“The whole purpose of a demo is to get to a point where you can have a strategic business conversation around the problems your solution solves that you’ve now made more real than you did in the first conversation that was much more high level.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 1616
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from David Weiss. David is the Chief Revenue Officer of the Sales Collective and founder of DealDoc. Here he is:
David Weiss: Hello, everyone. This is David Weiss, Chief Revenue Officer of the Sales Collective and Founder of DealDoc, your app for deal coaching. On today’s tip, we’re going to be talking about the Cinematic Demo Play, a fancy name, right? So if your demo is met with a lot of… Yeah, that’s interesting. If it’s met with a lot of, Oh, this seems really nice to have, but I don’t know if we need it right now. Or, Man, you just showed me a lot. My head’s spinning, or, That’s overkill. If your demo just isn’t landing the way you want it to land, this is a play for you.
So most demos that I sit through and that you’ve maybe delivered are this amazing array of features, functions, every single all the things that your solution solves. And then you end it often with, All right, cool. Now we have about five minutes left. Let me show you some analytics. Let’s do that. And then we can maybe talk about next steps.
So here’s the problem.
If you show too much, your solution’s bloated. If you show features and functions that people don’t care about, they tune out. If you try and slam everything in and you don’t leave time for conversation, you have missed the point of the demo. I would rather leave someone wanting more than not have enough time to talk about the impact of the demo. The whole purpose of a demo is to get to a point where you can have a strategic business conversation around the problems your solution solves that you’ve now made more real than you did in the first conversation that was much more high level.
So this is where the Cinematic Demo Play comes in. What you’re doing in this play, you are thinking about the problems that you solve. You are taking your demo and breaking it down into vignettes. Instead of a 45-minute, one-size-fits-all, cascading harbor tour of a demo, you are showing 3-5 minutes tops, really best 2-3 minutes, honestly, of a specific feature, function, use case that aligns directly to a problem you learned in discovery. So that often sounds like, hey, look, today what I heard last time is this issue, this issue, this issue, this issue. What we’re going to be doing today is really tightly aligning to those. So we’re going to start with this problem and then we’re going to move down to the others.
So what I’m about to show you, and you use what’s called the tell, show, tell framework, you tell them, What I’m about to show you is this. Then you show them, Hey, look, what I just showed you is a solution to this specific problem. Let’s talk about it. How do you see that fitting in your ecosystem? How would that help you solve the ABC problem? Is it missing anything? Did it solve it? What would be the impact of solving that? Who else would care about solving that? If we solve that for you, what else could you do? You’re unpacking the value of the thing you just showed them. Then you’re like, great, cool. Now we’re going to move on. The next problem that you said you had was this. Let me show you that. And it’s rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
The reason why we call this the Cinematic Demo Play is it’s wow moments. It’s like the car chase at the beginning of the story where you’re getting people sucked in and you’re making sure they know that you are about to solve a problem that was important to them. So you’ve got them at the edge of their seats. They’re not showing up with a thing of popcorn and just eating the entire time like, When am I actually going to see the thing I care about?
They’re actually leaning in. They’re paying attention because you’re very quickly solving problems, talking about it, conversing around the impact, moving on to the next problem, so on and so forth. And then the most important thing here is you’re leaving 5, 10, 15 minutes at the end now to have detailed conversation, talk about next steps, make plans, who else should be involved, back in the napkin business case, all of those types of things you’re now doing because you’ve very tightly aligned and you’ve taken out and stripped out all fluff. There was no fluff in this.
So no one can say, oh, you’re too bloated. Oh, this is too complicated. Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because you’ve just solved their problem and only their problem and nothing else. That’s what people want. And then you know what? You can always set up more time to show them all the other things that they frankly don’t care about, or they may not have thought of yet. Or maybe there’s other use cases for other stakeholders and you redo discovery and then you demo those components to them versus these components to the people you just talk to. That’s the whole idea. You don’t show everything. You show and solve problems for the things that people care about.
All right. So again, this is called the Cinematic Demo Play. If you like this play, you can find 78 others just like it inside of the Sales Tactitions playbook, which exists inside of Deal Duck. You can also find a link to it on my LinkedIn profile and potentially at the end of this recording. So if I can help with anything, please hit me up on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with David, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1616. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come right back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!