The subject of demonstrating our product or service always burns in the back of our minds, especially with something as inherently useful as the great solution we sell. A picture is worth a thousand words! We want to show people how their lives will be easier, or more successful. We want to be of service. The question we want to answer today is…..When do you do it? (I’m not going to tell you how, since you already know how.)
I have a recent experience to share with you. I had been working with a business development guy for a while who told me he could bring me qualified leads. We discovered together that nobody in his “Rolodex” owed him any favors, so he tried one last tack with me: “Let’s get everybody to experience a demo of the One Page Business Plan and we’ll generate leads that way.” Well, I like to talk about my stuff as much as the rest of you do, and I don’t do public speaking engagements, so I went along with this as an experiment. In the first quarter of this year, we ended up with about 10 demos to “qualified leads.”
How many systems did we sell, do you think? One - we got lucky! (How many of you are lucky all the time?) Why did they buy? Actually it wasn’t the demo. We knew ahead of time that our client was having difficulty integrating new companies he purchased, and so we tapped into his personal motives.
How many of you are old enough to remember that cars used to last about 2-3 years before you had to trade them in, either because they were junk or because they were so boring that you couldn’t stand them anymore? How many of you still have that occasional itchy Saturday where you go out and kick tires and shop, or in my case pretend to shop for a car? Why do you do this? Do you ever not buy a car when you do this? Do you ever buy a car and why do you buy a car? Did you ever buy a car off of eBay or without driving it first? Did the salesperson—who couldn’t figure out what to ask you—ever suggest that you should go for a test drive? Do you buy then?
Usually not.
You see, when we don’t know what’s driving a customer and we can’t figure out what to ask them to get to their interest, we tap into the lizard-brain part of our inner sales personality and start doing demos. It’s the old, “I have a hammer in my hand, and everything out there looks like a nail.” I would submit to you that doing demos drives away more prospects than it attracts. Why is this? Why wouldn’t your amazing solution just make people start drooling over the prospect of doing business with you? In general, it’s because you’re out of phase with the buyer. Specifically, you haven’t identified what the prospect needs and wants yet and cannot appeal to their task motives, and, more importantly, their personal motives.
Now, today I’m not going to teach you how to sell. If you want to gather up your colleagues and friends, we’ll run the best sales class you’ve ever attended since that’s part of what we do for a living. But, I am going to teach you something really handy that will help you determine when it’s the best time to do a demo.
Take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle from top to bottom. Now on each half of the page – that’s left and right half – divide each section with another line drawn from top to bottom. You should have 4 columns? Does anybody have 3?
At the top of the first column, write SHOP. Top of the second, write BUY. Top of the third, write USE. Top of the fourth, write DISPOSE. I’ve been using this tool for years. It comes from Wilson Learning’s Differentiating Business Solutions and originally from Barbara Bund’s Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers.
Customers travel through these four distinct phases in usage: Shop-Buy-Use-Dispose. Each of the phases has distinct characteristics and many steps. The customer determines their behavior either by following a plan or following their nose. The more complex the purchase or corporate bureaucracy, the more steps in each of these phases. It is important to remember to conduct your demos based on where in the cycle the customer is, not where you, the seller, are.
Shop is all the steps a customer takes before selecting a vendor or making a buying decision.
- Seeing what’s out there – Web site search and visit
- Vague notion of a problem – Web site search and visit
- Comparing vendors – Web site visitDo not demo for any of these steps. It is a waste of time. You should focus instead on relating, demonstrating propriety & competence, and overcoming the buyer’s lack of trust. Technology won’t do this for you. More Shop steps include:
- Discovery – do not demo during discovery! Focus on the buyer’s interests, not on solutions. And please don’t use a demo to help a customer self-determine a solution. What little control you have will evaporate in a wisp of smoke.
- Advocating – Now you can demo your product or service as part of showing someone how your solution will solve their problems. At this point, the customer has shown some level of commitment to you as either the person they’re primarily interested in, or the process is down to two people. The solution is not just your product, it’s you and your product!
Buy is all the steps between making that decision and taking delivery. There is little need to demo at this phase.
Use is everything between taking delivery and either using up or completing the usage of the product or service. Here you would use a demo your product or service to expand usage to other people or departments.
Dispose is all the steps a customer takes when they have either used up the product or service or decides it no longer works for them. If you have a licensed or perishable product or service, you might demo to induce repurchase by the customer - but only after you have conducted a thorough discovery!
The lesson here is that all customers or potential customers are in one of these phases at all times. Doing product demos out of phase, for the wrong reason, in the wrong way, and most importantly, in the absence of a defined business problem, leaves everything totally to chance, luck, and probably does little to engender trust between you and the buyer. It will also short circuit the discovery process which, by the way, benefits the customer just as much as it benefits you.
When you demo out of phase, you leave it to your product to create the trust for you and very few products sell themselves. This reduces your close ratio – and as salespeople, we should care about improving our close ratio because it lowers our cost of sales.
On the positive side, and this is what I want to leave you with, understanding how customers buy and where they are in the cycle informs you, among other things, of when and what type of demo to conduct. An early shopper can easily go to your Web site on their own and take a quick trip through, or attend a talk that you’re giving. You can follow that up with an email or phone call while they’re warming up. Remember, they are just shopping; you are just marketing. A late phase shopper can more easily make an informed decision about the solution you’re offering if your demo is on-target with their task and personal motives. Someone who is in the Use phase of another process or product might benefit from a demo of some sort (at a talk or in an email luring them to your site) to see that there might be a better way to do things, and that might send them on a shopping expedition in which you end up pulling the strings. Someone who is disposing of an old process is also generally self-determining how they want to replace it, so a demo would represent an early attempt at getting them to shop with you.
Any thoughts? When do you demo?