#539 - How to Run Demos That Actually Convert | Alex Kane

When that camera comes on, show them that you're listening. Put your ear right up to the screen and let them see that you're there. Make eye contact with them through the camera. If they don't share their camera, that's okay. You still share yours because it's showing them that you are actively present at this meeting. And then the last tip, take up as much of the screen presence as you can. So many people do the tiny little person in the corner of the zoom. You don't want to be this person. You want to be in the room and you want to be present and you want to listen. [Music] Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froke and I'm here with my co-host Nick Skalski. And today we have a nine-time President's Club winner. He has hit over 200% of his quarterly quota over 25 times and over 500% five times. And his claim to fame is that he knows how to put on a show and tell stories that get customers moving out of their seat and wanting to buy. His name is Alex Kane. Nick, why should people listen? We got into Alex's demo and presentation best practices and structure. And we went through everything from how to break out of the traditional buyer-seller frame where buyers like are 84% engaged and sort of see who is just another salesperson. He talks about why you should not be Vanna Whiting. He gets into why when they say yes on the demo, why that might be the wrong answer. And so if you want to get better at selling the value of what you do, Alex is your man. And three, two, one, let's roll. All right Alex, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. Tip number one, show instead of tell. Most people kick off a call with a million questions and discover it. I would rather be in the demo live asking a million questions. It's a much better experience for them. So what I recommend to do is you open up the dashboard, the demo, the deck. And you get right into it and you say, how do you track applicants today while you're showing it? You want to ask all the questions while it's live on the screen because it grounds it in reality. It makes it real and it helps them understand how your product's actually going to help them. Not just question and answer time with a new AE. Love it. What's number two? Number two, a question is actually a confession. Every time you hear them ask a question, it's them letting you know what isn't working at their business. And the wrong answer is just to say, yes, we do that and move on. The better way to handle this is to ask, you know, let's say they ask, does your product help with safety coaching? I don't want to say yes to that. I want to ask, how do you currently do safety coaching today? And what they're going to share with me is that it's really difficult for them to get everyone in the same room. It's not super simple for them to distribute content evenly across their nationwide presence. And I'm going to be able to show them our product in action, solving their problems in a more meaningful way than any back and forth of yes or no could accomplish in this point. You got to listen for that extra piece. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales, busy work like CRM updates, and flag hit and deal risk. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals and every discovery call with these three questions, number one, do you want to buy a K validate if the deal is real? Number two, when do you want to buy validate if it will close this year? And then number three, how do you buy validate that they will get you in front of power? We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. All right, Alex, round us out. What's number three? Third tip I call listen with your eyes. It's your body language that matters here. You guys, it's so funny. People miss the whole point of zoom. It's a chance to share your screen with them, get to know them. But here's the actionable tip. When that camera comes on, when they're talking, show them that you're listening. And they, if they don't share their camera, that's okay. So Alex, you talked a lot about storytelling in the prep. And much of that is going to happen during the demo. And so let's say that you're wrapping up the discovery portion and you're about to transition into the demo, into storytelling mode. Talk to me about how you like setup or enter the demo. A lot of this is you're now getting to be the storyteller. So have some pride in that. You get to say, now I want to take you on a journey into what it could be like. You can enter that story mode and start building on their imagination. Your current solution is making you have to work really hard, late nights, missed vacations. What I want to show you is something that might automate all those tasks that take up so much of your time so that maybe we can get you back on that beach again. You're trying to get their mind thinking about this utopia of where this could go and why is this going to be interesting to me instead of just why it's not working and can you solve my problem. They're going to go with you because they believe it's a better version of their life, not just a better version of their product need. So could you give an example of exactly what you would say if you were selling to someone at Teambridge or give an example from a deal the other day that you had? A great Teambridge example and what we do is we make a workforce management platform. Everything from tracking your applicants through onboarding them, scheduling them and getting them paid for the hourly 10th gig worker economy of the world. So when we enter this conversation I might say the best companies in your industry have gone out and found the best application tracking system they could find. The best onboarding platform they could find. The best scheduling platform they could find. The best paid solution they could find and they've all had to take a break from it and said wow why don't these systems work nicely together. And they're coming to us saying can you consolidate all this into one system so that I have a single place to run my business with because I'm spread too thin. And I'm telling a story that's guiding them in the direction of where this sale should go which is the consolidate on a single platform. And I'm planting that seed early just in the way that I enter the demonstration phase. I think what you're doing is something that is a lesson I've had to learn the hard way which is before getting into the actual product itself even if what you have to show is extremely compelling you have to lead with what Armand has told me is called the approach. You are leading with the high level three bullet strategy of how this thing works. To get them bought in on the philosophy and it sounds like your philosophy is there's like these three disparate systems and all these other companies have gone out and gotten these three systems and they're like why don't they all talk to each other and work together. And so what you're selling them first is not hey here's how the product works. Here's how we're going to help you with applicant safety tracking or safety coaching. You're saying first off let me just lead with philosophically this is how this thing solves your problem. Before I get into showing you how we back that philosophy up questions or feelings or reactions on that philosophy because if they're upset or confused about the philosophy you are only going to make them more confused when you get into the first module. I would say spot on analysis there Nick. If you're not helping them understand the why behind this conversation then it's just what it's a new applicant tracking system or a new on boarding system a new scheduling tool. They're not looking for new things they're looking for innovative solutions to their problems and you should be in tune to something you might be able to solve that they didn't even know was possible. So Alex let's say that that's like orienting you around what you're about to show them the before and after state. Now you actually drop into the demo maybe you're demoing feature number one. There's a bad way to demo a feature talk about what is the bad way and then what does the good way sound like. So the bad way is what I call vano widening. You're just telling them what's on the screen. This is where names go this is where you put a phone number this is where you put an email that's not actually helping them understand what is special about your product. The right way to demo it is what I call kind of making the beat drop. You're a DJ you have to build this thing up to the moment where you're going to absolutely melt someone's face. So you're going to first say what's the most important information that you need to capture about all your applicants. They drop a bunch of stuff in there. I build it up live as they're watching. I say what's the thing you wish you could interact with them on a daily basis that right now it's reactive at best. They give me their special sauce. I add in their special sauce and then I say wouldn't be cool if when you need to reach out to all of your applicants. I mean how many do you guys got? They say 250,000 people. I go wouldn't be cool with one click of a button to know which 150 are the most qualified applicants for this specific role that you're filling because of all the detail that you already had. And with one click of a button they can get a text message. They can get an email. They can get a push notification and you can do that all automatically without you having to be the one who even clicks the button. Sales managers, no one ever teaches you how to do your job. If you've ever wondered, why are my pipeline reviews useless? Should I actually hire this person or am I going to have to fire them in three months? Or maybe my forecast is like a finger in the air exercise where I'm totally guessing? Guess what? You're probably a little bit like me and you had to figure out this stuff from scratch. Fortunately I partnered up with the best sales leader in the game today. His name is Mark Casaglow. He led outreach from zero to 250 million plus in ARR and he has graduated eight sales managers who just became VPs and that is through his three step sales management operating system. There's a special discount code in the comments. I guarantee it will be the best sales management resource you've ever used in your life. Today's show is brought to you by consensus which can help you close deals faster by using automated demos to sell between meetings. Here's a tip. Share micro demos during each stage in your sales process. One way I do this is before a 30 minute demo. I'll share a 90 second teaser to get them excited and oriented around what they're going to see in the live meeting. Now if you want to take that a step further, the VP of sales at consensus put together a guide with six tactics that their team used to hit a 72% win rate that you can get for free at the link in the show notes. I want to build them up towards the utopia at the end of how this is going to be amazing and along the way, I'm gathering the things that make it land for them and showing it to them in the moment. Yeah. We call this using present and past questions. So one really easy demo flow for everyone can be before you demo a feature, ask a present question, which is just how are you doing this thing? Presently, how are you tracking applicants today? How are you giving your manager insight in the compensation decisions today? They will usually tell you the bad version of that because if you're asking that question, you know that it's already a problem for them in discovery. From there, they've given you the present bad state and then you demo the good future story and then you ask a past question and that's as simple as like, so you mentioned this is how you're doing things today. This is what it could look like in the future. How does this compare to how you've done things in the past? And that's when you can start to use the demo to create the gap between how they're doing things today and how you could potentially help them do things in the future. Is that like generally how you're going through the thing? I refer to it as the gap as well. That's the piece that you're most interested in helping them understand, define because you're going to need it later. So what do you do when people start getting caught in the weeds? So for example, it's like, how do I track applicants today? You're like, what if we could make this thing seamless this way? Yada, yada, yada, you would never have to think about tracking applicants again. And they're like, yeah, but do you integrate with this system? And can you have different levels of granularity and permissions? And what about this nuance that's only specific to our business? What do you do when someone starts to drag you down in the weeds on that first demo? So this goes back to one of the tips. There is a confession in this question. And so the first thing you should do is not just assume that that is a requirement of your product. The real question is, how do you do that today? Make them explain how they integrate their current thing with that other thing. Make them explain how their multi-complicated process works, and when they admit that they don't have it right now, it becomes something that is not a requirement of a future product, but it is a nice to have now. So that is the first move. And then the other is when I'm seeing it go in a certain direction, I think of it almost like a fire. And I want to put the fire out. And the easiest way to put the fire out is to actually remove the oxygen from the situation. Not to try and smother it and say, oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. But instead, what I'm doing with that question is I'm removing the air from the room and making them prove to me that this fire is actually a problem. How do you currently integrate with that system today? How did you guys accomplish that with the product you have right now? And I make them earn that whole piece they want. And if they can show me the roadmap, we could probably copy it. But if it's not something they've ever solved for before, then it's no longer a requirement of this project. Dude, I thought you were going to say the easiest way to put the fire out is to boot them from the zoom room. And it was like, wow, that's a best brave. But no, I've run into this also where when I was selling ERP software to law firms, I would frequently get asked, all right, like, well, can you integrate with our document management system? And there were some we could and some we couldn't. And I in my early days would get myself in trouble where if they asked about a DMS, we couldn't integrate with, I would like sort of get flustered and be like, oh, well, we can't. But here's like this kind of crazy workaround that you could do. Look, as I'm like, I thought it was a requirement. And then at the end of me, like, oh, well, we we don't have an integrated today, but your product sounds really, really complicated. And we're like, damn it. And so you're right, understanding what is the current state of how you're doing things helps you calibrate to almost inoculating against that shooting yourself in the foot like I did. And so I guess that brings me to my next question, which is like, I think I'm identifying a couple places demos will go off the rails. One is the oxygen sucker. The other is the answering a questioner trying to sell too hard against something that might not be a requirement. Are there other places that you commonly see AES get themselves in trouble on demos? And maybe you could talk to what they need to do instead. I would say one of the things I see a lot is that people desire back and forth interaction. And they get really flustered when the people on the other, the customers, the prospects aren't giving them back anything more than, yeah, no, it looks good. Keep going. Yeah, sure. And it's short answers on their part. And you're continuing to go, go, go, go, go. And so a lot of what I do is I make it so interactive that I say, how cool is this Nick? Is this incredible? Have you ever seen anything like this? I force their answers a bit more and I force their interaction to try and get a little bit more back and forth out of them. But then also while I'm talking, I stay very confident that what I'm saying is landing because if they say keep going, if they say, no, it looks great. It's not a bad thing. It just means that they want to see more. And so I'm not going to necessarily take that as a negative, but what I'm going to try and do is as I show something, I'm going to hit the pause button real quick, I'm going to ask them a question, not just look good because that's easy to say yes to the wrong question is something that a yes is the right answer. I want to ask them something that a yes is the wrong answer now. I'm going to say, is there any other product out there that you've seen even similar to what I'm showing you right now? And they'd go, oh, well, actually there's this one other one or maybe no, I haven't seen anything like it before. I want to force them out of just the yeses, which is almost counter sales intuitive because we believe stacking yeses is so valuable. But in a demo, if you look at the Gong recording stats and I talked for 86% of the time and all I got from them was tiny little confirmations that they're still alive, it doesn't feel great. You're basically shattering out of the typical buyer seller frame that a lot of prospects show up to demos in where when you open your call with the same small talk that every other salesperson is doing, when you ask the any questions question or what do you think question, which are not bad questions to ask on their own, but the problem is they are contributing to the perception that the buyer has of you of this person being just another cookie cutter salesperson like all the other ones that I've seen. And so what you're doing is you are pattern interrupting, you're breaking out of the common, oh, I've seen this one before with a different product that they're so damn used to, you're doing the thing where like you're talking about you're leaning in and showing your ear, you're doing all of these things to start to contribute to something Armand taught me, which is you cannot be perceived to be better until your first perceived to be different. And they're probably seeing eight demos of products in the same category. And when you do all of these things, you are the one that they remember. Now you have to do a lot of other things right, but the way that you're engaging them is really, really sharp. Hey, folks, if you keep getting grilled in your pipeline reviews, try this show up with your deal risks already flagged. So gaps in pain, timeline or power and your net's move ready to act. That's kind of where clarity helps is they will show you live signals and risks on your deals in one clean view. So you can run your business, not have your manager do it for you and poke a bunch holes. So we put together a free guide on three plays to get your sales manager off your back. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has a risk and I have something I can coach to. Now we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again, and you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. I said at samsara to many of the reps. If all you did on this call was sell them on why they need dash cameras, then they've convinced themselves that they need dash cameras. You failed to sell them on why they need your dash cameras, and that's the purpose of the call. So you really have to get into the differentiation pieces, because that's what's going to make them be memorable. When they think back on those eight, nine different demos that I did, what they remember is the experience of that zoom meeting, that first impression that they got. It's almost like a first date. Why does anyone get a second date because they were interesting? They listened. They had a good conversation. It's not because they came with the same exact pickup lines. Talk to me about selling on differentiators, because I think we've talked about a concept on this show before of the winning, losing, and neutral zone, which is where if you think about a Venn diagram of you versus your competitors, your neutral zone are places where you and competitors basically have parity in like you do the same thing and you basically do it equally. Losing zone is places where your competitors beat you. And as much as we all want to think we have the best product in the world, there's places our competitors beat us. Winning zone is the inverse of that. Those are the places that we beat our competitors. And something I got taught early is like we want to spend as much time as possible in the winning zone and basically check the boxes on the neutral zone and try to make them feel like the losing zone is not as important. I want to ask you, Alex, though, how do you steer the conversation towards winning zone stuff or how do you get them walking away being like I actually understand those differentiators and why they matter to me. So the way I actually describe, as I say, it's not about what you do. It's about how you do it because everyone does the what? The what is the industry that you sell into the product line that you have? The how is the differentiator? So instead of feeling like people aren't technical enough to understand that detail. I love to give them that extra detail. So let's use an example here. It is the samsara dash camera. And we are talking about how going down the road stuff can come at you that you just can't see coming. And recording the road on a sunny day is easy. Everyone can record a sunny perfect day. But what happens when it's actually like negative 20 degrees or 120 degrees? And what I'm doing is I'm making them think about the furthest extent of what needs to be in scope for the product to function and the worst case scenarios. Because the best case scenarios is that sweet spot that everyone's got that you described there Nick. The winning zones occur at negative temperatures and over 100. But you didn't take the time to look into the specs on all these products to figure out who can operate at those edge French cases. And those edge cases is why you should go with a premium product like a samsara. This makes me think about like when I was selling to law firms we had a differentiator, which was our ERP's ability to help them calculate the profitability of their 47 different practice groups that a law firm might have. And when we were up against a worse competitor, they might be able to help the law firm calculate profitability for one or two or three practice groups. But the level of complexity for 47 would have been too much. And I would sometimes lose on the column fodder deals because oh, they have profitability calculation. And so does Nick's company. And what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, it's really easy to do it if you just have one personal injury practice group pretty much any software out there can do that. So like if that's what you have, if you don't have more than one group, like probably get by with those. But how do you do it when then? And then I'm articulating oh, when you have multiple partners who split different practice groups and they've got different clients who are coded in different ways and basically amping up the complexity if my product can handle it to make them understand there's there's levels to the box check. And that's one of the ways you articulate same feature, but different depth of feature if I'm getting that right. Correct. Nobody asked me to bring up the temperature zones. I used it as a differentiator to help them understand with a story. So Alex, we've talked about all of the demo that you were doing. And in the prep, you talked about this concept of reverse dimming. We're there doing the demo because you walk us through what that is. This is one of the best parts. So we have this amazing tool that we're doing screen shares on. I'm doing my demonstration. I don't really know what a day in their life is like. So what I always recommend is hey, can you show me what it's like right now for the way you do it? I've been doing a lot of showing off what it would be like on team bridge, but man, the moment that they share their screen and show off their Windows 97 version of a product that is very difficult for them to use. It is no longer an elephant in the room where they get to hold their cards close to their vest of how it's not so bad right now. We all just saw it. And if you're not pushing for a worst demo in your calls, you're missing an opportunity to shine a big light on why this project matters. Yeah. I had a deal once where we were helping this law firm calculate their partner compensation. And they had a very, very, very complicated methodology for calculating what the 42 partners at this law firm were going to get paid at the end of the year based on how much they build the clients they brought in, etc. And like they were throwing all of this like very technical stuff at us. And like I could tell my solutions engineer was getting pretty overwhelmed. And he was a really sharp guy who did not get overwhelmed easily. And so I did what you talked about where it's like, Hey, like, could you show me how how y'all are doing this right now? And I'll never forget like the CFO of this law firm. She's like, Sure, she pulls up her zoom screen share. And she's got an Excel file with like 42 tabs. And she's like, so let me show you how this works. And she like clicks run on the formula that she had on there. And her fucking computer crashed because it was so complex. And she comes back on the zoom, she's like, sorry, you must have been in zoom and she does it again, Excel crashes does it again, Excel crashes. And and and everyone in the room, the managing partners on there. And he's like, Oh my God. And this was like, it just like totally like it leveled the playing field. And it made it so much easier to be like, Hey, we're not perfect. Like we were not able to perfectly solve the issue because there was so much complexity. But we did get the deal because it was a hell of a lot better than 42 different computer reboots, which is what this woman was having to do just to get the partners paid. I love it. What's that saying? Perfection is the enemy of progress. The clock is ticking. We can't let perfected the enemy of progress. So we got to progress to the last question, which is we've talked about a lot of really good habits for sales people. Now I got to flip it on its head and ask you about one bad habit. So the last question is what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sales people exhibiting? You think they need to break? Because it hurts them more than it helps. I thought long and hard about this one, because you guys have given out such good advice over the years on this podcast. And the one that I see the most is that everyone is pressured at the end of their month, end of their quarter to drag it all in, drag it all forward. And they call all their prospects, all their customers to try and find the shavings make a pile at the end of the quarter. And the reality is, they're now associating with the guy who calls when he needs something at the end of his month, at the end of his quarter. And the best time to call your prospects, call your customers is when you don't need anything at all. And they ask you, why did you call me? And he said, I just wanted to check and see how you're doing. He goes, well, you know what? Now that I got you, I actually do want to order another hundred units. And they will give you what you want if you just do it in the right way, and they'll respect you for that. Really good. Alex, thank you for joining us. Everybody, stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Already folks, it is time for a three step recap and one thing you can do. So three step recap. Number one, when you drop into the demo, you don't want to just drop in the screens right away. You might consider starting with what we call the approach, which is you recap here, the two or three problems that I heard at the highest level here, the three big steps and the outcomes you're going to achieve by the end of this demo. You do that at the highest level before you drop in. That's step one. Then step two, whenever you're demoing a single feature, first, ask them, how do you do this thing today? Then demo the future state in story form, and then just ask how does this compare to how you're doing things today or how you've done it in the past. And then lastly, number three is the reverse demo. You can show everything that you want about the future state, but the current state becomes undeniably bad when you make them demo it and their excel spreadsheet crashes in front of you. Today's show is brought to you by text us, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a feel forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting. And that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps, and use texting to keep deals moving forward with text us. Check it out. It's free in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by Nooks. Nooks is the AI-powered pipeline engine that researches your accounts, builds your target list, writes your emails, and gets you more live conversations on the phone. Thousands of reps at companies like HubSpot, SizeMek and Deal use Nooks to automate the busy work and prospecting so they can focus on closing deals. Reps that use Nooks daily have twice as much pipeline as their peers, and we put together a guide with our friends at Nooks on how to automate the busy work and prospecting and dialing so you can focus on winning. Go get it for free at the link in the show notes. Artinik, what's one thing people can do today? One of the biggest things that has helped me with my demos is leading with what is called the big team meeting demo deck, which is actually a resource that you built Armand that ties back, "Hey, here's what we heard in discovery." It gets the prospect saying, "Hey, what is on my wish list to see in this demo?" And tease things up to open the buyer up early so that you have a demo where they are actually engaged. And we will put in the show notes a link to that big team demo deck template that is free and that frankly has helped me make my demos a lot more interactive and less me like showing stuff and hoping that they're going to speak up and have a conversation with me. So go grab it, it's free, it's in the show notes, and we will see you next time on 30MPC. Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which can help you close deals faster by using automated demos to sell between meetings. Here's a tip. One way I do this is before a 30 minute demo, I'll share a 90 second teaser to get them excited and oriented around what they're going to see in the live meeting. Now, if you want to take that a step further, the VP of sales at Consensus put together a guide with six tactics that their team used to hit a 72% win rate that you can get for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by 11X, you're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying, and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact LinkedIn posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes.