After The Demo, Make Sure You Do This One Thing
You’ve just finished a long demo with a prospect and you feel it went great. The audience was participating the whole time, they agreed to another follow-up demo in the future, and told you they loved your new data entry tool. Time to celebrate right? Not so fast. Anyone who’s seen movies like Vantage Point, Run Lola Run, 11:14, or others like them, knows that different people can experience or interpret the same thing from vastly different perspectives. A common issue with inexperienced demo professionals is their tendency to lose sight of the forest for the trees. They’re so concerned about making sure all the agenda items and demo requirements are addressed, that they sometimes fail to see that there are other, sometimes more important, signals from the audience.
Consider the sales rep who accompanied you on your meeting. He saw audience interaction throughout the meeting, but it was only from the end users, not the decision makers or key influencers in the room. That follow-up demo they agreed to was actually just for one particular end user who wanted to see how a very specific scenario would work for her in your software, with no one else scheduled to attend. And your new data entry tool – IT loved that it would easily integrate with their existing database, but the end users didn’t seem thrilled about it, and your sales rep knows for a fact that at least three of your competitors’ solutions can also integrate with the prospect’s database.
You and your rep were in the same meeting, but your rep was taking the time to read the room while you were delivering your demo. By doing so, he was able to pick up on clues you missed, getting an entirely different take on how the meeting went.
In most cases, having more eyes and ears in the room will help you more successfully manage the meeting, but you need to capture those perspectives for them to be useful.
Regardless of whether you’re delivering an on-premise (in-person) demo or a remote online meeting, always schedule time to do a team debrief as soon as possible afterwards. For on-premise meetings, don’t book a flight out of town that requires you to leave right from the demo – give yourself the extra time to sit down and compare notes with your team. A team debrief can accomplish several important goals:
Having an immediate team debrief seems intuitive, but too many sales teams defer it to a time long after the demo, forgetting important details in the process. Instead, consider the debrief just as important as the discovery call, and you’ll always be sure to schedule time for it.
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