Give a Great Product Demo: 5 Rules

Are you acting like a 5 year old when demoing your product?

Last week my son Max (5) asked me to help him with his show & tell presentation.

So I taught him a simple 3 step process.

1. Start with the problem. (Story)
2. Pick 3 benefits & features to highlight (Demo)
3. Ask if they want to play afterwards (CTA)

These 3 steps are just a compressed version of what I teach my SaaS coaching clients… focus on the pain, peg it to benefits delivered via features and go for the close.

What do you think the other kids did?

They just went up and showed their toy, awkwardly rambled on about the things it could do, then sat down.

Almost makes you wanna cringe, right? Thing is…

Most SaaS Founders act like 5 year olds doing show & tell when they demo.

It’s not a product tour you’re doing… it’s a sales demo. You need to connect the dots for your customers in less than 30 minutes.

If you’re frustrated with low sales conversion numbers from your demos, or the amount of time it takes to close deals, then you’ll want to watch this week’s video where I share my 5 step process for crushing your sales quotas by demoing like a boss.

No mindless rambling about all the “cool” things your product does.

No tumbleweed silences that you awkwardly break up with a classic “oh, did I show you it can also do X?”

Just a clear, efficient, value-driven exchange that sets up the sale without eating into anyone’s lunch plans.

Exclusive Download: Rocket Demo Builder™ – Never Give a Boring Software Demo Again

Maybe you already have your demo setup so that it’s short & concise, but are you following these other 5 steps?

1. Demo not tour
2. Connect to pain
3. Lead by question
4. Peg the money shot
5. Virtual close

The last one is the key to ensuring you reduce your sales cycles by future pacing the process with your prospect so they can get in the mindset of having bought.

Also, small tip – use BAMFAM in your demos.

Book a meeting from a meeting.

Never hang up the phone from a sales demo without agreeing upon a specific next step, ideally a call to review any questions that might come up, or to loop in other people on their team to define a proof of concept.

To help you crush your demo script, I’ve outlined a 9 box model called the Rocket Demo Builder that you can use to design your specific demo and get started closing more deals faster.

So what’s your favourite closing question? Post it as a comment and I’ll be sure to add a few others that I love using to get customers to say yes on the spot!

Have an amazing day!

What follows below is a lightly edited transcript of the video.

Dan: Hi, I’m Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy. And in this video I’m going to teach you how to demo your SaaS product so you get customers buying faster and be sure to stay to the end where I share a resource where you can learn how to put all this together quicker

Dan: To get customers excited and motivated to buy your product. Be sure to follow these five steps.

Dan: Step number one, Demo not Tour. Many founders when they’re, when they’re kind of demoing their product, and I put air quotes around that, is they’re actually doing a product tour. The key is to actually ask the customer what their biggest challenges are and show them those features that solve those problems. Not go step by step by step log-in, click the button, then this’ll happen. Don’t do that. Just give them the good stuff.

Dan: Step number two, you gotta be sure to connect the pain. You know when a customer comes to you, it’s usually because they want to solve a problem in their world, but what happens is the time from experiencing that problem to you talking with them could be a few weeks. So what you wanna do is ask questions and really connect the pain point and as you’re doing the demo, remind them.

Dan: This feature solves that thing you mentioned to me earlier on.

Dan: Step number three, Lead by questions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a sales call on the receiving end and the person just talks and talks and talks and talks. It’s actually like something I tried to do just to throw sales rep off is I’ll be the first one to throw out questions and if they’re asking me questions, I’ll reverse it on them anyways, don’t do that. You really want to have a prebuilt list of questions that you can ask to help guide the conversation towards really understanding if it’s even a fit.

Dan: Step number four, Peg the money shot. I also call this the drop the mic moment. You know in any demo the customer’s coming because they want to solve a specific pain point and what you want to do is figure out what would the feature look like that I know and you save it for the end that if I kind of like showed them this feature and they’re like, yeah, that really solves that problem.

Dan: Show them this one. Yeah, that solves that situation. And then finally peg it to the money shot where they’re like, Whoa, that’s amazing. That was one click that takes me 10 hours today. That’s how you’re going to get a customer to buy from you in that moment.

Dan: Step number five, The Virtual close. As you’re wrapping up your demo, you want to avoid the scenario where a customer is going to take months and months to decide to buy or you start the process and there’s all these different roadblocks that you’ve got to overcome that you didn’t even expect. So one question I like to ask is what does the process of you buying our software look like? What departments are could be involved and you can even ask it in a non assumptive way because they might mention things like legal, procurement, security, some level of auditing in the business, some kind of proof of concept that’s required and understanding that and driving that forward. It’s extremely important that you connect with the decision makers while you or your sales rep giving a software demo to uncover their pain and paint a bigger picture that also aligns with their business goals

Dan: It’s going to help you increase the velocity of your sales for your product.

Dan: To recap,

Dan: 1. Be sure to Demo not tour.

Dan: 2. Connect the pain.

Dan: 3. Lead by questions.

Dan: 4. Peg the money shot AKA dropped the mic.

Dan: 5. Virtually close your customer.

These are the five components that make a great successful demo. It also increased my clients win rates on an average of 40% on their software product demos.

Dan: As I mentioned at the beginning, I want to leave you with a gift. It’s called the Rocket Demo Builder™ and it’s my nine box model for you to design your demos to start closing deals faster today, you can click the link above to download that.