Maximize Your Software Demo Performance To Boost Your Sales

Maximize Your Software Demo Performance To Boost Your Sales

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Our Demo Performance Toolkit is a practical sales methodology that focuses on maximising your software demo performance.
Understand how to engage your audience during your (web-) presentation and excite them about your product!

Wondering why companies invest such little time and money in improving their product demos, I started to systematically create the Demo Performance Framework.

It is a free step-by-step guide that will walk you through the various elements of a product demo, providing tools and techniques to improve your demo performance and presentation skills.

The Demo Performance Framework is based on my own experience selling complex B2B-software, and has been enriched with extensive research from industry-leading presales and communication experts.

It is a growing and free online-resource to empower as many presales folk as possible to deliver compelling and engaging demos.

Max Lüpertz

@ PreSales Rockstars

Demo Performance Toolkit

The Demo Performance Toolkit consists of a growing number of chapters. 
Each providing actionable advice to gain and retain your audiences attention and deliver compelling presentations to increase your demo success rate.

YouTube and other video portals are showing that people decide within the first 12 seconds of a video if they are going to follow and listen. Use a crisp opening to engage your audience from the start rather than speaking into an empty room.

In the information economy, people can hardly concentrate and focus for more than 5-minutes without checking their phones or mails. Gaining, but especially retaining your audiences attention in web-demos is key. Learn tools and techniques to reset your listeners‘ attention and build rapport.

Extensive research shows that the  most successful demos take on average 45 minutes. Demos beyond that tend to be less successful. Further benchmarks that are relevant are the „talk-to-listen-ratio“, „words-per-minute“ or the frequency of questions that can tell you a lot about the success and likely result of your demo.

One of the most challenging jobs when doing demos is to manage the perceived level of complexity. Which might sound all reasonable and easy to you (because you have seen it thousands of times), is often completely new to your clients. Losing your audience talking about little details and features is probably THE most common demo blooper.

Luckily, there are tools and tricks to mitigate the risk and manage the perceived level of complexity.

 

Nobody is perfect and in a live-demo, unforeseen things will always happen. However, knowing about the most common demo bloopers is not that hard and can increase your demo success rate significantly.

Learn which things to avoid – probably the easiest way to improve your demo performance.

There is no „one-fits-all“ demo approach and storyline. Each prospect has their own needs and requirements you have to address in your demo.

But what should be common in each and every demo setup is a clear and transparent structure. Having a good plan does not only help you to stay on track – it makes it also much easier for your listeners to anticipate and remember whats happening.

An evolving discussion is a great sign that you have hooked your audience. Rather than just listening, your audience is likely to take much more away from the demo if they are proactively involved. Ideally, you should ask certain kinds of probing questions to enable your listeners to have their personal „aha moment“.

Visual learning is key to reduce the complexity of your demonstration and create a longer lasting impression with your audience. Visual learning is a style in which a learner utilizes – surprise – visualizations such as graphs, charts or maps. It is one of the three basic types of learning styles and helps your listeners to easily follow your storyline.

When using visuals, the percentage of information that people remember is significantly higher compared to just listening to your voice or following your cursor.

It does not matter what you are saying – instead, it’s about how you are saying things.

In our daily communication, 54% of our interactions are based on non-verbal communications: gestures, body language, eye contact. None of which exists in a remote web-presentation.

Mastering your verbal skills and tonality is one core objective when delivering great and compelling presentations.

Classic – someone is having technical issues joining the meeting, some parties are coming late. Often, we are already behind our demo schedule before even getting started. Allowing time for unforeseen errors is a no-brainer.

However, it is also easy to get off track or lost in tiny little details when answering questions. As a result, the end of your demo is a hasty rush. When instead, the end of your demo is one of the most important parts: Winning demos involve 12% more time (>4 minutes) devoted to planning next steps and wrapping up.

Getting your time management right is tough – but there are techniques that will allow you to stay on track!

Even though you might be the most knowledgeable person at your company, there are common pitfalls which could make you look less confident. Doing a software demonstration, there are few basic principles you need to incorporate in order to look confident. Vice versa, not paying attention to details can make you look insecure.

Learn how to do a compelling and convincing presentation with our actionable advice.

People buy from people this is probably one of the oldest but still most important sales advice of all time. Even in B2B, we are doing people business. It is important that your counterpart(s) can sympathize with you and create a personal relationship that goes beyond their list of requirements. Being authentic is one key to accentuate your persona/personality and give your listeners something they could connect and empathize with. 

In the context of software demonstrations and sales, highlighting pain points instead of pleasure points has higher impact and better sticks with our audience. Pain points are the key to grab our prospect’s attention. They allow us to emphasize with our audience’s status quo and position our solution to cure their pain. 

Understand how to utilize this knowledge to increase your demo win rate.

Deliver your demo in short sprints rather than long marathons. Demos are „presales talking heavy“. But nobody wants to listen to your monologue for more than a certain period of time. Cut your demo in smaller bites and interact with your audience regularly to reset their attention.

About: Presales Rockstars is a free online-resource and toolkit to enable presales and solution consultants to maximize their demo performance.

max@presales.rocks

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