I had the pleasure of talking to the talented Tony De Leon, Senior Account Executive at Amplemarket & Revenue Collective SF Chapter Member, on a recent episode of the Demo Diaries podcast to discuss how to make a real connection during a demo. While demos are certainly about solving problems and showing the technology, they’re also made more effective when there’s a real human connections underlying all of that.
Meet Tony
When Tony was finishing his finance degree in college and wondering what kind of career he wanted, his brother mentioned TechSales Academy (now known as SV). He didn’t know anything about tech but jumped in to see what it was, and it shot him into understanding the world of sales in tech. He soon met a recruiter who liked what he saw and got him a tech sales job at Funbox. That’s just one of the many ways to get into sales these days – there’s no traditional path.
Social Selling
Everyone is overwhelmed with emails these days, and spam folders are also a real issue for salespeople. That’s why Linkedin and phone calls are most effective for prospecting right now, as long as you can personalize at scale. Tony used to just run a volume play where he would shoot lots of Linkedin messages and see who connected. But he ended up burning through a lot of his tier-one companies without even reading their whole Linkedin profile.
If you develop a plan that focuses on three key elements: serendipity, authenticity, and consistency, you’ll be more effective. Linkedin helps with all of these. For example, you can jump on a call and do a demo and try to build rapport that way, but your prospect is mostly just focused on the business at hand and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on that rapport-building. Linkedin allows for those organic conversations to start by commenting and starting conversations on posts, and maybe that conversation continues elsewhere and you have a new and authentic connection.
Getting Engagement
Controversial opinions do generate a lot of engagement on Linkedin, just like any other social networking site. It’s the new SEO – it’s strategic and it works, but you might not feel comfortable putting that kind of energy out there. But you don’t need to follow that path if that’s not your personality. You can find other ways to drive engagement that feels more authentic to yourself. You can test your formats to see what works, and experiment with a mix of business and personal content to drive engagement as well.
How to Build Awareness
If you’re connecting with someone, you can now drop a voice message or do a video instead of just writing a message. Voice messages are great, and Tony is a big fan because they don’t feel gated and do feel clean, plus prospects don’t feel pressured to respond. Don’t simply farm your likes thoughtlessly, but doing it in a personalized and relevant way it can be very effective.
Top Tip to Improve Your Demo
When you jump into a call, make sure it’s all about that person and creating a human connection. Sales is about delivering a message to a person in the most effective way, and it’s easy to make it more complicated and go into things they don’t care about. But that’s not how you win most deals – you do that by going into demos thinking about the person on the other end first.
Watch the complete episode:
