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.

There is an interesting Answers discussion thread on LinkedIn asking, “What impact does sales training typically have on a group of sales reps?” There are many responses citing how most of what we learn is forgotten within a few days, and that salespeople go back to what they were doing before and lose what they’ve learned because there is no recurring reinforcement of what the course taught them.

This is a major concern, considering that $5 billion is spent annually in the US on sales training. What’s your ROI on sales training if this money is mostly going to waste?

This is why at SalesWays we believe in integrated methodology training: sales training based on a method that you’ll actually use each day through software tools that make your life as a sales person or manager easier. Depending on your needs, we also offer consultation follow-ups to measure success and ensure that things are running smoothly on an on-going basis.

This is how we ensure a return on your sales training investment. Why would you settle for any less?

Successful salespeople won’t often dissect the dynamics of the sales environment, and what they do within the environment, but most will agree that there are two sides to selling: using sales skills to make a sale, and using people skills to make a sale.

We call these opportunity focus, and relationship focus; the two dimensions of selling.

Opportunity Focus

Salespeople need to know how to sell. Through experience and trial and error over many years, experts have developed the science that governs a winning sales process. There are countless interpretations; hundreds of books have been written describing it, and literally millions of successful salespeople have been weaned on it. Knowing how to sell—using proven rules and experience—that’s opportunity focus.

Relationship Focus

In the sales opportunity, both customer and salesperson pit their skills against each other. The customer wants the best deal, and the salesperson who wants to win the sale without compromising their company’s profitability. The selling process has a large element of negotiation about it, and all aspects of the process create tension. Relationships, if they can be struck, used, and sustained through the sale, can ease the tension. Leveraging interpersonal skills is the other dimension of selling, and that’s relationship focus.

The key to being a successful salesperson is not just using one or the other—it’s blending both, and also knowing when to shift focus from one to another.

–Excerpt from OPM: Opportunity Portfolio Management, the upcoming book.

Will technology ever make the salesperson obsolete? In short, absolutely not.

This is a common refrain at every step in technological advancement. Back in the late 1990s, there were whispers of how Internet technology would remove the salesperson from the transaction between buyer and seller. Now, over a decade later, we know that is not the case.

For the buyer, Internet technology allows them to conduct research on their own (with popular and trusted review websites like CNET, and Consumer Reports), and go through early phases of their buying cycle without contacting any vendors.

But technology also plays a big role in helping the salesperson achieve their goals. Advances in technology help salespeople reach prospective customers better, and provide the tools to manage a salesperson’s day-to-day workload.

Technology is neither the buyer, nor the salesperson’s enemy; it facilitates both the buying and selling process. In fact, technology is even right at the core of what we do here at SalesWays. The sales tools we develop at SalesWays allow salespeople to expand their opportunity portfolio, driving up overall value, and bringing them the results they are looking for.

So, technology is not going to replace the salesperson or leave them behind; for those adopting the best tools, technology will propel them even further toward their goals.

Salespeople usually get trained by “learning on the job.” Depending on who’s teaching, that may be OK, but it often leads to non-conformity of understanding from one salesperson to another. As salespeople move around, they find that they have little in common with their fellows as far as understanding the fundamental language of the sale.

Without formal academic teaching, the language of sales has developed in a distorted way. Even some of the most commonly used words, such as opportunity, can be understood differently from one salesperson to another. Some are convinced that an opportunity is a lead, an indication that someone may be interested in your product. Others say that the opportunity really doesn’t have any bite until there is concrete evidence that the customer is serious about buying something, such as when a request for a proposal arrives.

If the latter idea is taken to the extreme, opportunities are not recognized until late into the customer’s buying process–this is not a good way to sell against competition who know better.

A while ago, I tuned into a conversation between two of our salespeople. One of them, a relative newcomer to sales, was commenting that given the experience of his first year in sales, selling was easy.

I’ve been selling for a long time, and I have never thought selling was easy.

In earlier entries, I had talked about sales as a profession. As in any profession, it’s difficult to make a call on how easy it is until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Early success in sales can be the result of factors outside of your native selling skills.

I remember my first order was for about $10,000. I was elated. The problem was that most people in the sales department are nice, and they pat you on the back for your first sale. But it wasn’t a sale; it was an order. I just took the customer’s call and wrote down the information. The guy whose territory I had just taken over did the spadework.

The more experienced you become at selling, the higher you rise, and the more challenging it becomes. You are now up against competitors whose maturity evolved from the same torturous path that you followed to become successful. If selling is easy, you have no competition and sometimes that is the case. Or, someone else is doing the work for you. But if your product is much the same as your competitors, and the salesperson you are working against has the same experience as you, selling will not be easy.

Every salesperson has to make presentations to their customers, and the most common tool they use is Microsoft PowerPoint. In an earlier post, I even talked about PowerPoint as a form of “persuasion technology” in sales. But PowerPoint is not without critics; some feel that it encourages a lazy way to deliver information: first, you get the bullets into PowerPoint, then, you read the bullets to the audience. Presentation done.

Lots of stuff has been written about how to do it better, but if you are already prone to using PowerPoint, are there any alternatives?

Flypaper is interesting, because it is free. No caveats or hitches here.

Download this software and you can immediately design impressive presentations for delivery locally on your computer, or over the web. You can include video, audio, animation, and choose from predesigned models and templates. Flypaper works using a “story model” of building your presentation, and it breaks away from the “bullet method” of doing things. With Flypaper, the emphasis is on Flash-based animation that is easy to put together. Highly recommended and well worth a try.

What I findparticularly interesting is that the man behind Flypaper is Pat Sullivan. As you may already know, Pat was the founder of ACT! and later, SalesLogix; two commercially successful customer relationship management solutions. Given Pat’s background in sales, it comes as no surprise to me that he would be involved with persuasion technology.

Strategic customer relationship management has been my focus for the last twelve years. During this time I have worked with sales executives, managers and directors at major software vendors and consulting firms. I have always faced one major challenge: how to sell software or services to people who just don’t believe it can help them. “This is going to waste my time,” they say.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why CRM still does not have the same impact on sales as it does for marketing and service organizations.

Recently, I have completed some research which asked sales executives the major benefits that CRM brought to sales organizations. Most of them said that even considering indirect benefits related to their activities such as communications or reduction in administrative overhead, CRM did not help on its main promise: to increase sales productivity and revenues.

In fact, sales automation, when associated to mobile order entry is quite well recognized as an important tool. However, when associated with increased sales effectiveness with any kind of structured methodology, sales reps just turn their faces: “I’m afraid that it will take me too much time,” they say, “I do not see it as something that could make me work better.”

Working in the consulting business for the last 5 years, I could not find anything really new in this business. That is until a sales rep at one of my clients said to me: “Hey Enio, I´m in control of all my opportunities,” and showed me a PDA running a piece of software with an interesting dashboard. According to him, it was the first software that was worth using, because time invested on data entry results in fantastic results. He said, “You should try it yourself!”

It was the first time in many years that a sales rep told me that sales software was helping him to sell. I decided to check the methodology behind that software. And guess what? I found the book Sales Automation Done Right. Based on the ideas in the book, SalesWays was able to build Sales Cycle Manager, the software that makes the methodology come alive.

Enio Klein
Principal at K&G

I’m writing this on the way to Hawaii, on a cruise ship, a planned attempt at avoiding part of the long Canadian winter (which has actually been very forgiving this year). Cruises are always a good opportunity to read books, something that I find tough to do in life back home.

I quickly read two excellent books, the kind that you can’t put down once you start. One of them was Bob Woodward’s account of “deep throat,” the contact who gave him and Carl Bernstein guidance while investigating the Watergate break-in. In a short postscript, Bernstein said something that caught my attention: “Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.” This triggered something. I have often talked about the story that resides within our OPM sales method, which originated out of my first book and which has been expanded and augmented within the framework of OPM sales training. A sales method must have a story, because it has to follow real life experiences involved in the process of selling. A good many sales methods have been developed over the past decades and only a few of them have survived and are accepted. The test of a sales method is that it has to work, and it takes a lot of time to establish that. It’s extremely difficult to get salespeople to switch methods, even to a good one. They don’t have much patience, and if they try something new that detracts them from their normal routine, they had better see results quickly. If not, they revert to their previous way of doing things. The point is, that it is difficult to introduce new methods to salespeople if they have spent any significant time in the field and have confidence in what they believe is the right way to do it. Because of this, bad sales methods will never go mainstream–they are like bad news stories, unless they stand up to scrutiny, people won’t believe them.

Bernstein says the “story” controls the reporters. He’s right. Nothing can change the story, because it should be, by definition the truth. Reporters grapple with the task of finding the truth. It’s the same with sale methods. We try to discover a sales “method” Sometime, under scrutiny the method breaks down, because we haven’t got it right. The method only works if it truly reflects what goes on in the sales process—figuring that out is as difficult as a reporter trying to unearth the details that will piece together the “story”.

If I seem like I’m belaboring this point, it’s because I sometimes wonder how we got to where OPM is today. We started in the early nineties in assembling the components and here we are fifteen years later with a method, a book, a training course, and a patent. But the process was evolutionary, just like Woodward and Bernstein figuring out Watergate. There’s no doubt that the OPM method controlled us. Sometimes when we tried to add stuff the method fought back—with the new material the method broke down. We had to change it and test again, until it was right. As we added pieces to the puzzle, the basis for truth was tested. If we passed, we locked up that stage, and moved on.

The method controlled us, as the story controlled the reporters.

In my last post I referred to Michael Schrage’s comment that the 2×2 matrix rated along with PowerPoint as the two most popular business tools. I don’t rate them equal—PowerPoint does not have the same depth as the 2×2 in the power to unravel problems—it is more a set of tools to get a more effective portrayal of an idea or message. In an effort to learn more, I went over to Wikipedia to check on PowerPoint. This led to a digression that is worth blogging about.

Wikipedia says that PowerPoint is a ubiquitous presentation program. I guess we all knew that, and the reason it is ubiquitous is because of Microsoft’s marketing clout. It goes on to say that PowerPoint “is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology.” That last term caught my interest—I’ve heard of information technology, change technology, but this is the first I’ve heard of persuasion technology. I ploughed on:

“Persuasion technology is technology that can be used for presenting or promoting a point-of-view. Any technology designed and deployed for those purposes can be considered a persuasion technology. Such aids are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, cult recruiting and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human interaction.”

Wow, look at what heads up the list–sales! Click on sales and you get this:

“Sales, or the activity of selling, forms an integral part of commercial activity. It could be argued that it is the cornerstone of business as it is the meeting of buyers and sellers and all other areas of business has the goal of making that meeting successful. Mastering sales is considered by many as some sort of persuading ‘art.’ On the contrary, the methodological approach of selling refers to it as a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering, enabling the buyer to visualize how to achieve his goal in an economic way.”

I need to say “wow” a second time. That definition of sales is right on. I try to emphasize the true meaning of sales in our OPM course. I use a slide that says “sales is the business of doing business.” One of our trainers asked to take it out. I let him do it—but on sober second thought, I won’t do that again.

There is so much to talk about just in this simple wander through Wikipedia (sales is a persuading “art”, wow number 3!!)

Must do this again.