Transcript
Speaker: Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. For B2B marketers and salespeople, the demo is the holy grail. If they can convince a prospect to do a demo, the world is their oyster. Once prospects see first -hand a product's value, it's only a matter of time before a purchase happens, or so the theory goes. In some ways, a demo is a marketing channel managed by the sales team.
Speaker: To get into the value of demos and how to do them right, we're talking with Keri Sokulski, president of Presales Mastery, which does demo performance for B2B software companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Keri. Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. Why don't we start with looking at the state of the demo?
Speaker: Where are we at, and how do you see the alignment between sales and marketing? At the end of the day, a demo is something that happens because of marketing and activity, and if a demo is successful, then you get a sale, which ties back into marketing performance. How are demos being used within the B2B software world, and where are the areas for improvement or areas where companies can optimize how they do demos?
Speaker: Great question and multilayered for sure. So it's an interesting time for pre -sales right now in that there's a whole slew of venture capital dollars being invested into tooling for the space. For a long time, pre -sales has been sort of the neglected portion of sales in terms of investment in really good solutions to help automate and make pre -sales professionals more efficient in their job.
Speaker: And when for most B2B organizations, pre -sales are sort of the secret sauce that really is going to determine whether or not a sale happens or not, we've been criminally under service to this point. So this is an exciting time that now the tooling space is starting to grow. I think one of the things that the new solutions that are coming into the space is really enabled is a big push on really pushing product -led growth into the enterprise space.
Speaker: A lot of SMB organizations have really led in terms of product -led growth by allowing their prospects to trial their software. Get on the website, sign up for a demo or a trial, get into it, start using it without any formal training or any gatekeeping, and it becomes a function of how effectively can we convert those trials into paying customers.
Speaker: In enterprise, that's a lot harder to do. Enterprise solutions are typically much more complex. They're more difficult to use. They require formal training before you're going to do it. And in a lot of cases, they're just not conducive to providing sort of a free trial sandbox for people to use. But when that's the sort of buying behavior that more and more people are becoming accustomed to,
Speaker: I think in a lot of ways influenced by the fact that if you think about how you buy most consumer type of apps or technology today, that's how you buy, right? You want to trial a new software, you're going to go download that app or you're going to go to the website and try a free trial, which almost all B2C type tools allow you to do. And so buyers are taking that expectation into the B2B world.
Speaker: What's really nice is that there's a whole slew of sort of demo automation type tools and solutions now coming into pre -sales that are starting to make it more realistic for enterprise software companies to satisfy this sort of product -like growth requirement in terms of A, from the consumer's perspective, get me access to the product much sooner in the sales cycle and without having to go through tons of qualification and discovery and talking to three different salespeople or have five different calls.
Speaker: And as well from the software company's perspective, it makes it easier for them to now sort of let the client self -qualify rather than having to put expensive sales resources on doing that for each individual prospect that comes through the door. If you look at every single B2B software website,
Speaker: one of the main CTAs is asked for a demo. Obviously, they want to have conversations, they want prospects to connect with pre -sales or sales right away so that they can get them into the pipeline. What I'm wondering about is whether there's a lot of thought that goes into what happens after the click. The CTA is great, but how much, what kind of workflows, what kind of processes, what kind of communication tools that companies are implementing when it comes to
Speaker: the post -click activity. Are a lot of companies unprepared or just not structured properly? You know, what are best practices in terms of making that demo experience or that demo flow as seamless and as delightful as possible? Excellent question. I think unfortunately, too little is being done after the click. In fact, I think probably in a lot of cases, too little is done even before the click, right? Because ideally,
Speaker: we don't just want people to click on show me a demo, we'd like to capture something from them in terms of what they're looking for as part of that demo, right? And so I think there's sort of two paths that organizations are taking after the click right now. One is to funnel them into sort of an auto demo, where they can basically view a demo or download a demo to watch on their own versus the other path, which is
Speaker: they're going to push them to some sort of sales person who's then going to go through the normal qualification process before actually allowing them to get a demo. The get a demo button is kind of like a red herring. It's like, oh good, we got you, you know, we got you caught. Now we're going to really in the same way we would normally do by, you know, cold colony or email you in the first place. So I think those are sort of the two main paths I'm seeing. But I think, you know, ideally that button is clicked and then there are some qualification questions that come up after that.
Speaker: There's a couple really cool tools around demo automation and support these sort of self -service demos. And all of those tools ideally do a good job of trying to segment those sort of auto demos by persona, by industry, by critical business issue, that sort of thing. So they have multiple examples of demos they can serve out to that audience. The goal is,
Speaker: find out which one is most appropriate for the person clicking that button and to make sure that gets delivered as soon as possible so you can sort of have that instinct gratification the buyer is looking for or the prospect is looking for. I see demos that the post asks for a demo click happening in two ways. One is that you could envision a world in where people are build your own demo. So come to this demo form, tell us what you're interested in, tell us what your pains are, and then automagically
Speaker: a demo will be created that will be customized or personalized to their pains goals needs what have you and the second part of the process is that communications flow so once you know what people are struggling with what they're looking for then you can personalize the whole drip marketing campaign around them specifically.
Speaker: Actually, what happens is you almost have this sort of enhanced nurturing impact or this nurturing tool on steroids. Is that happening right now or is that kind of thing that people are actually going to have to strive for as we get into personalization and really producing marketing that's relevant and on target? I can't tell you if it's happening ubiquitously. I will tell you there. I mean, the nice thing is the way that the
Speaker: these demo automation tools work. There's sort of two approaches. There's one where they're just building multiple assets based on a certain, like I said, persona industry, you know, critical businesses, whatever. And it's either the sales reps job to determine what the right fit is, or hopefully they've automated that through, like you said, the marketing team or the website to ask those questions and automatically serve up the right one. So it's not that it has to be created on the spot. It's that it's already there. It's a function of
Speaker: based on the questions and the answers that are asked to those questions, we know which one to serve out. There's another organization in the demo automation space that takes a somewhat different approach. They're almost like the equivalent of a video choose your own adventure, where basically they will query the audience on what issues are most important to them. They'll have them actually order them in order of priority, and then they will auto stitch together a set of sort of video snippets into a longer demo and serve that out to them.
Speaker: I think what's really exciting about all of these tools in this particular subcategory is not only are they gonna support, like you said, a much more personalized sort of marketing drip campaign and that kind of stuff, they provide really interesting data. So they'll actually report back on who's accessed those particular demo assets and what portions of the demo assets they've been on. So how long did they spend in the demo asset in total? And then how long did they spend on each screen? So if I know they've spent
Speaker: a lot of time, for example, on a particular dashboard, I now know when I'm reaching back in, well, maybe there was a particular report on that dashboard that's resonating with them. And that's something I should concentrate on in my messaging. They also do things like if they're shared, so they'll provide this link to the asset, if you want to share that with someone else in the organization, before you log in to view it, you've got to add your email address. And so now all of a sudden,
Speaker: someone goes to click on that button, says, I want to see the demo. They answer their questions, they get the demo, and they say, this is really cool. I want these other three people in my organization to see this. And they send them an email with the link. Now when those new three new people click on it, they enter their email address. And now all of a sudden, I as an organization have four people that I can reach out to in that organization instead of just the one. So it helps these organizations go really broad inside the organization, which we all know is a key to success.
Speaker: given that everything is a team buy and a buy by committee and most of them must be to be software sales. Really cool functionality there. That sounds extremely cool and it sounds like demos, advanced demos, demos what they should be because most demos are pretty boring right now or pretty traditional. You fill out the form, you click submit, a salesperson calls you or sends you a series of emails and then they give you the demo.
Speaker: not terribly inspiring doesn't deliver a lot of value not personalized at all so i can definitely see why a whole lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to the demo landscape the other thing that i wanted to ask you about. Is that in the software world marketing and sales for the most part operate in silos.
Speaker: Sales complaints that marketing doesn't give them good enough leads marketing complaints that sales can't close deals and then there's internal bickering and fighting about who's to blame one of the things i'm wondering about when it comes to demos is how much influence.
Speaker: or involvement should marketing have in the whole demo process? And you might think that sales would say, no, this is our world. We should control it. You guys stay out. You've done your job getting people to take a demo from that point on. It's up to us. But I'm wondering whether they should, in fact, work together and move forward and lockstep to make demos more effective. It's an interesting question. I think that one thing I think marketing could probably do to enhance the process is
Speaker: find ways to be a little bit more personalized in terms of the value messaging that gets delivered to prospects, right? Every prospect thinks they're ultimately unique, and whether they are or not is up for debate, but everybody thinks they're unique. And while a lot of websites, for example, are going to show sort of generic value props, or try and go as broad as possible, ultimately, most buyers are unsophisticated buyers, they don't buy software as a general rule,
Speaker: And people aren't generally very good at envisioning what a particular software solution is going to mean to them based on a generic demo or through generic messaging. They really need to see their specific problems represented in the software and how it's going to address their workflows and their processes, their reporting, their data, etc., to truly understand
Speaker: that that's the right solution for them, which is why you ultimately end up getting, you know, the second third demos or proof of concepts where you've actually configured the software to be specific to those prospects. Alright, because ultimately they need to see that and so maybe we're marketing can add
Speaker: a little bit more value is finding ways to differentiate the message upfront so that the value props more closely aligned to more specific challenges that individual prospects have versus sort of a broad set that in general, over urgently apply, but aren't necessarily as specific as they could be. The other thing I can think about is one of the things that I coach on my clients in terms of improving their demo performance is
Speaker: we really need to be storytellers when we're giving a demo, right? Everybody wants to and there's a big reason for this, right? Stories, there's a lot of science behind the impact of stories. And I'm sure you probably know this even more than I do, given your background, but stories really improve
Speaker: people's memory of what they're being exposed to. If you hear something in context of a story, it's going to be more memorable than if you just hear a generic statement. When you can tell stuff in the context of a story, whether it's something that happened to another prospect or a client that you have, or something that you as a salesperson have experienced, you can relate that to the prospect, they're going to relate to that more effectively, and they're going to take it back with them. So they're going to actually respond to that better. I think in general, marketing is much better at telling stories than sales are.
Speaker: In a lot of cases, they're usually exposed to more information around those stories. One area I think where marketing might be able to help sales is in helping them actually prove how they tell stories, whether it's getting more stories from existing clients and crafting better messaging around that, or just wordsmithing even existing stories in a much more effective way.
Speaker: That's an interesting concept because I see storytelling within the software world as a virtuous activity. So a lot of marketers don't have enough exposure to prospects and customers for whatever reason. They're not in the field. They're not talking to customers on a regular basis. Meanwhile, sales is talking to prospects all the time. Customer service or customer success.
Speaker: are talking to customers on a regular basis and all that has to be fed back into marketing and then arm with that knowledge marketing then can feed those stories can package those stories back into sales so that demos can be more compelling they can resonate they can make an impact.
Speaker: Because you can picture that experience you can paint that experience for us prospect and i think that's one of the reasons why marketing and sales if they can collaborate if they can work together. They can make the demo experience powerful personalized customized and really enhance or accelerate the sales process so i think there's huge potential for a unified approach to demos as opposed to simply being the realm of sales. Yeah totally agree.
Speaker: When we look at the way that marketers assess their own performance or quantify what they do, obviously the MQL has been the king of the hill. And increasingly it's being eviscerated because there's not a lot of value when you really look at it in terms of MQL. Somebody who downloads an ebook and provides an email address, well, that's just an expression of interest. That's not really single buyer's intent.
Speaker: some marketers will rally around the MQL. Some of them will move upstream and go to a sales qualified leader or an SQL. And I'm wondering how demos and the number of demos and the performance of demos and how demos convert into sales can be tied back into marketing performance. Because when you think about it, a good B2B marketer really is about conversions, whether the conversion happens right away or whether it happens after a demo.
Speaker: if you can get people to convert and if demos are part of that conversion formula, then it just makes sense that marketers should be able to quantify their performance based on the number of demos or the effectiveness of demos. Do you agree with that? And how do you tie that into the quantification game? I think one easy way to do it is it would be it'd be very interesting to see if you're if companies are not already doing this, I think a bunch probably are the the percentage of
Speaker: both MQLs and SQLs that advance to a demo. And then from a demo actually advance to a generic or intro demo into a more structured or customized demo. In a lot of cases, you got to do both because there are a good chunk of sales people out there that use the demo as a crutch, where ultimately
Speaker: they're not even interested in qualifying pre -demo. They're just like, great, you want to see a demo? I want to show you a demo. It's not on me. It's on my solution engineer or my sales engineer to do it. I'm going to show everybody that wants to see you on a demo when that should never happen. They should always be qualified, not because we don't want to waste time on people who aren't going to buy, which is absolutely true, but even more so because
Speaker: In the demo world, the gospel is you should never ever be delivering a generic demo. It should never happen. There should never be a spray and pray, harbor cruise, show me everything you've got and hope that something sticks kind of demo. It's just not effective for anybody. You should always be doing proper discovery ahead of time to make sure that you're focusing on what's important to the client or the prospect. I think that measuring
Speaker: the transition or the progression rates from MQL and SQL into those different demo steps. But I know that most sales organizations are tracking the funnel progression in each of those steps because if anything, they're just a great way to find out where you're getting stuck. I don't think in a lot of cases, there's a situation where if the demo doesn't win the deal, it was a badly qualified deal for marketing or anything like that. It could just be there's lots of other things that are happening.
Speaker: Um, in that demo, I mean, that didn't go demo go wrong. Or when we got to deep discovery, we, our solution wasn't a good fit for some reason, or if there wasn't budget, but you're not going to necessarily find that out right up front. Um, and even if there is no budget, it still doesn't mean you're going to qualify them out and not do a demo. So I think there's a lot there that you can unpack to track that. I'm just, I'm not sure.
Speaker: how marketing should necessarily be tracked based on the demos outside of sort of what percentage of what they're throwing over the fence actually turns into what sales deems is a qualified prospect to show a demo, both a generic and a customized demo.
Speaker: At a high level, I think that if you're going to assess the performance of marketers, obviously you're going to look at what the website does, number of downloads, number of unique visitors, number of total visitors. And if the CTA is one of the major CTAs is asked for demo, then you have to add demo requests into the marketing assessment mix. I think there's a lot of thinking if companies aren't already doing it, they should be
Speaker: thinking about how to embrace demos as a way, as a KPI. I'm curious about getting some insight into what you do at pre -sales mastery, the kind of companies that you work with. What kind of things are you trying to help them with? Is it simply improving how salespeople do demos or is there more to it than that?
Speaker: When we think about improving sales, the most effective thing in terms of uplift of sales success, in terms of win rates and attainment to quota, coaching is, there's lots of studies that show that coaching is the single most effective thing you can do. And so I do one -on -one coaching with anyone in the organization, primarily the pre -sales organization, that is delivering demos to prospects.
Speaker: And I work with them usually over sort of three -month engagements where I'm coaching them on actual demos that they've delivered to live prospects. So I'll take a recorded demo that's been delivered to a prospect, upload it into my online coaching platform, provide a very detailed set of feedback around what they've actually delivered in the wild, right? So I'm coaching on real behavior that happens in the field, not something that's in a simulated sort of internal training environment.
Speaker: I also have a 95 metric sort of demo best practices framework that I score every individual against on every demo that they do. And so what that allows me to do is really sort of objectively identify where each of the skill gaps might be for every individual and track progress over time as they improve. So it really moves the dial in.
Speaker: uplifting in a fairly fast, fairly quick manner, the overall level of demo delivery and execution by whether it's a pre -sales person or an account exec. So where can people learn more about you and pre -sales mastery? Best place is to go to our website. It's pre -salesmastery .com or feel free to reach out to me, Kerry Sokolsky at LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out at any time. I'm having a chat about helping you win more business through better demos.
Speaker: Well, thanks for your insight, Terry, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark .co. I'll talk to you next time.
