Fix your demo ➡️ Nail your growth
Your demo isn't just sales' or product's problem
Hi all —
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time reviewing sales demos over the past few years.
And I’ve watched a lot of sales influencers on LinkedIn talking about the secrets to effective sales demos. These influencers have some really good points, and help reps close deals through skill and will.
But here’s the problem: When sales demos don’t create fast and easy wins, it’s usually not your sales team’s fault. Or your product’s fault. And telling the sales team to “sell better” (or telling your product team to “build more”) is a recipe for failure.
Sales demos are where *everything* about your business comes together. When you only look at demos through a sales lens or a product lens, you miss out on levers like positioning, messaging, packaging, framing, competitive strategy, and offer development. These levers come from demand-gen, product marketing, CS, product management & engineering, ops, founders & execs… not just sales.
When view sales demos as sales’ problem, you rely on your sales reps’ heroics to close deals. You need highly skilled reps, and it takes a long time for reps to get trained and effective. Each deal you win is based on luck and savvy contortions, where a rep grabs victory from the jaws of defeat.
Deep down you’re not sure *why* you win deals. And you’re not sure what to do about it. So you just bucket it as a “sales” problem and hope you can hire a sales leader to figure it out. This almost never works.
When you view sales demos as product’s problem, you forget the cardinal rule of business: Buyers don’t buy software products, they buy results. Product development is the most expensive, least predictable, and slowest way to improve your sales demos & growth trajectory. How do you know that adding features X, Y, and Z will lead to more customers buying? You don’t! You can’t!
Then you go and build, build, build…. pray, pray, pray… and… damn. Turns out you built the wrong thing, 6 months later.
Rob’s demo secrets (shh, don’t tell):
✅ You rarely show your actual product in a sales demo
✅ You can NOT persuade your prospect of anything… only people JUST LIKE THEM can persuade your prospect of anything
✅ You’re not really selling your product… you’re selling whatever your buyer wants to buy and bundling your product
✅ The goal is to make your offer and framing so compelling, a mediocre sales rep can destroy quota
✅ Don’t call the meeting “product demo” → make it more exciting, framed around whatever your buyer’s goals are. (E.g., if I meet with you to fix your demo, I’m not going to call it “sales consultation”, I’m going to call it, “Demo transformation session”)
Here’s a four-step demo audit that will help you determine how to improve your demo.
Step 1: Check Your Current Performance vs. SaaS Benchmarks
My very smart friends at the very cool company Sparkwise asked me for benchmarks: What does *great* look like in a sales cycle? Are we good enough? Should we leave our demo alone and focus elsewhere?
Three caveats:
Yes, this all depends. Customer type, demand-gen source, ACV, product, competition, blah blah blah. Every sale is different, we’re all special. Take these as directional benchmarks.
Even if you meet some or all of these benchmarks, there are almost *always* levers you can pull to shorten your sales cycle, improve your close rate, retain & upsell customers, boost referrals, etc. etc. etc.
Metrics and benchmarks in general are bullshit in complex systems
Caveats aside, here’s what pretty damn good looks like for $10k - $50k ARR deals:
Close rate: 35-40%
Average deal cycle (meeting to contract signed): 14-30 days
ARR to CAC ratio: 3:1 (This is less relevant at the founder-sales stage… plus LTV/CAC was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon)
But that’s not all! Your demo approach influences pipeline and customer retention. If your outbound call-to-action is, “want to see a demo of our game-changing software?” you’re probably not generating enough pipeline. And if your demo sets unrealistic expectations, you’re tossing grenades over to your CS team. Poor CS.
Here are some nontraditional benchmarks that your demo approach also influences:
Logo retention: ~100%
Demos per seller per month: 20
Avg referrals per closed-won deal: 1
And some heuristics that aren’t measurable, but are just as important:
Do your reps need to be heroes to close deals? Or could they basically just read off a script?
Are your deals generally “on the rails”? Do you know what prospects are generally going to say next?
Are your customers saying “Hell Yes”?
If you have these metrics, reps are closing ~$1M in revenue per year and making bank, and your customers are happy.
Even better if you’re getting annual contracts paid up front.
Beating all these benchmarks? Reach out - I want to interview you.
Chances are that you don’t have all of these metrics. Worse, solving for ONE metric is going to cause you to nuke your other metrics. Such is the tyranny of metrics in a complex system. Instead, solve for *all* metrics through your demo.
Step 2: Write Down Your Buyer’s Context
So there’s some room for improvement. Where do you start?
Start at the beginning… who’s showing up to your demo and why?
We need to understand buyers’ context when they show up for a demo, because our demos need to meet buyers where they are (not where we wish they were).
Here’s an assessment I’ve created:
If you can’t see the world from your buyer’s viewpoint as they enter your sales process, you’re just going to be guessing.
If your prospects are pretty savvy and have demo’ed your direct competitors, you’re going to need a different approach than if they’ve just set a relevant goal and have no clue how to accomplish it.
Here’s a cheat sheet on demo approaches that meet the buyer where she is:
I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t sell competitive deals the same way you sell to buyers who don’t have a plan. This doesn’t just change *how* you sell - it changes *what* you sell.
Buyers want to buy different things. Sell what buyers want to buy, and bundle what you want to sell. (See Services-Led Growth.)
Step 3: Listen to Recorded Demos to Diagnose Problems & Levers
Recorded sales demos are game-changers for marketing, product development, and company direction. Listen to your sales demos, people!
As you listen to demos, ask yourself:
What’s going on in this buyer’s world?
Are they telling us the truth? Are they holding back?
What do they actually want to buy? Are we selling what they want to buy?
What do they want to get out of this demo? Are we speaking the same language?
What’s preventing them from moving forward? (confusion, uncertainty, alternatives, jargon, boredom, “compiling a report for decision-makers”)
Based on this, you’ll get a sense of what the real bottlenecks to closing are. Once you understand the real bottlenecks, you can apply one of my ever-growing list of demo levers:
The cool thing about these levers: They generally don’t revolve around telling your salespeople to “get better at selling.”
Remember: Demos are where *everything about your business* comes together. Which means the biggest levers for improving your demo results don’t come from the sales department. You want a demo that’s so compelling, even a mediocre rep can meet quota.
Step 4: Prioritize levers and launch them
At early-stage companies, you can just blow up your entire demo and start again from scratch.
When you’ve got a bunch of sales reps, you probably want some proof that each lever works.
Here are two easy ways to test a new sales demo:
Test it with one rep and/or a sales leader
Test it on closed-lost deals / your “nurture” pipeline
And here’s one easy way to screw this up: Hand over your “new demo script” to sales and move on, expecting it will *just work*
Implement, watch, debug, iterate.
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Got GTM questions? Want me to blow up your demo? Reply to this email!