The Demo That Sells: From the Seller's Side

The demo is the only meeting where everyone on the decision map is in one place at one time. That is why it is the most valuable hour in the whole deal — and the most wasted.

It is wasted the same way every time: the seller opens the system, starts at the top menu, and walks through the modules one by one. After forty minutes he has proved the product is large. He has not proved it solves anything.

Rule one: the customer sees his own data or he sees nothing

Anyone demonstrating sample data with “Company ABC” and “Product 1” is asking the room for a mental translation they will not perform. The finance director does not look at the screen and imagine his company in its place; he looks at the screen and sees another company.

Ask before the date: ten items with their real names, five customers, and a picture of one invoice as it comes out today.

Three things happen when you do. First, what the room sees becomes their work rather than a presentation. Second, the request itself is a seriousness test: someone who will not send ten item names is not as close to buying as he looks. Third, while preparing you will discover something about their data — a conflicting unit of measure, one item duplicated under two names — and mentioning it in the meeting does more for you than an hour of demo.

That, incidentally, is half the message of data migration: a man who has seen his own data’s disorder on a screen understands why the disorder became a topic.

Rule two: three scenarios, not a tour

Ask one question before the date: “If the system did three things right, you’d be satisfied. What are they?”

Then show the three, first to last, complete. One transaction traced from document to journal entry says more than twenty screens. And anyone wanting to read the demo from the other side — the buyer’s — will find how to read a demo without being fooled written for him; reading it helps you more, because it is a list of what will be asked of you.

And cut everything else. Every extra screen you show is a screen that draws a question you do not need, or creates an expectation of a capability nobody asked for.

Rule three: do not lie, not once

This is not a moral homily but a commercial calculation.

What you say in the demo gets written down. Then the scope of work is built on it, then the project is delivered, then somebody says seven months later: you said in the demo that this would work. At that point you have sold one deal and bought a permanent handicap in a market smaller than you think, whose finance directors know one another.

The formulation that saves you, in three sentences:

“The system does not do that out of the box.”

“What it does do is this, and that covers this part of your requirement.”

“The rest needs customisation, at a cost and a duration I’ll put in writing.”

Whoever says those three in a meeting with four competitors has said something none of the others said, and has won the trust of the technical gatekeeper — the voice we saw can alone say no.

Rule four: show an error

Deliberately attempt an invalid action: issue more quantity than the stock on hand, post an unbalanced entry, exceed a customer’s credit limit. Show the screen refusing.

Because what the customer is buying is not the ability to act. It is prevention. He knows — better than you — that his real problem is that somebody can do something they should not. Thirty seconds of the system saying no sells more than ten minutes of green screens.

The story: three and a half minutes

The story is composited from real events, and every identifying detail has been changed.

A factory, nine people in the room. The finance director had mentioned to me a week earlier, in passing and without interest, that the hardest thing he faced was costing a production order after it closed, and that the one man who did it spent two days on it and nobody else knew the method.

I threw out the whole demo. I cut sales, purchasing and HR. I opened with one production order using the factory’s real items, closed it in front of them, and the cost appeared.

Time from opening the screen to the number appearing: three and a half minutes.

Then I stopped talking.

The man who spends two days on that process was in the room. He looked at the screen, then at the finance director, and said the sentence that ended the meeting:

“It produces the number without anyone entering it?”

I showed nothing else that day. The deal closed three weeks later.

The lesson is not that a short demo is better. The lesson is that a demo hitting one point everyone in the room knows is painful sells, and a demo covering everything tells everyone in the room that you listened to nobody.

Note also that the decisive sentence came from the person who could have been the silent loser — the man whose standing came from being the only one who knew the method. In that particular room he was exhausted by it rather than attached to it, and that is knowable only by asking.

After the demo, the same day

Send, the same day and not three days later, one page with three items and no more: what was shown, what was said to need customisation, and the question you did not answer plus when you will.

That page is what your contact carries into the room you do not enter. Whoever does not send it leaves his contact defending him from memory.

Checklist before you move on

• Did you ask for real data before the date? Did it arrive?
• Do you know the three scenarios in the customer’s words?
• How many screens will you show? How many could you cut without loss?
• Have you prepared the refusal scene — the system preventing?
• Do you already know the question you will be asked and cannot answer, and how you will respond?
• The follow-up page: is it going out the same day?

Next station

They liked what they saw. Now comes the question that collapses many deals that were winning: price, the proposal, and the discount trap.