Frequently, when we finish a demo session of our HR app, customers will tell us “Wow, that was a great demo!” when signing off. I never really thought about it, other than the fact that I usually had a good time showing them around, and that I was glad they enjoyed it too.

But then this past week, I have been on the opposite end of the stick, as my co-founder and I have been looking around for a new CRM and email campaign system for our SaaS product. We’ve had demos with quite a few vendors now. Some of them quite huge mega companies, and one or two of them who happen to be the darlings of the startup world who are talked up a fair bit on social media.

Our findings? Almost all the demos we have done have been mediocre or terrible experiences. Really. It has been quite a surprise and a bit of a wake up experience. For instance, I am currently typing this while waiting for our third ‘demo’ meeting with one particular vendor. The first was cancelled due to a laptop problem with the sales rep who was to give us the demo. The second was just a meeting with a junior employee who simply asked us a series of qualifying questions (that we had already emailed them before) and couldn’t actually answer our own questions about their product, and this third appointment coming up, I assume we will finally actually get to see what the app looks like finally. And this is a huge company with millions of users worldwide.

Our experiences basically boil down to:

We’ve been given demos by nervous, hesitant people who don’t seem to know their own product very well
People giving demos seems surprised, or put out that we ask a lot of questions and pose scenarios to them
We seem to be treated as an intrusion to most vendors, and they seem to be keen to work out if we are ‘serious’ before they will commit any time to us

All the above is basically the antithesis of what we try and do in our own company.

Our own sales cycle is very heavily demo based. Almost all our new customers generally do a demo session with us before buying, so I understand the importance of this crucial step in building our customer base.

Are our demos particularly fantastic, and do we have a set ‘playbook’ for how we run things? Absolutely not. In fact, I think there are several ways for us to improve (which I outline below), but I was surprised to see that our demo sessions are apparently well above the standards of companies that have received $millions in funding. (As of writing, we have received $0 in funding).

But what IS our philosophy when doing demos? Well, I have a simple set of rules that I always follow, and that I encourage anyone on our sales and customer success teams to do as well. Here they are:

This is all about the CUSTOMER. The fact that someone wants to see around something I wrote is totally exciting to me, and I cannot wait to show them what we have. No bored monotones here, or rushing through. I am as excited as a new dad showing off my baby - no matter how disinterested YOU may be!
This is all about the CUSTOMER. They have come to us because they have a problem. Rather than jumping straight into screens, I spend at least the first 10 minutes of the demo time asking them about their business, and what challenges they are facing, so I can best tailor the demo to suit them. Note: We do this at the same demo session. No separate sessions just to ask them questions and wasting their energy to try and schedule a follow up demo time. We try and ask pre-qualification questions in our online demo booking form.
This is all about the customer. We have customers in over 70 countries, so not everyone is going to work during my 8 to 5 work day. Someone wants a demo at 6am my time, or at 10pm, I will usually arrange things so I can do it. Not all the time, of course, because that would be nuts, but where possible, we try and accomodate them when they are free. Now that we have a larger sales team spread across the world, I don’t have to work crazy hours any more, but I will do so if needed from time to time.
A demo is not a short lesson. We don’t go through step by steps, but rather focus on the results they can get. For instance, if someone asks us about onboarding checklists, we don’t go through how to set up a checklist from scratch, instead, we jump to an already sent checklist in our demo company to show what it looks like from the employee’s perspective, and then how it looks like to the admin manager when the employee completes it. There are a dozen things in between all of that, but we don’t go into it in detail, but rather skim over it. Benefits over features. Sell the sizzle, not the sausage.
We do have a ‘standard patter’ of how we walk through the system when showing it off, but that is not a fixed thing and anyone can throw that out the window completely depending on customer feedback and responses during the demo session. It is simply a guideline to set things in motion and eliminate ‘quite spots’, but it is not set in stone.
We (our sales and customer success teams) sit in on each other’s demos every now and then so that we can all learn from each other, and improve our presentation style or standard patter. I originally set the demo sequence years ago, and my team uses that to a large degree, but recently I asked to sit in on other sessions because I thought that my flow was obsolete, and there could be better ways I could to it myself based on everyone else’s experience.
We always pause for questions, and if there are non forthcoming, we ask leading questions to eke it out of our customers. Questions are good, and means that they are processing what we are saying and trying to apply it to how they work in their own companies. If they are silent, we try and ask things like “How do you go about recruiting at Acme Co. right now?” or “How do you onboard new hires at the moment?” to try and work out if they have problems that we may have a solution to.
We never over promise. I was guilty of always saying “Oh, we haven’t got that feature right now, but we can add it next month for sure”. Well, sometimes we can, but often times we cannot, so I have learned not to give unrealistic expectations. This also goes if a customers asks us for something that we have NO plans to build. We never lead them on. We simply state that this isn’t in the larger product vision and then we even recommend competitors for them to talk to. My philosophy here is “If my customer is happy using my product, then I am happy. If my customer is happier using a competitor’s product rather than sad using my product, then I am happy”.
Be honest. Our system is large and complex and ever changing. Heck, I wrote 99% of our app and even I don’t know if we can do certain things or have a particular feature quite often. Nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can check and get back to you”, but do it with confidence. Nervous looks and hunched body language does not inspire faith in you (and, as a result, your company) at all. Oh, and if you promise to get back to someone with information, please actually get back to them and don’t ignore it or put it in the ‘too hard’ basket and forget about it.
Respect the customer’s time. They have taken a chunk out of their work day to spend it with you. Do not make them regret that. Actually, this is a problem area for us. Our demo sessions are allotted 45 minutes, but we often go over that, especially if there are a lot of questions. We always pad out the gaps between sessions to allow, and if we see a session is going over the 45 minute mark, we will always pause to ask the customer if they are happy to continue, or if they want to schedule a second session.
Always follow up. We try to send out a ‘Thank You’ email to the customer within minutes of ending the session, and this means just a simple ‘thanks’ for their time and their questions. We rarely ask for the sale during this follow up email unless they seemed really keen to sign up today. This is all part of being respectful for their time and attention given to us rather than anyone else.

The above is not a definitive list by any stretch, rather, some simple guidelines that we follow here at our startup. It’s not perfect, and we are always changing and updating it to see what works, but I believe it at least contains the essence of what most companies should consider when doing product demos.