Meetings can be highly effective in engaging, motivating, and inspiring your team. Or, they can be counterproductive, waste time, and distract your team from the purpose at hand. The formula for a highly-effective sales demo is the cumulative result of research, process, and most importantly, an effective process.

“A brilliant sales demo can quickly lead to a closed deal, but, on the flip side, an underwhelming demo can lead a potential customer to look elsewhere.”

Did you know that 69% of prospects find their business needs are not met on the first call? In other words, B2B salespeople are not approaching the sale from a buyer-centric mindset, which could be why many salespeople are not meeting their target. 

Understanding your prospect’s business needs is important so that you can build and execute your sales approach. Knowing what your prospects want and need tells you how they will use your solution, why they need it, and how much they’re willing to pay for it. 

All of this should be reflected in your sales demo.

So you have got your prospect interested and now they want to learn more about your solution. What can you do to help ensure that your B2B sales demo will be successful?

FunnL will explain to you the key things to remember to ensure your sales demo goes according to plan.

1- Create a meeting plan

For any meeting with a prospect, it’s important to have a meeting plan in place. A meeting plan is especially important when you have additional members of your team involved in the meeting or demo. A meeting plan is a great way to review and sum up the key information related to the prospect and ensure you have a clear goal to work towards during the demonstration. 

2- Test your technology early

For a B2B sales demonstration, you may only get one chance to impress your prospect. Whether your demo is conducted over the phone, online, or in-person it is important to ensure all components needed for your demonstration are in working order before the demo with your client.

All it takes is something little like an incompatible projector cable for your PC or Mac, trouble sharing a screen with an online demo, or trouble with playback on a video to make your prospect question if your solution is worth their time. A well-executed demonstration will build confidence in your prospect that you and your organization could make a capable partner.

3- Show confidence in the call

Never be afraid to ask and answer all the scary questions, for example, objection-surfacing questions, pricing questions, thought-provoking questions, clarifying questions, etc. The action of asking questions means you’re curious and answering them means you’re trustworthy. It means you want to learn and to help. Of course! You can’t know all the answers, especially when it comes to understanding a prospect’s motivations and unique business needs, but show them that you’re trying to bridge that knowledge gap and not just interested in closing this sale.

4- Learn your prospect’s motives

Did you know that 71% of B2B buyers who see personal value will purchase a product? And 68% of B2B buyers who see a personal value will pay a higher price for a service. 

Like the rest of us, the prospects have busy schedules and short attention spans. They will only pay attention to and remember the points of the presentation that are immediately relevant and important to them. Instead of going on and on about all the features and benefits your solution offers, narrow it down to the two or three that are most relevant to the buyer—the ones that align with their dominant buying motive.

There are two broad categories of decision-making: aspirational and preventative. 

1. Aspirational individuals make decisions that enable achievement and positive recognition by others (playing to win).
2. Preventative individuals make decisions to obtain feelings of security and less stress in their interactions with others (playing to not lose).

The language you use during your sales demo needs to be framed to address your prospect’s dominant motivational focus to positively influence them.

5- Make the sales demo interesting

A typical sales demo goes something like this:

1. You log into the screen sharing software, then make chit chat with the prospect for a few minutes while you set up and everyone arrives.
2. You talk for 30-45 minutes straight while showing the prospect what the software does.
3. There are a few minutes for questions at the end before the hour is up.

Boring right?

Buyers don’t care about all the bells and whistles. They care about how this product will help them solve a problem or improve their current processes and productivity. The truth is, we often get so caught up in features and benefits that we forget that our prospects are human. And humans want connection.

If you’re struggling to entertain and engage your audience, grab their attention by shaking up the typical agenda and meeting structure. Position your sales demo as a narrative that speaks to why your company cares about helping clients like them and how your product can provide a higher ROI than their current process or solution.

6- Make your prospects interact with the demo

Many times the sales reps fall into the trap of presenting their demo without ever allowing the prospect to ask questions during the demo. Allowing your prospect to interact and ask questions during the demo provides you with the chance to address their concerns or expand upon something that they are interested in. This lets your solution be better understood by your prospect.

These pointers that we have shared above are just the beginning, but the single most important thing you can do to make yourself stand out from the competition is to practice and rehearse, again and again, and again. Your sales demo is a mission-critical presentation within the sales process and is no different. It should be approached with careful thought, practice, and effort. 

FunnL is the fastest growing B2B sales qualified meeting generation firm. The team has an experience of generating more than 10,000 sales-qualified meetings from healthcare, education, finance, business services, telecom, technology, and the list goes on. 

Our meetings are of the highest quality because they adhere to the quality parameters ‘you define’. Our definition of a qualified lead is – Request for a telephone or in-person meeting in response to a message marketing. Book your appointment now!