Delivering Sales Demos With High Conversions

Sales demos are critical to a customer’s decision to purchase. No matter how high the purchase intent or how tedious the search process is, customers seldom make purchase decisions, especially for important and high-priced items, without getting a demo. Demos help clarify and confirm whether the product really meets one’s requirements. Hence, in any business, the concept of a demo is highly relevant.

There are two types of demos:

• Sales demos help establish the value proposition of a product to a prospective customer and give an overview of the key features. The goal of a sales demo is to convince the prospect to make a purchase.
  
• Product demos are more in-depth and focus on explaining products and features to an existing customer, i.e. one that has already converted. The goal of a product demo is to help existing customers better understand and use the product.
  

A well-planned, strategic sales demo can quickly convert more leads into customers. This blog will offer some key insights into the tried and tested strategies to help you plan a great sales demo.
So, let’s get started!

8 Tried And Tested Strategies To Deliver Great Sales Demos

1. 📯 Structure Your Sales Demo Into Clear Segments
2. 💽 Record And Evaluate Your Sales Demo Sessions
3. 📍Highlight Key Takeaways And Outcomes
4. 📘Learn To Deal With Awkward Silences
5. 🕵️ Ace The Q&A Session
6. 👨‍💻Rehearse Your Sales Demo
7. 👨‍🎤Leverage The Power Of Storytelling
8. 🗣️ Proactively Explain The Next Steps
   

1. Structure Your Sales Demo Into Clear Segments

Nobody wants to listen to a sales demo that’s all over the place. Here are some tips for structuring your sales demo:

• Begin the call with a broad overview of what you’ll cover in the sales demo. This will make the prospects comfortable as they’ll know what to expect from the call.
  
• Next, move straight away to the product you’re explaining. Offer a detailed product tour to the audience and share all the benefits this product offers them. To master this part, you might need to do some research on the prospect to discover their pain points and offer solutions.
  
• Before concluding the demo, summarize the key takeaways and include a question and answer (Q&A) session. (More details on this later).

2. Record And Evaluate Your Sales Demo Sessions

Record yourself whenever you’re delivering a demo; later, you can use sales enablement tools like SalesKen to analyze the improvement areas in that demo.

Here’s how SalesKen can help you deliver better demos:

• It helps you identify the customer’s intent to purchase. Hence, you can easily differentiate between high-intent and low-intent prospects. Therefore, you can spend more time converting the high-intent prospects.
  
• There may be some objections from the customers during a sales demo. While reps often become clueless about addressing them, SalesKen’s real-time cues can offer prompt strategies to handle those objections.
  
• Finally, a sales enablement tool can help you find the improvement areas in your sales pitch and suggest better ways to convert the customers with proper engagement hooks.
  

Remember that a sales enablement tool can develop a data-driven approach and direct your sales team accordingly. With proper utilization of such a tool, there’ll be no room left for conjecture.‍

3. Highlight Key Takeaways And Outcomes

Want to ace your sales demos? Focus more on the takeaways and not the features. Your product can be feature-rich.

But what ultimately matters is that how it will benefit the prospect and make their life simpler. So, highlighting the outcomes is always a better idea. Help the prospect envision how the product will simplify their problems.

But why should the prospect believe you?

What are the changes you’ll bring in to transform their website?
Instead, try to prove your point. For instance, show them what changes you’re referring to and how the new website will be more beneficial for the prospects.

4. Learn To Deal With Awkward Silences

Sales reps often freak out when there are awkward silences in a demo. But silences are pretty normal. Silence doesn’t always mean that the prospect is not convinced with your software demo. It can mean that they’re processing their thoughts. It’s worth noting, however, that sales reps are often very enthusiastic about the products, and they keep talking about the product without realizing that the prospect might be feeling left out.

So, it is ideal that after every few minutes, or after sharing a section of your pitch, you encourage the prospect to share their thoughts or ask questions, especially if they’re silent. Make the demo session interactive whenever possible.

Silence is easy if you know how to deal with it.

5. Ace The Q&A Session

There should be a segment in every sales demo that’s purely dedicated to Q&A. Acing this Q&A session is very important to win a sales deal. In fact, it’s not mandatory that the prospect has to ask questions every time.

You can start asking the questions too. That’s way better than turning the demo session into a lecture.

Remember, the questions you ask should be open-ended. That’s when the prospect will be able to answer freely.

Here’re some questions you can use:

• What do you think about the demo? Will it help in your business growth?
• What frustrates you the most with your current software solution?
• Do you have any questions about the functionality of the product?

Research the prospect to make your questions stand out.

6. Rehearse Your Sales Demo

There is no harm in rehearsing your sales demo again and again. If you’re a newbie, practice will help you get familiar with the process of demos. If you develop a data-driven strategy, the process of rehearsing will become much simpler for you.

How about taking help from sales enablement software?

SalesKen’s software can analyze your past demo calls in real-time. It can identify the real-time talking points with the help of advanced analytics and help your reps find smarter strategies to ace the demo calls. Hence, when a rep rehearses for the demo, they’ll be able to perfect it easily if they can consider these tips.

7. Leverage The Power Of Storytelling

Treat the sales demo as your customers’ story where they are the main character and your product plays a supporting role. Suppose you’re planning a project management software demo.

Here are two possible approaches that you can adopt:

• “Our software helps create new projects and break them down into different sub-tasks. You can then assign these subtasks to team members and add the deadlines. That way, the entire project will be streamlined, and each team member will have a clear idea of their responsibilities.”
  
• “Imagine that you have acquired a critical project which is due today. You don’t have the time to explain to each team member about their responsibilities. So, what do you do in that situation? You can simply add the project details in our productivity software, add sub-tasks and assign them to respective team members. You can add the deadlines there, too and the concerned staff will get the notifications directly. This will hardly take you 30-minutes and you’ll save hours of pointless discussions.”
  

In the first scenario, the product is the main character, in the second scenario, the customer is the main character. Ideally, you need to support the basic first pitch with the second, storytelling-focused pitch.

8. Proactively Explain The Next Steps

If the prospect is showing interest in your product by the end of the sales demo, you can always book another meeting with them for pricing discussions. Sometimes prospects show interest, but they demand more knowledge on the product. That is again a positive sign. In that case, you can schedule another product demo with the same prospect.

A clear understanding of steps is crucial to the prospect closing the deal. Make sure that you clearly explain details like who will be in touch and when, whom to communicate with for further queries, if they need to take any further steps, etc.

Don’t keep the prospects on hold. Make sure that they know about all the communication touchpoints. Else, you risk losing a high-value sales deal.

Final Words

A sales demo has the power to make or break any potential deal. So, make sure that sales reps are taking extra care to master them. Sales managers should guide the reps to deliver a flawless sales demo. We hope these tips to ace demos will help you out. Don’t lose hope if the first few demo sessions don’t work out. They’ll qualify eventually. Just keep trying and get better with every demo.

As mentioned earlier, SalesKen can help you close deals faster than ever before. Book a demo today!