point: A rep frequently struggled when answering questions about limitations. After Great Demo!, he learned how to handle tough questions with honesty, building trust instead of eroding it. Prospects appreciated his transparency and saw him as a credible, trustworthy partner. 

Great Demo! Insight: We teach you how to navigate tough questions with honesty and grace, building trust and respect. 

Pro Tip: Keep it fresh—be upfront about any limitations and answer questions with transparency.

Conclusion: Mastering the Art of Demo Dynamics

With a little dating wisdom and Great Demo! skills, you can transform your demos from forgettable presentations into powerful, meaningful engagements that win over even the toughest prospects. If you’re ready to turn awkward “dates” into lasting relationships that lead to closed deals, consider exploring Great Demo! training to master these techniques and more. After all, the secret to a great demo—and a great date—is always the same: make them feel seen, valued, and understood.

About the Author

Paul H. Pearce has over 25 years of experience in executive leadership in Sales, Presales, Field Enablement, and Business Development.  As the first certified Great Demo! and Doing Discovery training partner, Paul has mastered the methodologies and today contributes to its ongoing success helping organizations dramatically increase sales and success.  As the President of Great Demo! LLC, Paul has consulted and trained hundreds of organizations and practitioners and recommends ways to increase sales and customer success through proven methodologies and real-world experience.

The webinar also covered advanced tactics for commanding price premiums, expanding deal sizes, and ensuring that deals don’t fall through past forecasted closing dates. These methods, combined with proactive negotiation strategies, were designed to help sales professionals close more deals while maintaining higher profit margins.

Here are the key concepts covered in this session:

• How to negotiate and win opportunities in a non-contentious manner.
• The importance of articulating value during demos to start negotiations early.
• Strategies for commanding price premiums and expanding deal sizes.
• Tactics to ensure deals don’t slip past forecasted dates.

Watch the webinar replay to learn the easy-to-follow processes and concepts that will level up your negotiation skills. Follow Ron and Paul through the channels below for more insights and tactics to improve your sales approach.

View Recording

If you have inquiries, you can reach out to the webinar hosts through the following channels:

Here are the main objectives of this session:

• Identify the key challenges that presales and sales teams encounter and learn effective strategies to overcome them.
• Shift your focus toward client success throughout the entire process to ensure long-term satisfaction and recurring revenue
• Achieve seamless collaboration through implementing the SEAMless Sales® methodology

Watch the full webinar to learn how you can improve your client relationships and achieve long-term success through better collaboration. If you want to know more about how the SEAMless Sales® concept can help you and your team, keep watch for the upcoming release of Art’s book, Making SEAMless Sales. Follow Art, Peter, and Paul for more insights and strategies that can lead your team to long-term success.

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If you have inquiries, you can reach out to the webinar hosts through the following channels:

A Never Stop Learning! Article

“After working as presales prior to the sale, then assisting with implementation, and then continuing in a CSM role, the customer said it was the most successful major project ROI they’d ever seen – and extended an offer to hire me!”
– Presales Practitioner

“Our objective is to maximize CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) for every customer.”
– Member, Board of Directors, SaaS Company

What’s in This Article for You?

• A customer’s perspective
• High-fidelity handoffs
• The enormous value of relationships
• What happens as companies grow?
• How about a hybrid approach?
• Another intriguing hybrid!

Nearly all vendors struggle to find the best approach to align staff for each of the various customer-facing roles from presales, through implementation, to customer success. Some organizations have an account-based approach, with one or more individuals assigned to handle the entire continuum. Others prefer a more specialized structure, where one set of players focuses entirely on presales, another on implementation, and yet another on customer success. Some organizations employ a hybrid approach, mixing and matching individuals’ skills and strengths to the various roles and combinations of roles.

Clearly, there are many options to explore! Let’s begin with the customer’s perspective.

A Customer’s Perspective

“I want, no, I need vendor representatives who are knowledgeable about their products, solutions, use cases, and typical environments, and who are responsive and, in the best cases, proactive with respect to problems, solutions, and guidance. I’m looking for the least friction in my buying, implementation, rollout, and user adoption processes.”

Let’s break this down! Our customer wants the vendor team to have:

• Product and technical knowledge.
• Solution and use case experience.
• The ability to be proactive.
• The ability to avoid or reduce friction associated with each stage.

Let’s examine this last item: Reducing or eliminating friction is one of the key objectives for vendor teams. What causes friction?

• Inexperienced vendor team members
• Non-optimal sales, implementation, and customer success processes
• Handoffs

Creating teams that combine seasoned veterans with newer players can help address this first issue. Evaluating, improving, and tuning the associated processes is clearly the strategy to tackle the second one, and there are numerous books, blogs, and articles to draw from.

That leaves handoffs as an area for improvement…

High-Fidelity Handoffs

Managing handoffs is often relegated to each group as they come into contact with the customer. It is also generally assumed that each group can access all the relevant information needed for their work in their organization’s CRM system. Sadly, in most cases, far too little information is actually entered to be useful!

That’s where the trouble begins.

Salespeople, for example, typically enter the minimum info needed to satisfy management’s requirements for status updates and reporting. And whereas other groups may be more altruistic, the fundamentally important discovery information is often lacking. This should include the customer’s objectives, their needs, their desires for a solution, the value expected, and the timing for implementation and rollout (big bonus for including Value Realization Events!).

Unfortunately, much of this information is never even collected, and when it is captured, it is the rare organization that sees that data input into their CRM system. Much of customers’ CRM records consist of the sales steps taken to get the deal done, but dangerously little else!

Friction is generated when this key discovery information is lacking, leaving each subsequent vendor department at risk of poor assumptions, guesswork, or having to ask the customer, again, for guidance. The frustration mounts like a mound of wood dust from large grit sandpaper!

Creating structured handoff procedures, including documentation, reduces the friction generated when sales pass information to presales, presales to implementation, and onward to customer success. However, when you eliminate the handoffs themselves you are also eliminating many of the risks of incomplete or erroneous communication.

This is a major argument in favor of an account-based model, where an individual serves as presales, implementation, and customer success for their customer. At a minimum, that person has the direct experience and memory (hopefully!) of all the interactions across the continuum.

Does this approach relieve that individual of the need to document? Definitely not! Job changes, PTO, and other time away from their day-to-day tasks make an equally strong case for effective corporate capture of customer information. The ability of an organization to smoothly transition between customer-facing players relies on this ability to transfer information with high fidelity and high accuracy.

Minimizing handoffs is one valuable element of an account-based approach. What else can be gained with this model?

The Enormous Value of Relationships

How long does it take to really get to know a customer? Not just their organization chart, but the individual players’ personalities, interaction history, and culture. Months, in many cases. Years, for some!

Each new vendor player doesn’t automatically enjoy the same relationship status with the customer: They have to earn it!

What does it take and how long does it take to be perceived by your customer as a trusted advisor? Or a real partner? When your customer asks you for your recommendation on a topic that is not about your offering, then you’ve earned this status. That can take years!

The “Rule of 150” (or Dunbar’s Number) suggests that each of us understands how to interact with about 150 other people, and we also understand how each of those folks interacts with one another. Building relationships within and between the vendor and customer takes significant time but yields enormous advantages. This knowledge is an important lubricant in reducing friction but is difficult to transfer to new players.

The value of long-term relationships is another argument in favor of an account-based approach. But what if no one individual can amass and apply all the required knowledge and skills?

Growth and Specialization

“Hooray!” they announced, “We just hired our first presales person!”

A presales player joins the existing small team in a startup and finds themselves doing a wide range of customer-facing tasks, including presales demos and POCs, a bit of marketing content, implementation configuration and training, logging bugs and enhancement requests, plus working to ensure customers renew their subscriptions.

They have no choice: There’s no one else for any of these roles!

A year later the overall team has doubled in size, but the approach remains the same. Another year and they reorganize, creating separate departments for presales, implementation (or professional services), and customer success. Each of these departments brings in new hires with strengths in their respective functional areas.

They have just implemented a production-line approach to customer interactions, where each station in the production line works to optimize their portion of the process. There are several advantages to this approach, including:

• It is typically easier to hire for each specific role than a range of roles.
• Role specialization allows for deep skills development within those roles.
• Objective-setting, measurement, and evaluation of player execution may be simplified.

Of course, this structure is at risk of the challenges of interdepartmental communication and the associated handoffs. Additionally, there are often deep (and sometimes sharp!) discussions of departmental responsibilities and boundaries, as well as battles for resources. (Have you ever heard a department manager say, “I have more folks than I need on the team. Why don’t you take some people for your group…?” Nope!)

In these cases, a vendor’s internal friction may spill over to impact customers and create bottlenecks or gaps in customers’ journeys. This would be like an auto assembly line discovering that the team responsible for installing engines is delayed by a lack of parts, impacting everyone downstream.

This happens with software vendors, for example, when the big sales push to close Q4 business results in a bulge in Q1 onboarding activity. In the specialization approach, individual department resources don’t typically adjust in accord with demand that varies periodically.

So, the specialization model enables departmental depth but suffers from compartmentalization and silos. It is strong vertically but weak horizontally.

Is there an approach that can offer strength across both dimensions? Perhaps!

Hybrid Approaches: A Happy Medium?

Some organizations have adopted models that leverage the advantages of individuals caretaking the entire sales-presales-implementation-customer-success continuum while simultaneously permitting specialists to support discrete roles. There are (at least) two approaches that apply these ideas.

In one strategy, an account manager is ultimately responsible for all activities that take place with the customer, including securing new licenses, renewals, and expansion. This model is frequently used for vendors’ “key” accounts that produce significant portions of a vendor’s overall revenues.

The account manager draws resources from individual departments as needed. Presales, sales specialists and product specialists, implementation and professional services, and customer success all contribute personnel and other resources when requested. In addition to the ability of the account manager to establish and maintain long-term relationships, organizations often enjoy an improved ability to track the expenses associated with each customer, providing a clearer picture of the cost of sales, implementation, and success on a customer-by-customer basis.

A variation on this model includes two cross-continuum roles: an account manager, focused on the “business” aspects of the relationship, and a technical resource dedicated to product, technology, and solution implementation tasks. Each of these players leverages department-specific specialists as needed.

Another intriguing approach is based on rotating roles over time. For example, a salesperson lands an order with a new-name customer to start the cycle, then oversees implementation and rollout, and then transitions to retain and grow the customer over several years. Continuity is maintained throughout the process and strong relationships can be developed over time. A similar process can be undertaken by a technical player. Again, both people can work with departmental specialists, as noted above.

I’ve seen some clever orchestrations of this model, where the sales/technical duo has responsibility for several prospects and customers across typical customer lifecycles. There’s a delightful positive feedback loop that is established when vendor personnel can experience all phases, beginning with selling and buying processes, moving to implementation and onboarding, and then continuing to initial ROI and long-term growth. These experiences yield rich firsthand success stories (as well as things to avoid!) for each stage of their customer’s journeys.

A twist on this strategy cycles the vendor personnel through each role over time across multiple customers. Salespeople, for example, might start as “farmers” to develop existing customers and then transition to “hunters.” As in the case above, their experiences with current customers can enable more effective and successful new-name sales.

A similar cycle can take place with customer success team members moving into implementation and/or presales, rotating through these roles over time. Firsthand knowledge of how customers actually use the software can be surprising and offer important insights for selling to and guiding the onboarding of new-name accounts.

These rotating arrangements can take place in ways beyond the presales-customer-success continuum: Here’s an example!

The Copley Plan – A Hybrid Twist

One evening after a long day working a tradeshow in Boston, my colleague Dave and I felt a touch of malaria coming on and decided to head it off by imbibing a few gin and tonics at one of the hotel bars by Copley Square. We had been lamenting how our development team seemed to take forever to release critically needed new capabilities. So, we defined and executed a “Skunk Works” plan to do it ourselves.

It was a terrific success! Here’s the story…

We knew, generally speaking, what the deliverable needed to do, but the specific details were lacking. So, we enrolled a handful of presales folks, one from each region, to join the “product team” for our Skunk Works project. They were intensely knowledgeable about the precise customer needs for this product, and we were able to dramatically reduce the time to define the product specs in comparison to the then-current product management processes. We reduced what typically took months to a couple of days!

As the developers got rolling, the presales participants returned to the field, but remained in close contact, providing rapid feedback to the developers as the code emerged. Again, this condensed the development process. Testing and feedback often occurred overnight from our presales folks, providing the developers with the answers they needed even before starting their day (it helps when you have an international team spanning the globe’s time zones)!

The new product came together rapidly. When it was ready for release, we already had a team of people who were deeply conversant with prospect and customer needs and use cases, and who already knew how to align those needs with the capabilities in the new offering. Yes, they were those same presales folks!

This same presales team now brought the product to the field. They were charged to train their peers and were the tip of the spear in the initial sales. Who else could have done it better? (No one!)

The net of this “Copley Plan” was:

1. A critically needed product was defined and delivered in record time.
2. Prospect and customer “fit” and acceptance was extremely
3. Sales, adoption, and ROI were blisteringly fast!

But wait: There’s more! The presales team involved in this project was delighted to have been utilized this way. So, what do you do when you encounter a new method that works really well? You repeat it (and improve it). And we did!

Customer Service vs Customer Success

I haven’t discussed customer service in this mix, so far, and that is intentional. Customer service is often perceived as a separate team, dedicated to reactive responses to customer inquiries, bug reports, and similar problems. It is tasked to handle and resolve short-term issues, typically.

The mindset of customer service is one of finding the fastest route to resolution. This is almost diametrically opposed to customer success whose proactive approach focuses on achieving the longer-term objectives of customer retention, renewal, and expansion. It can be difficult for an individual to operate with these mixed mindset concepts (perhaps generating friction inside of one’s brain!).

Notwithstanding this, some organizations combine these functions. This can work well with rock-solid offerings, but for others with complex products, it may be wiser to separate customer service from customer success.

Objectives and Compensation

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
– W. Edwards Deming

“Compensation drives performance.”
– Every senior manager everywhere!

Each of the models we’ve explored requires carefully defined and aligned objectives, and compensation strategies that support the models.

For approaches that span the entire continuum, objectives need to match the desired outcomes. One might want to track and compensate for low churn, for example, but also for total revenue generated from each account, as well as NPS scores or similar customer happiness metrics.

In models that mate more experienced team members with newer players, a “pod” approach may suggest an incentive plan that rewards all the players on the team for all the pod’s successes. This also encourages intra-team mentoring and support across all the team’s projects.

For models that rely on specialists, one way to encourage improved communication and effective handoffs is to reward upstream team members with bonuses when successes such as an expansion sale take place downstream. Similar incentives might be offered for downstream team members who harvest references and other customer success stories for use in new-name sales.

An important consideration is that these different approaches may require novel or at least different compensation structures than are typically employed in traditional “lone wolf” sales organizations. One organization established mechanisms to track and measure the success of the team’s buyer enablement practices, for example.

Finally, personality traits can and will impact compensation programs and objectives-setting. Highly successful lone-wolf salespeople may not be comfortable in an environment that requires a high degree of collaboration. Similarly, altruistic (or less monetarily motivated) folks may not be inspired by traditional commission structures.

Your Continuum

I’ve proposed a handful of approaches to organize, staff, and execute across the sales-presales-implementation-customer-success continuum, and I am certain there is no “right” answer. Experiment, iterate, and improve the model for your organization, and please let me know the results!

Copyright © 2024 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our books, blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

Salesperson: “I need you to do a demo tomorrow for ACME Corp – it’s a huge opportunity!”
Presales person: “What do we know about the prospect’s situation?”
Salesperson: “It’s a huge opportunity!”
Presales person: “…Sigh…”

Or this one?

Salesperson: “I need you to do a demo tomorrow for ACME Corp – it’s a huge opportunity!”
Presales person: “What do we know about the prospect’s situation?”
Salesperson: “Hmmm… There are some notes in the CRM system…”
A few moments later, after our presales person has found the record: “It only says, ‘It’s a huge opportunity!’”

What’s in This Article for You?

• A sadly traditional challenge
• What’s a Vision Generation Demo?
• What’s an Informal Success Story?
• An incredibly effective and efficient handoff
• And another
• And still another
• And yet more!

No Disco No Demo?

Here’s another frequently played scene:

“I promised them a demo…” announces the salesperson.

“But we don’t have any discovery information,” complains the presales person, “What should I show them?”

“Just show them your standard overview demo…”

What is the result of this decision? Wasted time for all parties involved and an increasing likelihood of the opportunity being lost to a more competent competitor or vaporizing into a No Decision outcome.

Well, what if there were a way to satisfy all parties in this scenario?

• The salesperson is excited about the opportunity and wants to move the sales process forward, and delivering a demo is a traditional first step.
• The presales person also wants to see the opportunity convert to the next sales stage but knows that an overview demo is a recipe for disaster. Discovery is what is needed at this point.
• And the prospect (let’s not forget about our prospect’s point of view!) wants to get a sense of what solutions to their problems are possible.

It seems like the ingredients in this recipe are not going to combine well and may result in some serious vendor-prospect indigestion! What’s an elegant and effective solution to this dilemma?

A Vision Generation Demo!

What’s a Vision Generation Demo?

It consists of two components:

1. A relevant Informal Success Story (or use case) and;
2. A few compelling screens from your software that summarize your solution.

And it goes like this:

Vendor (could be sales or presales, or both operating as a team): “Let me share how we’ve helped other organizations in potentially similar situations to yours address their challenges.”

The vendor rep shares the Informal Success Story briefly and then asks, “How does this compare with your situation?”

The prospect then provides some discovery information, following the format of the Informal Success Story as a template.

The vendor then asks, “Would you like to see an example or two of how our other customers have solved these problems?”

“Yes, please…!” responds the prospect.

The vendor then presents a few compelling software screens and asks for the prospect’s reaction: “Is this the kind of thing you have in mind?”

“Yes, that looks pretty good,” is the prospect’s reply. “I’d like to explore this further…”

“Great!” says the vendor rep. “Let’s invest a few minutes together to understand your situation in more depth. Then we’ll be able to put together a demo that matches your needs and avoid wasting any time.”

“Sounds good!” responds the prospect, and they move into a productive discovery conversation.

What’s just happened? All three parties have gotten what they want. Wow!

1. The salesperson was able to provide a demo for the prospect and move the sales process forward.
2. The presales person was able to deliver a demo and execute discovery.
3. The prospect saw enough demos to satisfy their desires to get a sense of what’s possible.

It’s a win-win-win!

That’s a quick introduction to the Vision Generation Demo process (hey, that’s like a Vision Generation Demo of a Vision Generation Demo!). For the details, please grab a copy of Great Demo! (Third Edition) and consume Chapter 11. For guidance from an expert, enroll in a Great Demo! Workshop.

What’s an Informal Success Story?

An Informal Success Story is a high-probability use case, based on existing customers’ successful use of your offering, organized in a structured format:

Job Title and Industry:    For an individual or group sharing the same Job Title
Critical Business Issue:    This person’s or group’s top-level challenge, often best expressed as a quarterly, annual, or project-based goal or objective that was at risk
Problems/Reasons:          The “pain points”: What made it a problem, what made it hard to achieve the goal or objective, and how were they doing things prior to your solution?
Specific Capabilities:        The capabilities needed to solve their problem from the prospect’s perspective
Delta:                                   The value associated with making the change

Many of you will recognize that this is a Great Demo! Situation Slide (minus one or two important elements, yet completely sufficient for a Vision Generation Demo).

Intriguingly, Informal Success Stories in Situation Slide format represent one of the key examples of Situation Slides as the crisp currency of discovery information communication! Used in Vision Generation Demos, they represent completing the full cycle from prospect to customer and back to prospect.

Let’s take a closer look at this highly leveraged cycle and at the gains you and your organization can enjoy.

Capturing Discovery Information

Doing Discovery and Great Demo! practitioners know that a complete Situation Slide gives you the green light to move forward with a Technical Proof Demo. Your completed Situation Slides enable you to present the Specific Capabilities your prospect needs to solve their problems and accomplish their Critical Business Issues (CBIs). (Think in terms of a separate Situation Slide for each relevant prospect Job Title.)

Let me say that again, slightly differently (because it’s really important!): The list of Specific Capabilities tells you what to show in your demo and why they are important for your prospect. They provide the linkage to addressing your prospect’s CBIs and the associated value (the Delta). Moreover, the presence of concrete CBIs, Deltas, and Critical Dates on your Situation Slides reduces the likelihood (rather dramatically!) of No Decision outcomes.

Situation Slide format tells you what information needs to be discussed and captured during your discovery conversations. Here’s the full definition of the fields for discovery:

Job Title and Industry:    For an individual or group sharing the same Job Title
Critical Business Issue:    This person’s or group’s top-level challenge, often best expressed as a quarterly, annual, or project-based goal or objective that is at risk
Problems/Reasons:          The “pain points”: What makes it a problem today, what is making it hard to achieve the goal or objective, and how are they doing things today?
Specific Capabilities:        The capabilities needed to solve their problem from the prospect’s perspective
Delta:                                   The value associated with making the change
Critical Date / VRE:         A date by when your prospect needs to have a solution in place (and why, the driving force) / Value Realization Events (VREs) – the first few small (but significant) successes using the solution

(Note: A partially complete slide is an indication that “We need more information…!”)

While discovery can (and should!) go far beyond simply uncovering the elements in a Situation Slide, a completed Situation Slide represents the baseline information necessary to progress a sales cycle successfully. In many cases, it also signifies the visible tip of a much larger and deeper prospect information iceberg. (To explore that iceberg more completely, consume a copy of Doing Discovery. What you can’t see can hurt you!)

First Handoff

Now, let’s return to our sad example where our presales person notes, “There’s nothing in the CRM system on ACME, other than, ‘It’s a huge opportunity!’” In the best case, the presales person interviews their sales counterpart and is able to complete a Situation Slide satisfactorily.

Yeah, fat chance! Rarely happens. It’s possible, but unlikely.

Let’s explore a more likely approach…

Recognizing that they lack the necessary information, our sales and presales folks agree that the salesperson will do a Vision Generation Demo for the prospect as the first demo and execute enough discovery to fully complete a Situation Slide. This takes place successfully, and during that discussion, the salesperson also schedules a Technical Proof Demo for the prospect. What happens next?

Our salesperson provides that completed Situation Slide to our presales person who is, frankly, overjoyed at receiving everything needed to prepare the demo. There is a brief dialog between the two players consisting of a few questions, clarifications, and comments to ensure that all information is understood and correct.

What a delightful, effective, and efficient handoff! The crisp currency of discovery communication, the Situation Slide, has enjoyed its first exchange (it’s like money in the bank!).

What happens next?

Another Handoff (Or Two)

Let’s say the prospect, while highly impressed by the demo, requires an additional level of proof. They were a “burn victim” previously and need to see the vendor’s solution successfully operating in their unique environment to feel comfortable enough to proceed. The prospect requests a Proof of Concept (POC) as part of their buying process and the vendor agrees to pursue this.

To adequately support the POC, the presales person notes that two other vendor players need to be involved, both from presales. The first is a subject matter expert in the prospect’s discipline and the second is particularly skilled at managing POC processes.

What entity could be used to communicate the information needed to bring these two additional vendor staff up to speed? Oh, I don’t know, how about that crisp currency of discovery communication? Yes! That’s it!

The two additional vendor resources consume the Situation Slide and, after any necessary clarification, reach out to the prospect to discuss the Specific Capabilities to be tested and their associated success criteria. These are subsequently defined and agreed upon. The parties then move forward with the POC.

(Note that the sharing tool could be a CRM system that houses the Situation Slides, it could be a product like Homerun, Vivun, PreSkale, or similar, or it could even just be a simple file system. This is a case where the “what” is much more important than the “how”: I really don’t care what you use to store and access Situation Slides as long as you find a way to capture and share them effectively!).

So far, we’ve seen that same Situation Slide used to convey discovery, demo, and POC information from sales to presales, and within presales to other presales players. Interestingly, there were very few additions to the slide itself throughout this process; the slide enabled successful communication of the relevant data. A few conversations between team members served to fill in any gaps.

The POC went ahead smoothly and was a success, and the prospect moved forward with the purchase – congratulations! How can the Situation Slide be used beyond the sales process?

The Next Handoff – Professional Services

As soon as the sales and presales folks finished celebrating their closed business (with the prospect players, of course; it was a wonderful and festive dinner), they passed the Situation Slide to their Professional Services (PS) counterparts who would perform the implementation.

The Situation Slide provided the PS folks with an understanding of what needed to be configured, what training was required, and what data needed to be migrated to complete the implementation process. This was terrific but wait: There’s more!

A review of the VREs on the slide guided the PS team to focus their implementation efforts with the goal of enabling the customer to achieve their VREs with the highest probability of success and in the shortest possible timeframes. This meant that the customer was able to enjoy realizing value (hence the VRE name!) from the new system early on. In fact, the lead customer buyer was able to send a happy message to the balance of the buying team and management declaring that the new system was well on its way to becoming a major success! (What a change from being a burn victim previously).

(You can learn more about the enormously differentiating importance of VREs in the Doing Discovery book – I strongly recommend learning about VREs if you are unfamiliar!)

That Situation Slide is really getting around. It has progressed from sales to presales, presales to other presales, and now from the sales team to Professional Services, and that investment is generating appreciable interest. Who else could take advantage of this crisp currency next?

A Customer Success Success

Account and customer success managers (CSMs) are often tasked to secure renewals and, in many cases, to increase the footprint of their products in their customers. The CSMs at this vendor were absolutely delighted when they received and reviewed the Situation Slide, as it told them exactly what value the customer hoped to gain through the use of the new software. Even better, the CSMs were already working with the customer when the first few VREs were achieved (and another happy vendor-customer party took place to celebrate these early successes once more).

The CSM team then used the Situation Slide information to track the customer’s progress toward accomplishing the next set of VREs during their regular meetings. And because the customer had been enjoying value throughout that first year, there was no CSM panic as renewal time approached. In fact, the customer was so happy with their results so far that they committed to the renewal weeks before the actual renewal date and extended the term. That customer is now also serving as a reference for the vendor and has agreed to share their experiences at the next users’ group meeting.

Well, that Situation Slide is certainly generating an abundance of interest! Sales created it, presales consumed it twice, Professional Services leveraged its information, and now Customer Success has drawn from its ever-growing bank account. Who else might enjoy a bit of that dollar?

(“Pieces of Eight” were literally eight sections of Spanish Dollars from a few centuries ago. They were frequently divided into eight “bits,” from which we get that magical phrase, “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar…” etc.)

Marketing Moola

Wouldn’t it be a delight for marketers to know which capabilities of their software are used by their customers, for what reasons, and with what results? Yes, you betcha!

Situation Slides find their next application in the hands (and minds) of the marketing team, who seek to improve their marketing campaigns, lead generation results, collateral, customer references, and related. Situation Slides from successful customer implementations provide this information, enabling improved prospect targeting, website effectiveness, and superior sales support materials.

But wait: There’s more! “Sanitizing” (anonymizing) Situation Slides from happy, successful customers generate the Informal Success Stories that enabled that Vision Generation Demo waaaaay back at the beginning of this story. Congratulations! You are now able to start your own virtuous cycle of Situation Slide creation and use.

Is there anyone else who might reap additional Situation Slide rewards?

Investing in Development

Harvesting Specific Capability information from Situation Slides provides the development and product management teams with corroborative data on customer use.

Imagine the following discussion:

“Should this capability be enhanced?”

“Why, yes, it’s one of the key uses of the system and drivers of value for our customers.”

“How about this feature?”

“No, it doesn’t look like it is being used and there is no indication of any value derived from its use, so let’s not invest any more development calories in it.”

So, now we have seen our Situation Slide investment yield dividends across the vendor organization: Sales to presales, presales to other presales, sales team to Professional Services, PS to Customer Success, and now on to Marketing, product management, and development. Pretty impressive payback! Is there anyone else to consider?

Beyond the Vendor

Sure! Third parties, channel partners, resellers, and similar organizations represent bonus opportunities.

Do you need to bring a partner organization up to speed with a prospect opportunity? Provide that partner with the Situation Slide(s), then review and discuss. It’s a concise, effective way to get on the same page.

Do you sell via channel partners and/or resellers? Sanitized Situation Slides in the form of Informal Success Stories accelerate the channel’s ability to prospect, engage, and begin sales cycles. Prospect-specific Situation Slides can help fast-track VARs (Value Added Resellers) who pursue leads you’ve already engaged.

You Can Bank on It

Situation Slides are, indeed, the crisp currency of discovery communication. They are enormously enabling in beginning sales cycles, highly effective within sales cycles, and offer tremendous efficiencies during implementation and into early production use by your customers. Build up your Situation Slide bank account and enjoy the rewards of your investment!

Copyright © 2024 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools, and techniques, explore our books, blog, and articles on the Resources pages of our website at GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

I remember something remarkable my friend Chris Ruscio, the CRO at Synergy IT Solutions, once shared about trust. He said, “You want your customers to feel comfortable reaching out to you for anything they need, regardless of whether you can directly assist. Trust matters, and it’s important for them to believe that you have their best interests at heart. They should see you and your firm as trusted advisors they can depend on.” Adopting his approach to customer success and relationships is a goal worth pursuing.  

This article can help you find ways to boost your trust factor with your clients to support the relationships necessary to drive long-lasting and meaningful value in their operations.  For those who provide demonstrations, you will find valuable insights on how to extend trust in your solution presentation. 

Introductory Influence

In the book “The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, one of the concepts discussed is the principle of “liking” and how it can enhance trust and credibility through introductions. The idea is that when someone is introduced by a colleague or a person who is already liked and trusted, it can positively influence how others perceive them.  

This is based on the tendency of individuals to be more receptive to people they like and trust, which in turn can lead to higher levels of credibility and persuasion. If you are presenting to a client and someone else has established a strong rapport, have that person introduce you. Here is how to do it:

1. Choose the Right Introducer: The person introducing you should be someone already liked and trusted by the audience you want to influence. It will feel more genuine and authentic if this trusted person does not try to oversell or exaggerate your qualities. The positive image of the introducer may be transferred to you by association and enhance the prospect’s impression of you, thus improving your credibility.
2. Highlight Positive Traits: The introducer may draw attention to your positive qualities, accomplishments, or traits. A good example would be talking about your many years of experience in the role you are now presenting solutions for or discussing your deep knowledge of the industry and/or how you have helped many clients and customers achieve incredible forms of value. Keep the introduction concise by highlighting key points that establish your credibility without overwhelming the audience.
3. Provide Relevance and Authenticity: The introducer should link your expertise or qualities to the context of the situation, demonstrating why your involvement is valuable or relevant. If applicable, mention any shared connections, affiliations, or endorsements that contribute to your credibility. 

Here is an example:   

[Your Name] brings a wealth of corporate leadership experience. Having held significant positions in the corporate world, they have firsthand knowledge of the intricacies and challenges faced by organizations like yours. [Your Name’s] background provides them with unique insights into how our solutions can drive value for your company. 

What sets [Your Name] apart is not only their extensive experience and professional qualifications, including hands-on knowledge as a customer using the product they will be demonstrating today. This firsthand experience means that the insights they share and the solutions they present are deeply practical. 

An introduction’s effectiveness depends on the introducer’s trustworthiness and credibility, as well as how relevant the introduction is to the situation. You are likely to be seen as more trustworthy and credible in the eyes of others if you are introduced by someone who is liked and trusted.  

Empathetic Listening

Listening goes beyond hearing words; it is about understanding the needs, challenges, and aspirations of your clients. Take time to understand and observe not just what the prospects are saying but also the meaning behind their words and actions. This lays the foundation for a relationship built on trust.

Asking the right questions to understand your prospect’s needs, challenges, and goals is a big factor in earning their trust. Empathize with their pain points and show that you are paying close attention to what they have to say.

Addressing objections and concerns openly and effectively demonstrates that you respect the prospect’s perspective and allows you to act on your empathy. Here is an acronym that may help you remember the concepts below: LEARN. The acronym LEARN provides the steps to help you be better at empathetic listening:

1. Listen: Actively demonstrate your involvement in the conversation. Then, move beyond merely hearing words and actively seek to comprehend the underlying needs, challenges, and aspirations of your clients. Maintain eye contact, nod, and use affirmative language.
2. Engage: Invest time and effort in truly understanding your prospects. Pay attention not only to what they are saying but also to the deeper meaning conveyed by their words and actions. Observe and provide both spoken words and nonverbal cues to indicate your genuine interest in what they’re sharing. Ask follow-up and probing questions to engage with your prospect and gain a deeper understanding.
3. Assess: Asking pertinent questions is crucial for gaining insight into your prospect’s needs, challenges, and objectives. The right questions demonstrate your genuine interest and commitment to understanding their situation. When done correctly, this will allow you to understand the impact of the situation and the tangible value your prospects may receive from solving their challenges.
4. Reflect: Summarize and rephrase what the prospect has shared to ensure that you’ve accurately understood their points. This also shows that you’re actively processing their information. 
5. No Judgment: Maintain a non-judgmental attitude throughout the conversation. This encourages open sharing and builds a safe environment for meaningful discussions. Be patient and give your prospects the space to express themselves fully. Avoid interrupting or rushing the conversation. 

Transparency and Honesty

Transparency about what your product can and cannot do fosters credibility. Clients value honesty, and by setting realistic expectations, you build a stronger foundation for a long-term partnership, foster credibility, and prevent disappointment down the line. This also bolsters your reliability, thus strengthening their trust in you over time. 

Try conveying authenticity in your interactions by speaking clearly, simply, and confidently. It will help prospects feel more comfortable and confident in their intentions. Being realistic about implementation timelines is an example. Trust is built when customer-facing professionals are genuine, transparent, and honest in their interactions.  

Think about being CLEAR and consider the following suggestions when extending your transparency and honesty:   

1. Client-Centric Approach: Focus on your client’s best interests rather than pushing features that may not align with their needs. Offer solutions that genuinely add value to their specific situation.
2. Leverage Thorough Understanding: This is huge! Before addressing limitations, make sure you have a full understanding of how the client intends to use a particular feature. This ensures that your response is accurate and relevant. Refrain from making assumptions or jumping to conclusions about what the client needs. Instead, ask clarifying questions to gain a deeper understanding of their requirements.
3. Embrace Integrity: Embrace integrity as a core value in your interactions. Recognize that clients appreciate straightforward communication and will value your candor.
4. Acknowledge Limitations: When discussing your solutions, openly acknowledge any limitations or areas where your product may not be a perfect fit for the client’s needs. Be prepared to address these limitations when they arise in the conversation. Your goals should be to be honest and transparent, yet creative in using your solutions and ways to solve your prospect’s needs.
5. Respond with Authenticity: Just be you! Authenticity creates a genuine connection and makes clients more comfortable sharing their concerns and aspirations. Speak authentically by avoiding clichés.

Value-Oriented Demonstrations

For customer-facing team members who provide demonstrations to clients, please consider the following.  Offering valuable insights and solutions that directly address your prospect’s pain points establishes their trust in you. Consider using the ALT Approach (the Tell, Ask, Listen, Tailor, Teach, Tell framework). It’s an improved model based on the combination of Value Selling and Challenger Sales methodologies that will help you deliver more effective demos. 

Start with ‘Vision Generation’ and a Great Demo! Situation Slide, tell a story about another customer with similar objectives, challenges, solutions, and the value they received. This sets up the context, generates interest, and challenges their thought process. Then, ask questions that will help them compare their current situation to the other customer and reflect on it.  

Listen to their responses and ask follow-up questions. Turn the demo into a discovery conversation that focuses on uncovering business issues and the specific capabilities they need. From there, tailor your demo based on the information you gather. Present the capabilities and processes that make the demo experience worthwhile and the solution worth paying for. Lastly, communicate the value of your solution as it applies to their specific situation.  

Customization and Personalization

Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to interactions, demos, presentations, and solutions. A high level of personalization not only highlights your expertise but also shows that you are dedicated to helping them achieve their goals. 

When you address the prospect’s specific situation and challenges using “you” phrasing, you capture their attention and create a personalized connection. This engagement is crucial for keeping the prospect invested in the conversation and interested in what you have to offer. Remember to strike a balance between personalized language and avoiding sounding overly rehearsed or insincere.  Essentially, you don’t want your prospect ticked off. Think about this acronym – TICDOF when considering how to customize and personalize your message.   

Consider the following:   

1. Thorough Research:  Before any interaction, conduct thorough research on the client. Understand their industry, challenges, goals, and any unique factors that could impact their needs.
2. Identify Pain Points: Pinpoint the client’s specific pain points and challenges. Take notes and ask clarifying questions to ensure you have a comprehensive understanding. This will allow you to address their concerns directly and demonstrate your commitment to solving their problems.
3. Customize Presentations and Demos: Tailor your presentations and demonstrations based on the client’s specific needs, pain points, and objectives. Highlight how your solutions specifically address their challenges and contributes to their goals. Frame your interactions using the client’s industry-specific language and terminology to create a sense of familiarity and build rapport.
4. Demonstrate Value: Showcase the value of your solutions in a way that directly relates to the client’s needs. Use examples and case studies that resonate with their situation. This makes your solutions more relatable and shows your ability to address similar challenges. Use tangible, meaningful numbers as opposed to broad-brush claims.
5. Offer Tailored Solutions: Propose solutions that are specifically tailored to address the client’s pain points. Avoid generic recommendations that don’t align with their unique situation. During interactions, be prepared to adjust or tailor your approach based on the client’s reactions and feedback.
6. Follow-Up: After interactions, follow up with personalized messages that reference the discussion and reinforce your understanding of their needs. 

Collaborate with Prospects 

Work with your prospects as if they are already your customers. Get to know their goals, understand their pain points, and identify the specific capabilities they need before presenting solutions. As you collaborate with prospects consider the skill, described in the book Doing Discovery, of Transitioning your client’s vision. According to Peter Cohan, “A Transition Vision is the process of helping your prospect understand how they can move from their current, painful state to the glorious future visualized as their solution. It represents another key opportunity to differentiate, based on demonstrating authentic interest in your prospect’s success.” Frame your responses in a way that fosters collaboration. Let the prospect know that you’re interested in their success and collaborate with a vision for how your solution will help!  

Address objections or concerns openly and acknowledge their perspective. Provide thoughtful responses to show that you value their viewpoint and are willing to address any reservations they may have. Foster two-way communication and allow them to provide their input on the solutions you propose to make them truly active participants in the conversation.  

Encourage your prospects to envision themselves benefiting from the proposed solution. Collaborating to find solutions that align with their goals helps shift your mindset from sales-oriented to customer success-oriented. When clients see you as a partner rather than just a salesperson, trust naturally follows.  

Embracing Client-Centered Communication

Using “you” phrasing in sales, also known as customer-centric language, involves framing your communication in a way that focuses on the customer and their needs. The concept of “You Phrasing” is essential to connecting with clients and moving their minds to the perception of how your product or service can directly benefit them. This customer-centric approach not only builds trust and rapport but also guides the conversation toward a more positive and receptive mindset, increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes.  

The concept is so powerful, that it is covered in numerous books including The Great Demo! by Peter Cohan, Neuroselling: Mastering the Customer Conversation by Jeff Bloomfield, Conversations That Win the Complex Sale by Erik Peterson and Tim Reisterer, and in other classics like How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink.   

Employing it serves as a testament to your genuine concern for your prospect’s distinct needs, challenges, and aspirations. This approach plays a pivotal role in building rapport and trust, as the prospect experiences a sense of being truly understood and valued. Furthermore, it empowers the prospect to assume an active role in both the conversation and the solutions being discussed. 

What’s remarkable is that the influence of “You Phrasing” extends throughout the sales process. It can (and should!) be applied during initial outreach, in the exploratory phase, in sales presentations and demos, in implementation discussions, and even in negotiations. Adeptly tailoring your language to align with the prospect’s perspective supports continued engagement and ensures that their interests remain at the forefront throughout the journey.  

Incorporating “You Mode” into demonstrations, specifically, enables a unique dimension of trust-building. As you demonstrate your solutions, weave phrases that resonate with the prospect’s individual situation. Articulate how their challenges find resolutions in what you offer, and how their objectives can be achieved through your solutions. This focus showcases your dedication to their success, solidifying trust through your client-focused approach. 

Conclusion

Mastering the art of introductions, empathetic listening, transparency, value-oriented demonstrations, customization, collaboration, and client-centered communication can help you win deals and cultivate enduring partnerships. These principles, based on psychology, renowned books, and practical experience, can transform you into a trusted advisor. 

Ultimately, trust is crucial to successful customer engagement in sales, presales, and customer success. Once earned, it becomes the driving force behind every meaningful and successful customer interaction. If you’re seeking to foster trust-based relationships with your clients, use the tips presented in this article as a guide. Embrace these principles and apply them with sincerity.

About the Author

Paul H. Pearce has over 25 years of sales and executive leadership in Sales, Presales, Field Enablement, and Business Development. As the first certified Great Demo! and Doing Discovery training partner, Paul has mastered the methodologies and today contributes to its ongoing success helping organizations dramatically increase sales and success. As the President of Great Demo! LLC, Paul has consulted and trained hundreds of organizations and practitioners and recommends ways to increase sales and customer success through proven methodologies and real-world experience.

Leveraging Its Impact on Managing Competition, Renewals and Expansion Sales

(A Never Stop Learning! Article)

“Get their data, and their hearts and minds will follow”

Michael Cusumano, The Business of Software

Let’s explore some of the advantages enjoyed by being the incumbent vendor and how you can leverage this position for renewals and expansion sales, while holding your competition at bay. We’ll examine:

• Leveraging sunk costs, time and energy investment
• Change avoidance
• Risk avoidance
• Burn victims
• Social capital
• Users’ Groups
• Leverage

Vendor Selection – Sunk Costs, Time and Energy Investment

First, it is likely that a large amount of energy was expended by your customer in bringing your software aboard and implementing it successfully into production use. Very simply, this is work they really don’t want to do again, without a very compelling reason to change!

This can be compared to a trek where you and your customer climb a mountain together. After a great deal of preparation work and an exhausting ascent, you and your customer are now enjoying the view from the summit. Starting again at the bottom with another vendor is not a pleasant thought!

The climb probably included the following energy investment:

• Problem Recognition: At the beginning of your customer’s process, their first stage was realizing that they have a problem, followed by an effort to define it accurately. Additionally, the owner of the problem may have struggled to convince others that it was important to solve and to allocate budget and other resources to make it a real project. That took significant work and political capital as well.
• Solution Evaluation: The bigger the problem (and the more expensive the solution), the more thorough the evaluation process. Your customer may have had numerous discovery calls, demos, and other discussions with several vendors, including you. There may have been an RFP process, competitive bakeoffs or POCs executed with multiple people involved from the customer’s side. This could have consumed several people’s time over a period of months.

Here’s a partial list of the activities your customer may have completed:

• Formation of a buying committee
• Problem and timeline definition
• Researching solutions
• Internal “build vs. buy” discussions
• Managing “Group Dysfunction”
• Identification of possible vendors
• Initial discussions with SDRs or BDRs
• Initial demos
• Discovery conversations
• More demos
• Vendor elimination to a “shortlist”
• Data privacy and security reviews (often extensive)
• IT architecture reviews
• Reference checks and other social proof
• Vendor bakeoffs or POCs
• Building and presenting the business case
• Vendor selection (and communication with the losing vendors)
• License agreement terms negotiation
• Purchasing SOW and terms negotiation
• Price negotiation
• Raising the purchase order(s)
• Signing the license agreement
• Implementation discussions
• Each of these steps involved members of the buying committee, often plus other impacted departments, including Data Privacy, Security, Governance, IT, Purchasing, and Legal, plus senior management, as well as users and users’ managers.

That was a big investment! And all of the above are now sunk costs that organizations don’t want to reincur.

That’s a lot of climbing with a large team, in our analogy. Perhaps it’s more like an expedition seeking to summit a major peak like Everest or Mount Khuiten. And while the expedition did reach the summit, consider how many people contributed substantial time and energy in planning and logistics, preparing gear, load-carrying, and camp setup and maintenance, not to mention repairs and rebuilding after a serious storm. This may be very similar to the internal processes and challenges involved in selecting a vendor!

Solution Implementation – More Sunk Costs, Time, and Energy Investment

That was selection, now for implementation:

• Solution Onboarding: It is likely that you and your customer invested significantly in the process of implementation. It’s another, different expedition:
• Assembling the implementation team
• Implementation kickoff, strategy and planning meetings, and assignment of resources
• Pre-installation or implementation assessment
• Installation, as necessary
• Administrator training
• Customization meetings to determine and agree upon fields, configuration and profile parameters, dashboard layouts, processes, rules, approvals pathways, alert thresholds, etc.
• Data migration; data loading; QC
• Implementation of configuration, profiles, processes, rules, alerts, dashboards, etc.
• Interoperability testing with the customer’s existing software and communication with those vendors
• Pre-rollout QC
• User training
• Go Live and initial rollout
• Tuning and changes as needed
• Broader rollout
• Internal progress reviews and updates
• Old system shutdown and removal (and termination of license agreements with the old vendor, as necessary, by Legal, Purchasing, and Accounting)
• Periodic internal progress meetings
• Periodic meetings with your Customer Success/Account Management team

Again, there was a terrific investment in time, people, and money to bring your solution aboard, similar to staging an expedition into the Himalayas. It was an enormous effort, including numerous side trips, solving problems with supplies and provisions, unanticipated challenges, injuries, and other difficulties. Most customers really don’t want to go through that effort again, particularly in the short term!

Leveraging This Investment

Once your solution is in production use, the appetite for your customer to repeat these experiences is typically very low. Reinforce and leverage this! During renewal and expansion discussions, remind your customer that all of these steps are already done (and don’t have to be duplicated, as would be the case for a new vendor).

Your customer doesn’t have to climb that mountain again; they don’t have to face freezing winds and oxygen deprivation (in the form of excruciating presentations, demos, and other vendor activities). They can enjoy the rewards of that journey without reexperiencing the pain!

Furthermore, any competitor that tries to displace you hasn’t even defined a plan for their proposed expedition, as far as your customer is concerned. You are in a competitively advantageous position.

Important Caveats

However, here are very important assumptions for the above to remain true:

1. Your customer achieved their Value Realization Events and is tracking well on the path to full ROI or has already achieved it (see page 110 in the paperback version of Doing Discovery for more on Value Realization Events).
2. You have regular meetings with your customer via your account management and/or customer success teams, so you are aware of any issues your customer is facing with your product or implementation (and have concrete plans to address them).
3. You regularly discuss product roadmaps with your customers to head off competitors’ “new and improved” offerings and capabilities. Your objective is to stay “ahead” of the competition, with respect to functionality, or to minimize any perceived negative functionality gap between your offering and competitors’.

Roadmap discussions are also opportunities to bind your customers more closely to you, by giving them more “weight” in the feature/function definition, prioritization, timing, and implementation processes. Interactions with colleague companies at users’ group meetings help reinforce this.

In our expedition analogy, this last item is similar to discussing future excursions, encouraging your customer to participate in decisions about desired destinations, routing, daily travel distances, food and beverage choices, and sleeping arrangements. They enjoy a growing amount of ownership in the process and the results.

Change? No Thank You…!

Fundamentally, most people don’t want to change.

Let me say that again: Generally speaking, people don’t want to change. Even if they don’t like their current state, they will preferentially stay with their current situation rather than take on the tasks above.

They would rather stay with “the hell that they know” rather than seek a solution. Oh, they’ll whine about their current condition; they’ll talk for hours about how much they don’t like it. But if the problem isn’t big enough or the solution isn’t sufficiently compelling, then most people will stay with what they have.

Want proof? In the world of software sales, one of the biggest “competitors” is No Decision, where the customer chooses to do nothing. On average, 43% of all forecasted opportunities end up as No Decision outcomes. (See this Forrester study and this article for more data.) Fascinatingly, some of the people who are most resistant to change are… wait for it… salespeople!

Why do No Decision results happen so frequently? Because making a business decision on major software selection is expensive, as described above, and it involves substantial risk as I’ll outline next.

Risk

There is risk associated with anything new. As consumers, we tend to repeat purchasing from vendors who deliver sufficiently on their goods, expected capabilities, and associated promises. Why take the risk of trying another vendor?

It is only when we have a bad experience that we consider changing (and many people still won’t change – it’s the hell that they know!).

A similar situation exists in business with software purchases. If you have had a good experience with one vendor, you’ll preferentially return to that vendor for other offerings or more licenses (upsell and expansion), because the perceived risk is lower. This is true even if a competitor’s offering appears to be “better”.

Example? For a period of about 1000 years (plus or minus a few), there was a famous expression, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM…” It is much less risky to stay with the current, well-characterized vendor and their products than to move to a new, unknown provider.

Why would you engage a new, untested expedition company when you know and are comfortable with how your current guide-company performs? Why take the risk?

As the incumbent vendor, you can take advantage of this risk by calling it out, when appropriate. If your customer begins to explore alternative vendors, gently (but firmly) remind them that you are a known quantity, whereas other vendors represent significant, unquantified risks!

Burn Victims – Fear and Loathing of Risk Unrewarded

There is great risk in change, often accompanied by fear and loathing. And for good reason!

Have you ever seen a software implementation effort fail? Have you ever met a customer who was unable to gain the desired value from the “solution” they purchased? Have you ever encountered someone who had to roll back to a previous state?

People in business who have suffered these fates are known as “burn victims”. They may be angry about being burned, and they will be hard to convince to pursue the same or a similar route again! (You can find more details on working with burn victims starting on page 298 in the paperback version of Doing Discovery.)

This would be like paying for and participating in intense preparation for a major expedition only to find that the guide-company failed to provide proper provisions, requiring you to turn back without even glimpsing the summit! All that time and energy invested – for nothing.

Opportunity cost is also an issue. A customer who decides to change from their current state will consume the resources described previously, including time, people, money, and political capital. What else could they have used those resources for, instead? Perhaps a more profitable expedition could have been launched in its place.

This is also painful for customers who go through the entire evaluation process only to decide to do nothing (the No Decision outcome). Very expensive! (“We spent months preparing for the expedition, but then called it off at the last minute…”)

Accordingly, customers who were previously burn victims (with other vendors) who are now enjoying success with you will be predisposed to buy more from you than risk pursuing another vendor. You can leverage this experience in your renewal and expansion discussions, and in fending off competitors’ advances.

Relationships

Social capital is another area of advantage for the incumbent vendor. As the entrenched vendor, you have undoubtedly established and grown relationships with important customer players, including champions, management, key users, system admins, etc., as well as built relationships with Purchasing, Legal, Accounting, IT, Data Privacy, Security, and other departments.

You’ve developed good working relationships. Vendor and customer teams have established comfortable processes for communication and interaction that are now familiar to both parties. Your implementation team and your customer’s team have shared and overcome the challenges they faced, together, and your customer success folks have developed rapport with key users and managers.

This is valuable social capital that you’ve established, in contrast with your competition who would have to develop these assets separately. And while the competition’s salespeople might be known by your customers, they have not earned the trust and credibility that you have generated through a successful implementation process and resulting realization of value.

You are the proven vendor! Reinforce this when competitors loom and when you discuss renewals, expansion, and other sales opportunities.

When you have successfully completed a difficult, but satisfying mountain climb with one expedition company, wouldn’t you prefer to work with that same organization when contemplating a new adventure? They know your food tastes, your preferences, your stamina level, and your allergies; they’ve laughed at your jokes and listened in appreciation to your travel stories. It’s a comfortable relationship!

Users’ Groups Are Competitive Weapons

Users’ Groups are like biological organisms: They want to grow and succeed. Each new customer who joins an active users’ community makes that community stronger and increases its collective knowledge. This is another set of important relationships and social capital!

Customers talk with other customers, sharing success stories and solutions, as well as roadmap preferences and new functionality requests. There is great comfort and safety in a community, along with a feeling of greater leverage with the vendor when the group as a whole agrees on a position.

In addition to user-user interactions, Users’ Group meetings also represent opportunities for you as a vendor to establish and develop deeper relationships with your customers. Customers expect to meet with sales and presales people during their buying processes, and with customer success folks during implementation, rollout, and beyond. However, Users’ Group meetings provide opportunities for additional vendor teams and players to connect with customers, potentially including management, developers, product and marketing players, customer support, and other teams. These relationships increase your social capital “bank account,” generating more reasons to resist change.

I encourage early-stage companies to establish Users’ Groups as early as possible, even when there are only a dozen customers. And if you are a more mature vendor without a Users’ Group, you should start one right away, and encourage every existing and new customer to join!

In our expedition analogy, this would be like the vendor hosting regular post-expedition gatherings, with the clients sharing their experiences and stories with one another. Participants will not only reinforce their positive experiences (as well as push the vendor for improvements), but they’ll learn about new, intriguing destinations, often selling one another on these opportunities much more effectively than the vendor can. That’s very powerful reference selling…!

Leverage

The incumbent vendor enjoys huge advantages that should be leveraged when exploring renewals, expansion, upselling, and in defense against competitors. Remind your customers of the investment they made in evaluating offerings prior to the sale. Recall the substantial effort now realized in implementation. Review the relationships – the social capital – developed, now in place, and operating smoothly. Recall the pain of change and the associated risks.

Build on this foundation to secure renewals, drive expansion sales, and when introducing new products and solutions. It is much easier for the incumbent vendor with a successful track record within a customer to introduce and pursue these possibilities vs starting from zero.

Presenting your mutual history in a timeline, as a slide or whiteboard exercise, can be a very effective way to gently (but firmly!) recall this information and reinforce your relationship. It is also a great way to bring your customers’ new players up to speed with the activities completed to date.

Competitors without comparable history suffer from severe disadvantages, which are the inverse of the incumbent’s strengths. A customer’s positive personal experiences with the incumbent build an imposing barrier against vendors without first-hand proof of success.

When your competition talks about how much better their offering is than yours and introduces new, tempting capabilities, reinforce the investment your customer has already made, the value they are receiving, and the objectives they have achieved. Emphasize your customer’s emotional desire to avoid change, the comfort and safety of the status quo, and the avoidance of unnecessary risk.

With a successful implementation in production use and the customer enjoying the value gained, the incumbent vendor is perfectly positioned to secure renewals, drive expansion, and acquire additional business. And regarding our expedition, what is your next desired destination?

Hmmmm – one additional thought: How many of you would now like to see a follow-on article on “Battling and Overcoming the Incumbent Vendor”?

Copyright © 2020-2023 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

What’s in this article for you?

• A small investment in time yields surprisingly valuable sales-ready information.
• An example!
• The enormous gap between what is typically captured and what is possible.
• The surprising utility of Informal Success Stories.
• Two types of use cases.
• Three sources for stories.
• The process for capturing Informal Success Stories.

Here’s one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in sales:

Salesperson: “I’m not here to sell you anything today…”

Collective gasp from the customer audience…!

Salesperson: “I just want to understand how you are using the products you already purchased from us and the value you are receiving.”

A pause, followed by, “But I will be back tomorrow, of course, to try to sell you something else!”

Why did this salesperson begin this conversation? It’s because she knew that the results of this dialog would provide high-octane fuel for her future sales to both new name customers and existing accounts. She understood that investing a few minutes to understand existing customers’ use cases and the associated value they enjoy accelerates future sales and buying processes.

It’s like interviewing a few experienced friends and colleagues before a vacation to a new destination to learn what’s worthwhile and when to go, what tourist traps to avoid, and what rare gems shouldn’t be missed. This brief investment could make the difference between slogging through overcrowded attractions or having the best time ever!

Want an Example?

Here’s the kind of success story you can capture (in Great Demo! Situation Slide format):

This is a real-life customer success story, crisply captured, and ready for use!

The delightfully simple format enables easy documentation, dissemination, and application for multiple sales, marketing, and customer success processes. Now let’s look at how to capture and leverage these success stories.

Fabulous Fuel for Sales, Presales and Customer Success

Here’s the key idea: Go visit your new customers several months after they purchased your software and well after they have deployed it into production use. Ask them, “How are you using our software? What use cases have you implemented? What value are you receiving?”

What you learn is tremendously important!

You’ll capture success stories and establish references that help you make your next sale, secure renewals, expand deployment into existing customers, and possibly open new markets.

This information is like concentrated fuel for sales engines – enabling BDRs, SDRs, sales, presales, customer success, and marketing to achieve their goals more rapidly. It also increases the likelihood that your customers will be successful, reducing churn, and increasing renewals and expansion.

Critically, you will differentiate yourself from traditional sales organizations by demonstrating that you really care about your customers! (Gasp of astonishment.)

Very Valuable, But Rarely Collected

If you are in sales or presales, wouldn’t it be wonderful to know, ahead of time, the goals, objectives, and Critical Business Issues faced by the prospects you engage? Wouldn’t it be delightful to understand – again, ahead of time – the underlying problems that make it hard for your prospects to achieve their goals, and the specific capabilities they need to solve their problems?

Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have a strong understanding of the value prospects might gain by using your offerings, well before your first conversation with these prospects takes place?

Interviewing current customers to collect this information enables customer-facing teams to address prospects more efficiently, and to secure renewals and expand sales to existing customers with greater precision. This same information helps vendor teams execute discovery much more effectively, and to deliver more compelling and successful demos.

This is the essence of reference selling: sharing how other, similar customers addressed their problems using your offerings. This information is truly like concentrated fuel for sales!

Sadly, most vendors do not broadly collect and leverage success story information today. While there are typically a few key references and a certain amount of “tribal knowledge”, most seller teams have only limited personal experiences to draw from.

Accordingly, newer customer-facing staff have a very narrow understanding of real-life customer use cases and ROI. Seasoned team members have more experiences to leverage, but their information is generally bounded by each individual’s customer interactions. In both cases, the depth and extent of that information is limited, and it is typically unstructured, making dissemination and reuse throughout the customer-facing team difficult.

And while many vendors complete “win/loss” analyses every quarter, the major focus is on “why we won the deal” or “why we lost”. Both exercises focus on the mechanics of the deal-making and closing process. Neither provides customer success stories to support future sales.

Ignoring this information would be like trying to drive to the airport during rush hour in some major megalopolis without consulting traffic maps or apps to find the best route. Traditional sales teams languish in bumper-to-bumper traffic and miss their flights; enlightened teams are found relaxing in the frequent flyer lounges, enjoying a drink and a bite prior to boarding!

The sad summary is that most companies simply do not collect this information – no formal process – and thereby lose valuable opportunities. Let’s change that!

Formal vs Informal Success Stories

Customers who are happy with your offering may be willing to serve as references, providing you with reference stories to support your marketing and sales efforts. These references are the Formal Success Stories that all marketing departments crave, and sales teams consume. That’s the good news.

The bad news regarding Formal Success Stories is that:

1. There are far too few of them.
2. They are generally “sanitized” to the point of non-relevance.
3. They age (sometimes rapidly!).
4. They may not align with your prospects’ regions, size, markets, or other parameters.
5. They can take forever to finalize, pending surviving the associated legal and publication processes!

Informal Success Stories, on the other hand, don’t suffer from these challenges. Why? Because you don’t show the name of the actual customer, eliminating the need for lengthy reviews and cleansing! This gives them much greater flexibility and longevity.

The advantages of Informal Success Stories include:

1. There are comparatively tons of them.
2. They are focused yet rich with detail.
3. They can have terrific longevity.
4. They can be adjusted to align with your prospects’ regions, size, markets, and other parameters.
5. They only take minutes to generate and share!

Seasoned customer-facing staff are often walking, talking databases of Informal Success Stories based on their years of experiences working with their customers. For every Formal Success Story that gets published, there might be dozens of Informal Success Stories waiting to be harvested, organized, and shared!

Whether you are working to capture actual references or Informal Success Stories, you need to have structured conversations! Let’s start with conversations with customers, first, then extend the ideas to collecting information from your team.

Some organizations have dubbed these, “Why did they buy?” exercises. Others simply call them “customer success stories”. They are structured, extremely valuable interviews with current customers to capture the use cases and value gained.

What Can You Learn?

When you do sit with your existing customers to have the success story or “Why did you buy?” conversation, you’ll learn what they like about your product(s), as well as what they dislike or desire to see changed. This information is a good starting point and should be captured.

However, your objective is to uncover complete use case information. During a success story conversation, you’ll likely learn two wonderfully useful sets of use case information:

1. Use cases your customers have deployed that were expected to be implemented.
2. Use cases your customers have addressed that were unexpected or unanticipated at the time of purchase, but were discovered and implemented by customers on their own.

Expected Use Cases

The first group are use cases that your customers planned to implement when they purchased your product(s) and did indeed roll out. In collecting these use cases, you should ask:

• What use case(s) did you deploy?
• Who are the current users and how many?
• What value, in terms of time, people, or money, have you gained as a result?

I recommend using Great Demo! Situation Slide format to guide the conversation:

While you want to keep track, internally, of which customer provided each Success Story, you can remove the name of the specific customer (and any other confidential information) and begin leveraging this use case right away as an Informal Success Story!

Using Informal Success Stories to Drive Sales and Buying Processes

Sales, presales, and customer success teams find this information invaluable when prospecting for new customers. Presenting a prospect with success stories of how other customers in similar situations addressed their challenges generates real interest in learning more. Informal Success Stories enable customer-facing teams to establish credibility with their prospects to move the sales process forward faster.

[See Chapter 11 Vision Generation Demos in Great Demo! Third Edition, starting on page 258, for details on using Informal Success Stories with new prospects.]

High-performing sales reps know that prospects are much more interested in learning how your organization has helped other, similar customers solve their business problems, as opposed to being flogged with another interminable corporate overview or product presentation!

Customer success teams know that success stories catalyze adoption, renewals, and expansion, particularly if these success stories come from within the customer base.

Astute marketing and enablement professionals know that these success stories are the single most important asset of their go-to-market materials. Great marketing teams produce libraries of high-probability use cases supported by these success stories to equip the field.

Sales, presales, customer success, and enablement personnel take these same use cases and success stories and integrate them into specific sales process steps and motions (e.g., for Vision Generation Demos, discovery conversation prompters, and value analysis examples).

Leveraging a library of success stories is like rolling down an empty modern highway in a self-driving car, preprogrammed with your desired destination, vs laboring up muddy, rutted dirt roads and navigating (poorly!) with inadequate ancient paper maps.

Unexpected Use Cases – High Octane!

How many times have you visited a customer and found that they are using your software in ways that are truly terrific and wholly unique? When you see these use cases, don’t you get excited to see the novel ways customers are using your software’s capabilities? (You should!)

What does this information represent?

These new use cases and success stories enable you to expand your footprint into existing customers, entrench current users more deeply and engage new users, all while providing additional and unanticipated value to drive renewals. These use cases are often the vehicles to enter new markets or address new players in existing markets.

These unexpected use cases are truly remarkable opportunities: They are high octane fuel!

But like an internal combustion engine, gasoline doesn’t magically flow into your car’s fuel tank on its own, you need to actually have these “Why did you buy?” success story conversations with your customers. Best performing organizations schedule these dialogs at a cadence that map to the expected completion of Value Realization Events, for example (see page 110 in the paperback version of Doing Discovery for more on Value Realization Events).

Refining Your Own Success Stories

So far, we’ve travelled down the roads leading to customer interviews, but you probably also have fabulous energy sources much closer to home. Earlier, I mentioned that many of your more seasoned customer-facing staff have personal collections of success stories: Now it is time to collect, refine and add these to your fuel stocks.

You can follow the same process outlined previously. Interview or simply ask team members to document one or more success stories, using the Great Demo! Situation Slide format.

A very rewarding exercise is to leverage events where your team has already gathered together. Dedicate 30 minutes, for example, to generating a collection of success stories. For a team of 25 folks, you could easily produce 25-50 success stories in this half an hour!

Invest another 30 minutes to have volunteers present their efforts, and you’ll find that this session may be the single most valuable portion of the entire gathering! You’ll hear team members immediately ask for copies of all the other participants’ success stories.

It’s like suddenly finding a highly productive oil well right on your own property. (Or, since we want to move away from fossil fuels, it’s like suddenly finding an inventory of novel, highly efficient battery materials in your storeroom!)

Users’ Group Meetings: Power from Fusion!

I’m a huge fan of users’ group meetings. While most vendors think in terms of presenting product road maps and taking feature requests, customers are also interested in something else.

Why do customers attend users’ group meetings? Three reasons, typically:

1. The free bar, of course (at face-to-face meetings).
2. To see the product road map (and contribute to it).
3. To learn how other customers are successfully using the vendor’s software and to learn about new use cases.

This last item is often the most compelling! Organize specific success story sessions for customers to share their non-confidential applications and use cases with other customers and, of course, your team. Customers are often very proud of their work and are happy to present their stories.

Whenever you gather your customers together, whether face-to-face or over the web, organize sessions to encourage these exchanges. You’ll find this form of fusion to be fantastic!

Fill the Tank!

I strongly recommend that companies collect and organize both the expected and the novel use cases along with the commensurate success stories, and disseminate them to the field. This is a perfect use of sales enablement tools.

Identify which group or groups should engage customers in these conversations, and establish regular cadences based on how long it takes for your specific products to begin to deliver value.

Who Should Collect This Information?

It would be wonderful if salespeople took the initiative to collect this information. What a pleasant surprise it would be if a salesperson visited a customer with our opening story, “I’m not here to sell you anything today; I would just like to better understand how you are using the tools you’ve already licensed from us!”  (How delightful; how refreshing; how differentiating!)

While truly exceptional sales performers often do have these conversations, most sales staff do not. Their motivation is driven by compensation to achieve quota, which generally means moving on to the next prospect as fast as possible.

Customer success staff often take responsibility for meeting with existing customers to collect this information. They are a natural hub for capturing, publishing, and disseminating the success stories and use cases they acquire.

Sales enablement groups are also structured to gather and broadcast success stories. As the implementers and managers of salesforce automation and enablement systems, they can take advantage of the available tools and technologies for archiving and delivering success stories to the field.

Finally, presales staff are particularly well-positioned to gather this information. Why? Because customers perceive them as particularly trustworthy and credible. Presales folks are able to sit side-by-side (in a real or virtual sense) with their customers to see and discuss the use cases in action. Customers are generally delighted to share the work they have done and often welcome the opportunity to do so.

I recommend implementing a structured approach to capture and disseminate this information. One or more of the groups above should be selected and assigned concrete objectives to meet with customers to collect success story and use case information. Objectives can easily be defined, and progress measured to track the success of the effort. Consider: A team of 10 presales folks tasked to capture 1 success story per quarter yields 40 stories each year. Now that’s filling the tank!

Timing Is Important

When should you collect these success stories?

Too soon after “go live” and customers may not have sufficient data for the value elements of the discussion. Too late and they may have forgotten their previous pains: How long it took previously (vs now), how many people were involved, how many steps, etc.

As memories fade, trying to calculate the value associated with the change from “before” to “after” will get harder. Customer success and account management teams should make these success story conversations part of the plan for “check-in” meetings or QBRs.

However, do not schedule these conversations too close to renewal dates. That’s way too late!

Fantastic Fuel for Your Business

Acquiring these use cases and success stories takes work, but the return on this investment is truly terrific. Since most organizations do not have success story programs in place, this is a critical opportunity to differentiate. While companies without programs are starved for field-enabling fuel, your teams will be purring smoothly (and rapidly) on all cylinders…!

So, fill the tank and be one of the high-performing vendors who re-engage customers to learn how they are using your products and the value they are enjoying. Inject this fabulous fuel into your field organization and enjoy the feel of the entire team accelerating!

Copyright © 2005-2023 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

It’s a small example of ongoing evolution, a key to the success of any methodology!  More impactful examples of improvement and extension of Great Demo! include:

• Guidance for automated demos
• Expansion and renewal demos
• Demos for transactional sales
• Hybrid demo meetings – where participants may be both face-to-face and remote
• Exploration of presales metrics
• Vision Generation Demos
• Discovery skills and methodology
• Ignition Demos – sparking the buyer’s journey
• Leveraging vendor incumbency
• Lunch and Learn demo practices
• Customer success insights

And much more – check out the Resources pages on our website.  To stay up to date with changing times, subscribe to our newsletter.

Accordingly, if you participated in a Great Demo! Workshop previously, you may want to consider reinforcing and expanding your demo methodology toolkit by enrolling in a Great Demo! Master Class.

Coming back to “Do It Again” vs. “Peel Back the Layers”, they both mean the same thing, but “Peel Back the Layers” is a more accurate way of communicating the core idea – which is turn your demo into a two-way, bi-directional conversation while applying inverted pyramid approaches.  Your demo should explore capabilities in as much depth as your prospect desires (but no further, generally speaking!).

How is your evolution going…?