"Wait — you can’t buy yet!  We have more to show you!"  Have you ever seen a demo where the customer indicated that they’d seen enough to buy, but the SE kept showing?  To their credit, Solution Engineers often do significant preparation in advance of custom demos.  Consequently, they want to show everything they intended to show during the demo.

This begs the question, “How many processes and features need to be showcased in a custom product demo?”  The short answer is “as few as possible.”  Don’t we want to show off all of our great product features?  The reality is that most customers end up deploying a small percentage of the overall feature set of your product.  It’s as if the customer investigates the 500+ features of a digital camera, only to use just the zoom feature.

Let’s back up for a moment . . . customers are trying to solve a particular business problem when they embark on a software investigative journey.  While some features that the customer may implement later (phase 2, 3 or later) can be enticing, often they just confuse the customer and make our software look complicated and overkill for their project needs.

So how do you balance the competitive game of feature poker with a needed focus on solving the customer’s business challenge?  The short answer is Solution Engineer self-control.

Just like a news article leads with the most important point and works its way to lesser points (readers cut from the bottom), viewers stop listening the moment the demo drifts to less important functional issues.  Therefore, demos should ALWAYS lead with the most important features/messages (reporting for executives, ease of use for field people) and stop showing as soon as possible, while still teasing other features for later use.

After all, which video was more popular: “Thriller” or “The Making of Thriller?”  Of course, Thriller by far, because it is the result that matters most.  How we got there may be interesting, but of far less importance than achieving the intended result.  At the same time, your demo/sale conversion rate will increase and your sales numbers will be easier to predict.

In the end, by doing extensive discovery, focusing the custom demo on the truly important issues, features and processes and going from most important to least important, we can make our demos more impactful and convert more custom demos into sales, while shortening our demos at the same time.  Just because we think a feature is cool and innovative, if it doesn’t directly address the primary reason why a prospective customer wants to see our demo, it likely doesn’t need to be incorporated into our demo flow.

If your team struggles with “over demoing” and needs guidance on how to strike the right feature/process flow, email dave@moicpartners.com.  In doing so, your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) will decrease and your company’s valuation will soar.