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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
We’ll talk more about the actual process of giving a combined sales presentation and demo later. But before we get into the blocking and tackling of presentation and demo, it’s good to have a concept of the content you want to demonstrate when your prospects agree to a formal sales presentation.
As with the other materials discussed, this should be done with a mind toward your narrative. And because a live demo will typically come after you’ve shared some initial slides from your sales deck, follow the framing you presented in your deck. Your demo will reiterate much of it, but with much better context, customization, and visuality.
What is that framing? Well, as with your sales deck, it’s the bucketing of key use cases and the features that enable them. Ideally, you should already have those use cases identified, as they are likely referred to in your sales deck. But think about the combination of most common, most important, and most impressive use cases your solution enables. Then rank them, such that you start with the most important and most compelling ones—because you never know when a demo will have to end early! Beyond that, I like to think of a demo as telling the story of how your solution is used, again starting with major pain points.
We’ve already looked at customizing sales presentation content for a given prospect, but your demo is where this sort of thing can really be done in earnest. In fact, as you’re developing your product, think of ways you can make it easier to demonstrate using prospect content—it could be something as simple as ensuring that a prospect name and logo can be quickly embedded, or as complicated as making it easy to import customer data to use in a live demo. But the purpose of the demo is not to be a cold rehash of the features that you may have just touched on in your sales presentation. Rather, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate the potential value the product could provide to the prospect, richly, before their eyes. More customization will raise close rates and shorten deal cycles—both things you want!
The simplest version of this customization is knowing the prospect’s business context—either from prior research or from discovery questions at the beginning of your call—and using that to guide the demo.
exampleAt TalentBin, that meant making sure that our sales reps knew the technical- and design-hiring requirements for prospects they were talking to, which was easily divined by looking at those prospects’ career web pages ahead of time. That way, the TalentBin rep could easily say, “I know by looking at your careers page that you’re hiring some iOS developers in Philadelphia. I would love to show you how TalentBin could help with that.” Consider this in contrast to something that is non-contextual, like, “How about we show you what this looks like for recruiting for Java developers in San Francisco?” when the prospect doesn’t recruit for Java and definitely isn’t based in San Francisco. Ask yourself: What are the key pieces of information you could use to modify your demo and make it more impactful to the prospect? Which can be sniffed out ahead of time, and which need to be elicited from the prospect?
If your demo is non-contextual and not tied directly to the business realities of the prospect, it will always smell like you’re running the demo to make the product perform at its peak attractiveness, rather than showing how it will work when used by the client. You can avoid that by focusing on the prospect’s business context first and foremost. It will make your materials more believable than other vendor demos they see and raise the trust factor. It also helps to do this research yourself. Because if you simply ask clients what they want to do, they may not know or may ask to go in the wrong direction.
exampleAgain, with TalentBin, the worst approach would have been to ask, “What’s a role you’re having a hard time filling?” Because the client would likely simply bring up their current most difficult role. Better instead to focus on the roles that the client has the most hires for, because that’s the larger pain point.
exampleA more evolved version of demo customization is a demo that actually includes user data. A great example of that is how HIRABL (the company that makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies) runs their demos: A week ahead of the demo call, the prospect sends HIRABL candidate submission data from the CRM system they use to track hires. HIRABL then runs their missed hire analysis in a new instance of their SaaS software spun up for the prospect. When it comes time for the demo, they execute a lightweight presentation so the prospect understands the general mental model of the problem, solution, value, and such, and then they turn to all the missed fees that HIRABL has identified for that prospect. That’s a pretty killer demo! “So, we found what looks like around twenty-five missed fees from your last two years of submission data. You make about twenty thousand per placement. Would you like to purchase the product so you can get cracking on collecting that four hundred thousand dollars of missed fees? We would just give you access to this instance right here. It’s ready to go.” The answer is usually, “Yes!”
Source: HIRABL
Obviously the latter case is far more advanced, and by no means should you say, “Well, we don’t have the ability to hyper-customize a demo environment, so we can’t start selling.” Not at all. However, when you work with product management, providing feedback on features you’d want to see in the product, remember that there are features that will make selling easier via a more customized demo. And even if those features don’t necessarily provide post-purchase value to customers, they can still be very valuable from a revenue-generation standpoint, in that they raise close rates and bring in more money!
exampleWhat did a demo script look like at TalentBin? Well, of course, it correlated to our core sales narrative, and was built around the Search, Qualify, Reach Out, Automate framing we presented in our sales deck. You can check out how we handled those first two buckets below. It starts with one of the most important use cases for our audience of recruiters, and then progresses from there in the way a recruiter would move from discovery of a new candidate to qualification of that candidate to outreach—a full life cycle of what recruiters do so often in their day-to-day workflow. Also note that it’s broken up to allow for pauses and discussion with the client.
As you read through it, imagine what it would look like to walk prospects through all the ways TalentBin fits into their day-to-day, and solves their pains at each step, while screen sharing the product. And think about what your demo would look like! What are the natural workflows that your prospect works through on a daily basis? How does your solution fit into them and make them better, faster, stronger?
Enhanced candidate discovery was TalentBin’s first value proposition, and one of the most easily comprehended by prospects. This section was where we touched on the importance of being able to discover engineering candidates who were previously undiscoverable in traditional recruiting databases—or at least super hard to find, requiring far too much manual effort.
We knew nothing would capture the attention of a technical recruiter like showing them the potential candidates they could find and engage using our solution, especially as compared to standard databases, so we started with that.
exampleI saw from your company’s career site that you need to hire some Ruby engineering staff there in the Dallas area, so let’s search for some.
Here’s how we build a search for people who know Ruby in the Dallas area. We can do it manually, or we can use our new Job Req Translator that automatically pulls out the relevant terms in your job posting.
I actually grabbed this posting before the call, so let’s paste that in there. See how easy that is?
Now, we can save that search for later use since we’re going to come back to this. Also by saving that search, you’ll now get recommended candidate emails from those searches every few days. But let’s expand this some to see the total number of potential candidates for this role in Dallas.
Excellent! Well it looks like we have around eight thousand results there. That’s promising, since LinkedIn only has around eleven hundred for that same query. Very nice! So that’s like seven times the number—I’m betting there’s a pretty hefty load of people in these search results who have zero LinkedIn profiles.
And of course, the way that you’d do this previously was to manually browse through GitHub, or Stack Overflow, or Twitter—it might take you five minutes per valid candidate. This way they’re already ready for you to review. And tons of them aren’t on LinkedIn being accosted by every other recruiter with a LinkedIn Recruiter seat!”
Source: TalentBin
This is where we would cover why having access to all of this aggregated professional activity was fantastic for qualifying that a candidate had the characteristics recruiters were looking for. Moreover, we looked at how using that contextual information, both professional and personal, in outreach could dramatically impact response rates and recruiter efficiency.
exampleOkay, let’s start looking at some of these profiles. You can see that we show a preview on the search page that includes the relevant information for the skill that was searched for, along with the various social profiles that we have identified and crawled for the candidate. If you want to, you can also tag these folks as ‘interesting’ or ‘not interesting’ for later bulk processing.
But for now, let’s check out an individual. Natalie looks interesting.
Source: TalentBin
Understanding that a candidate fits the bill and is at least worth reaching out to is a core recruiting workflow. Whether basing their decision on a resume or a LinkedIn profile, recruiters are used to doing that. So showing them how they could do that with a TalentBin profile, but with data aggregated from all over the web, was important.
exampleLet’s click into her profile. Now you can see that we’ve aggregated all of her various web profiles. See, here’s her GitHub, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and we even have her Lanyrd social conference profile. Nice.
If you ever wanted to go to those sites, you can just click on these like this. However, the big idea here is to aggregate that activity so you don’t have to do that.
Source: TalentBin
Understanding why a given candidate has the relevant professional skill is also important for recruiters. Often they spend time cross-correlating resume claims with sources of professional activity on the web. Moreover, they know that using contextual information in outreach is a valuable way to raise responsiveness but often takes too long to do in a scalable fashion manually.
exampleSo let’s look at how we know that Natalie has Ruby relevance. Okay, see down here on her profile, we’ve got her ‘interest viewer’ section, and if we click on Ruby there we see that, wow, Natalie is really into Ruby! She’s following a number of Ruby repositories on GitHub. She has it in her Twitter biography. She’s a member of a couple Ruby Meetups, and she has answered some Ruby questions on Stack Overflow. Nice! Looks like Natalie is really into Ruby.
The problem is that historically this is the sort of thing you’d have to spend five minutes clicking all over the web to determine. Nice that these interest details are right here so you can check them out, and maybe even share them with the hiring manager.
Let’s go check out Natalie LinkedIn profile. Whoops! That link is dead! Probably because she deleted her LinkedIn profile. But we’ve got it! We can see that she’s got a bunch of other interests in technologies that are relevant to us—Ruby first and foremost—so she looks like a great one!
Source: TalentBin
From here, we would cover the key remaining buckets, Reach Out and Automate. We continued to follow the recruiter’s natural workflow—using a real-world candidate that matched that prospect’s hiring needs—and highlight features that would boost efficiency at every step. Importantly, we would tie parts of the demo to prior elements, making sure to create a holistic understanding of how the product would impact the entirety of the recruiter’s workflow for the better.
In TalentBin’s case, the product was fairly evolved, so there was quite a bit of bucketing and a good amount of ground to cover. But that doesn’t mean that this has to be the case with your demo. The goal is to connect the known pain points to the solution and its benefits, step by step, so your prospects can truly see how it fits into their workflow and makes their lives better. You know you’re doing it well when prospects are saying things like, “That’s awesome” or, “You have no idea how much this will help me with XYZ.”
Think about the right way to go about demoing your offering. Is there a natural workflow to walk the user through? Is there a chronology? Are there specific key use cases that correlate to the value that you’re providing that you would want to start with? Think about the story of your product in the hands of the person you’re presenting it to, or the person that reports to her. What things will they care about, and what will make them better, faster, stronger, smarter, and more successful? Focus on those things, and you’ll be in a good spot.
I’m a big fan of video to help accelerate appointment setting in early-stage sales. Internet video is a fantastic tool; it’s highly accessible and provides for a richness of communication that far outstrips email templates or even visual exhibits. And thanks to mobile phones with fast data plans, video collateral can be watched anywhere, at the moment it shows up in a prospect’s email inbox or Twitter feed. As such, having a one-, two-, all the way up to five-minute overview of your offering to share with would-be prospects is extremely helpful.
importantThe goal here is not to sell the product. Rather, as with your email templates and phone scripts, the goal of these videos is to sell the prospect on the next step—getting on the phone for discovery, presentation, and a demo. And as with your slides and email templates, your video overview does not have to be perfect. It just has to exist. One of the easiest ways to create a viable overview video is to put together a highly shortened sales presentation and demo and record it on your laptop, while you narrate.