How much should you show in your product demonstration?

HINT: nail 1 use case

December 16, 2020

Hey, you look great today.

Last week Will (Customer Success Manager @ Outreach) and I gave a presentation to 6 VPs for a large expansion opportunity.

Our goal was to nail their main use case, and here’s how we worked as a team to make that happen.

This is a story not only about a tactic when demo’ing, but how to work with your fellow customer success managers on a deal.

Will: "Andrew, that entire demo you only focused on 1 area of the product"

Andrew: "Yeah, I knew that would hit hard for their use case"

Will: "I didn't know you could spend 1 hr talking about just that"

And after the demo, we got 2 emails from the VPs saying what a great job we did.

I'm not telling you this story to toot our own horn, I want to give you a new tactic you can use in any presentation.

The main thing you want to know:

👉 It's better to have 1 use case nailed vs. 5 use cases that are so-so.

Now, here's the formula Will and I used to find that 1 use case and deliver it to our customer:

1/ It starts with discovery

In the discovery call, you need to nail the top 3 priorities.

Here's a talk track you can use in your conversation:

"Hey Prospect, if you are sitting down with the C-suite, and talking about the next 6-12 months, what do you need flawless execution on?"

2/ Use the Pareto principle ( i.e. 80/20 rule)

Ask yourself, what's 20% of your platform, that will cover 80% of the prospect's focus? This is the "wow" factor or the haymaker after a few jabs.

(For us, this is the account view in Outreach.)

3/ Come up with your questions

To simply show 20% of the platform without a conversation may take 5 minutes. Come up with 3-5 questions that will get people talking about the nuts & bolts of their situation.

Now, let me give you an example of this in action.

In Outreach, we have an account view that shows a 360 of all engagement around an account. Here’s why I only showed this view for 1 hour.

For Step 1, the prospect told me they need to figure out how to help AEs source 50% of their own pipeline. Their hypothesis: visibility into SDR engagement around accounts would help AEs determine where to focus.

For Step 2, I figure we could use the account view to show how Outreach provides a single pane of glass into engagement activity into all accounts. Our wow factor was showing them exactly how we prospecting into their account to get the current meeting, and the information we leveraged in doing so.

For Step 3, here were our 3 questions:

- How do you ensure AEs & SDRs aren't tripping over each other when prospecting?

- What's account coverage look like today, and why couldn't it be higher?

- As leaders, what are you missing today from account inspection for target accounts?

And this conversation lasted for 1 entire hour.

  • 1 focus.

  • 3 questions.

  • 6 people in the room.

  • 2 emails from the customer to me after the meeting ended.

This is why discovery is important.

And if you are working on a larger deal, you'll need to do many discoveries. Because what's important to sales leaders, is going to be different from what you show to marketers.

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