5 Things Every Prospect Wants During a Live Sales Demo

Edan Golomb, Reprise’s Director of Commercial Sales, has successfully run hundreds of live sales demos during his career. We asked him to share what the top 5 prospect needs were during a live sales demo, and he delivered.

1. Skip to the good part.

Nice job, you booked a live sales demo call with a new prospect! They’ve agreed to give you 30 minutes of their day in exchange for a demo of your product. You’ve got two goals now; to get your prospect excited about your product and to learn more about them.

Your prospect, however, came to the call with one goal, to see the demo. If they spend the first 25 minutes answering discovery questions and the last 5 minutes viewing your demo, you didn’t give them what they wanted.

So how do you get your discovery questions answered if the call is just about the demo?

2. Bring demo and discovery together.

Discovery questions become a separate line item on your call agenda when you’re working with a demo environment that locks you into a rigid story flow.

Rigid storytelling happens when your initial “demo” isn’t really a demo. It’s a PowerPoint deck full of static screenshots that can only go forward or backward. Or it’s a live product login that leaves you afraid to click around and lose your place.

Bring discovery and demo together by creating your demo on a platform that lets you responsively share your product with prospects during the call.

For example, Reprise’s demo creation platform allows you to fully capture the functionality and flow of your software in one go, creating a demo with a sandbox environment. The demo will look, feel and respond like a real product interaction, but one that you can move around in freely and easily – with no permanent changes or concern that your actions will affect someone else’s demo.

This way, you can ask discovery questions like, “What feature would be most helpful to you?” and then navigate the demo directly to that feature when they answer. Merge discovery and demo into one and end the call with a highly qualified (and happy) prospect.

3. Serve the meal, not the leftovers.

Every prospect wants a demo that looks as though it was cooked just for them. They don’t want to eat another prospect’s leftovers. The demo you share on your first live sales call should reflect your prospect’s vertical market (not the last prospect’s) and/or specific product use case.

If your prospect works in finance, don’t show them a demo populated with the same data you used to speak with your healthcare prospect. If your prospect works at a large enterprise firm, don’t show them one with data leftover from a demo created for a small company.

Pre-create demos that you can garnish with personalization before your call too. Nothing throws off a live sales demo more than sharing one that was made for every Jane Doe at every Acme Corp.

4. Show them the magic.

Disney paints everything they don’t want their park guests to notice with a green paint called “No See-um Green” or “Go Away Green,” so their guests will never be distracted from the magic by a water filtration system or garbage can.

This is what your prospect wants you to do during the live sales demo call. Hide the necessary mess, and direct their gaze towards the magic of your product. You can’t do this if you’re using a live product login as a demo.

After all, your prospect won’t be impressed by your product’s best features if they have to walk them through piles of hot garbage to see them. And the dummy accounts used for live product logins are filled with the mess of everyone whose tread there before. (i.e. administrative permissions your prospect would never activate are turned on).

Instead, come to the live call with a demo that hides the necessary messes and keeps your prospects’ attention directed at the “take my money now” product features they came to see.

5. Take prospects time traveling.

Your prospect doesn’t just want to see your product; they want to see what it would feel like to effectively use it over time.

The live sales demo call is your chance to take your prospects time traveling, showing them what it would feel like to be a proficient user that’s fully taking advantage of its best features.

Use a demo creation platform that allows you to change out variables and personalize your demo. Adding their picture to thumbnails or applying their internal naming conventions will help them imagine themselves as proficient users of your product.

TL;DR: What Prospects Want During a Live Sales Demo

• Skip to the good part and get straight to the demo your prospect wants.
• Bring demo and discovery together and better qualify prospects.
• Serve the meal, not the leftovers, by arriving with a unique demo experience.
• Show them the magic and hide the mess using a demo creation platform.
• Take them time traveling by showing them what they’ll look like as future users.