Recently, a customer of ours used a term that I really liked. We were talking about the process of selling, and he said something along the lines of how salespeople need to avoid becoming “Bag Divers.” I’d like to talk about this concept a bit more.

When you make your first visit to a potential customer, do you make sure you’ve learned everything you can about their business before you arrive?

Is your presentation tailored to them, or is it the same one you give to every customer on a first visit? If you are doing a demonstration, is it a general exposition of your solution, or is it a focused presentation on how your solution can help your customer reach their goals?

Remember, in most solution-style sales situations, you are there to help the customer identify their specific pain, and show them exactly how your company and product can help them.

If you arrive, hand out literature (by “diving into the bag”), and show a standard presentation, you are following a basic process and relying on your company brand to make the sale. If this is the case, you were likely hired to be an opportunity hunter and strong closer. This can work for some companies, but eventually a competitor will offer a solution that helps the customer more, unseating you and your market share in the process.

Consider this: when a brand new potential customer calls (an untapped goldmine for any salesperson), what do you do?

In many industries, if a brand new name calls, it’s usually because the caller wants product information and a price. With the Internet, potential buyers can even arm themselves with this type of information, and are capable of being further along in their buying process than ever before. When taking such a call, the “Bag Diver” would be keen to give the caller a price, and set up a convenient time for a demo. The reality is, the Bag Diver may not be giving any more information to the caller than can already be gleaned from the company website, and with that kind of canned response, the Bag Diver is almost certainly losing the opportunity to make a positive impression on the caller.

So what should you do?

Learn about your potential customer’s specific pains, and suggest how your company and product can help. It’s this type of approach that will keep you, and your solution, ahead of the pack in the eyes of your customers.

Giving a sales demo is hard work. Giving a really good sales demo is even harder, especially if you don’t know what makes a demo good. A great way to learn how to give good sales demos is to experience some from the buyer’s perspective.

I just sat through a demo that was given to me by a  sales rep from another company. We are looking for some 3rd party solutions and I have been reviewing different options extensively.

At the beginning of the call, the rep told me that he wanted the demo to be as much of an interactive demo as possible. But saying that doesn’t make it so.

The demo was an hour long. And it felt long, because it was clear that the salesperson was reading a script. He was simply following through a tour of all of his product’s features. When I had a question, I had to interrupt him. He would then give a quick answer and launch back into his script. Many of the features he showed me were not even features that I was interested in, and he would have known that if he had taken the time to ask. After all, I was not looking for a description of what their product can do, I needed to know if their product could solve the problems I was trying to solve.

One hour later, I still didn’t know if their product could help me. The salesperson had wasted an hour of his and my time, and I knew little more than I already knew from reading their website. He was no further along in his selling process because he hadn’t helped me further my buying process.

So, if you want to give good sales demos, just ask the customer what they want to see. Know your product inside and out so that you can answer their questions, but don’t just give them a tour. Understand the problems they are trying to solve and then show them how your product can solve those problems.

In OPM, we call these the Probing and Proving phases of the sales cycle. In your early interactions with a customer, most of your efforts should be in Probing them to understand what they are trying to accomplish. Only then can you Prove that your products can solve their problems. You can’t write a script for a good sales demo, because a good sales demo is a conversation with a real person who has a unique set of goals.