“The meeting was great, but I really wish that deck was longer.”
This is not something any human being has ever said, or thought, even once since PowerPoint was invented in 1987.
So why are we still delivering demos that are the equivalent of the teacher taking attendance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?
Not to hate on decks and slides—they’re incredibly useful and valuable in many contexts. But if you are in SaaS sales and presales, and you’re trying to get someone to buy your product, showing them a 30-page deck is not going to do it.
Or a guided demo that is 85 screens long, where you’re clicking endlessly around the site to show a new prospect every single bell and whistle you have to offer.
While your demo delivery is hopefully not in that exact same monotone Eugene Levy uses to such comedic effect (we hope not, anyways), rooting out the cause and finding solutions to eliminate it for good will help you close more deals.
The telltale signs of the deadly demo
Every sales rep and solutions engineer has had this happen at least once. You get into the demo and you’re feeling good—maybe the discovery was really thorough or the prospect is a great fit for your product.
But then your demo attendees stop making eye contact. They start rustling papers or glancing at their watch or, horror of horrors, checking their Slack messages. You’ve lost them, and once that happens it’s hard to get the demo momentum back on track.
These live sales demos aren’t just bad because the prospect is bored. Boredom isn’t exactly the emotion you want your prospect to experience in a demo, but it doesn’t kill deals on its own.
The real problem is that a painfully dull demo can make you seem out of touch with customer needs and preferences.
For example, let’s say you’ve got a prospect who is super interested in your product. Like most of today’s self-educated B2B buyers, they’ve checked out your website, watched a few product review videos, and talked to someone who uses it. Now they ask you for a demo.
That prospect doesn’t want to see every single feature in action. They certainly don’t want to see your login screen. They want to see how your product will work for their specific use case. They are looking for that “aha!” moment where they realize the actual value of your product and why they need it.
And instead, you’re just clicking and talking and clicking and talking until they wonder, “does this rep/SE/company really understand what I need? Maybe I should go look at their competitors again.”
On the flip side, if your prospect is totally new to exploring your industry and product, the endless demo will simply overwhelm them and leave them wondering what exactly you can help them with.
Houston, we have a problem.
Why deadly demos happen
So why are these bad demos happening? AEs and SEs are professionals who want to succeed at their jobs and often have plenty of experience closing deals—you know what you’re doing. It’s unlikely any of you are thinking, “let’s make a thirty-page deck and then read it line by line to this prospect and they’ll love it!”
But a few things can get in the way. One is excitement—you’re showing off this product your company has worked really hard to create, and you’re delighted about all the cool features your product team has developed. This is super common with new startups, especially if you’re creating a category.
Another big cause is discomfort with the lack of discovery in the sales cycle today. It used to be that prospects needed to go through a thorough discovery process—you’d ask them questions and develop a demo script based on that discussion.
But buyers come in asking for demos all over the sales cycle now, and if you don’t have that script you might just default to showing them everything and hoping something sticks.
A third cause is simply not understanding where your buyer is in their journey. Sure, maybe they want to see everything. But it’s also entirely possible they’ve done a ton of research on their own and just want to see a few specific things.
B2B prospects today spend only 17% of their buyer’s journey with a sales rep—and your sales and demo processes might not have kept up with that new world of selling.
Killing the deadly demo for good
Now that you know what might be making your demo deadly dull, how can you fix it?
First, think of your demo as being more like your website experience. That’s (hopefully) very carefully built with the user experience at the forefront—you never want a visitor to have to click more than three or four times to get exactly where they want to go. Your demo should deliver the same experience.
Again, B2B buyers are very different these days (have we said this enough), so that means you need to get flexible and creative. We’ve got a few suggestions.
- Rejigger your discovery process. Get it closer to what prospects want, instead of what your sales team is used to. This might mean asking a few disco questions as the demo is kicking off instead of having a separate call. Or having a few types of demos you can deliver fast depending on the buyer journey stage.
- Develop a few different demos. But not just segmented by industry or vertical—based on the end-user experience and stage in the buyer journey instead. You can create a library of premade custom demos with a no-code demo creation platform like Reprise tailored to where your buyer currently is.
- Send a post-call guided demo (sales leave-behind). You don’t need to worry about cramming in every possible feature when you know you can email a quick demo as a sales leave-behind after the call is over, speaking to exactly what your prospect finds relevant. (Again, this is where Reprise comes in handy!) And let’s be honest, a guided demo eats a one-pager for lunch any day. As Jenn Steele, a former product marketing leader, said: “I’ve written about 1,000 one-pagers, and probably only 10 of them were ever read.”
The best way to get rid of the deadly demo once and for all is to identify the magic of what your product does, and the big moments you want prospects to experience about a specific feature or use case, and stick to that—at least in your first demo.
At Reprise, we call those the “take my money” moments because they instantly identify what your product offers to your customers.
It’s like selling a really gigantic mansion—instead of wandering through every room and opening every closet and cupboard (we all know what cupboards look like), you find the feature or experience that will make that exact buyer see themselves in a whole new, better life there.
That magic moment is going to be different for the 25-year-old tech millionaire (she wants a high-end walk-in closet) than the family of five (they need a tiki bar in the basement for post-bedtime cocktails), so you need to determine what works for each person.
But once you land on it and deliver it quickly, you can move forward in the process faster. And you can save everyone from the most modern of horrors: being trapped in a room, on Zoom or in real life, while someone reads a thirty-page deck at you.
