The Best Demo Training You’ll Ever Take
Most enablement is at best, interesting and at worst, a waste of time. I did hours of enablement as a SE and only a handful of times was it beneficial. One time we got 3 hours enablement on a product that 1) we couldn’t sell and 2) didn’t natively integrate with our object model. Total waste of time.
But last year I bought an online course called “Win the Demo” and it was fantastic. It is by far the best training I’ve ever seen on delivering demos that demand engagement, deliver value and help get the technical win. I was kicking myself that I didn’t know about it when I was a SE manager because I absolutely would have made it required for my SE team to go through the course and apply the material.
Full disclosure, I have no affiliation with this course, and I paid for it out of my own pocket. But I would tell every SE from the newly hired to distinguished to take the course. And what manager would say, no to a demo training program that is designed to have you focus on value in your demos?
Look, if I had only $200 to invest in 2024 to grow my SE skills, I’d spend ALL OF IT on Win the Demo.
Here are the three reasons why applying Win the Demo is the best SE training you’ll do all year.
Start with the ‘Mic Drop’
The biggest shift for me was to lead the demo with the ‘mic drop’ moment. The one where you grab the attention of the audience and show them something that their business desperately needs. Most demos that I’ve led over the years are like a movie: I build to the climatic end.
Instead, Chris details why you need to engage your audience with the best feature right away. I did this on the last two demos and saw results immediately. Typically, I start with a new customer, walk through the buyer journey, and show all the parts of the customer relationship in ecommerce. However, the most impressive part of my demo is when existing customers need to update an existing subscription. While this happens half-way through the user journey, here is where I started.
I called out that “buying subscriptions online is easy, updating subscriptions is difficult and complex” and then jumped into the demo. If a member of the audience only had 5 minutes to see my demo, they would have gotten the most important part and how we were solving for their biggest problems. Not some user registration or searching on a website for products—every ecommerce site can do that. But using automation to update existing contracts, update renewals with new licenses and products—almost no software on the planet does that in a way that scales.
It took some convincing to get the team to agree, but once they saw the engagement and the value, they were glad I started with the mic drop, instead of going through the typical buyer journey.
Value Mapping
Discovery calls are meant to uncover the problem and pain points. And while Win the Demo isn’t really about discovery, it does give a helpful framework where you need demo to the root causes. In the past I’ve used the ‘so what, who cares’ to try to add value to each feature I show. This goes a step further by having you map out:
Customer Problem: can’t scale subscription business.
Root Causes: manual processes to update contracts, ecommerce different than quoting.
Capabilities: automation for contract amendment, visibility to customers
Value Statement: touchless transactions for customers
Proof Statement: dozens of customers leverage this for this ecommerce subscriptions.
I just did this for two demos I led over the past 2 weeks and got incredible engagement from the audience. I used the value mapping to identify three key areas for the demo and made sure that I had clarity not just on their problem, but the root causes and how the software solved for them.
Seamless Transitions
One of the biggest differences between a rock star SE and an average one is how they handle transitions. The most decorated SEs create seamless transitions throughout the demo. They tell the audience what they are about to show them, they tie in this new part of the demo to an existing question or comment.
Win the Demo gives a framework to work on these transitions. It literally gives you prompts like “what I’m about to show you…” and “earlier you said you were struggling with ...” These are always the parts of the demo that make it feel smooth, instead of feeling disjointed with different features to touch from a requirements list.
Summary
Do yourself a favor, commit to your professional growth and take Win the Demo. It is absolutely worth your time and will improve every demo you do when you apply their frameworks.