First, think about what is keeping your close-rate motionless and stagnant? Is it because of the intense and competitive landscape? Are you pitching to unqualified leads? Has something unexpected caused chaos in your business? All of these cited reasons are solid reasons you are not seeing progress.
When you think about demo conversion rate, you should first consider what is influencing your demos and what you can do to deliver high-impact demo presentations. Sometimes B2B SaaS pioneers, leaders, and salespeople miss out on the basics of providing a great demo.
So in this blog post, we wanted to highlight the seven common mistakes salespeople make during the product live-demo process. We will also provide new approaches and tips to solve these issues.
1. Lack of Demo and Product Knowledge
Many SaaS companies today create a comprehensive, complete onboarding plan, wherein new sales reps attend dozens of meetings and training activities to learn about everything – the job roles, SaaS products, live demos, offers, company details, and more. Learning will be continuous until they are pronounced to be ready.
Imagine yourself in your sales rep’s shoes, going through the same process, attempting to learn an entirely new SaaS product, sales playbook, and product value proposition. Can you imagine the ton of information they need to digest? It is a lot to take and digest. Most of the time, people will be most likely to forget more than 80% of what they learned after only a month. This means that everything they have crammed into their brains during training dissipates.
So what can you do about this? We suggest you continue combatting the forgetting curve, or you can start implementing interactive demo software that makes demos easier to execute for your prospects. It has everything your sales reps need – it’s interactive, easy to integrate, and quick to launch!
2. Failing to adjust the demo to your client’s needs at scale
An excellent sales rep understands that a great sales pitch is about the prospects and the value rather than the company or SaaS product features. So, how can you help your sales team focus on the customer without decreasing sales effectiveness?
Another common mistake most sales managers commit is spending a significant amount of time training new people on the whole SaaS product and asking them to develop a demo flow. Why do you want to do that with your sales reps? It is best to deploy a sales playbook since it yields better results. It is time to think of a better demo flow that includes a unique product click path and converse track that emphasizes a particular set of values.
3. Neglecting to validate value using relevant information
Do you know that people are ninety percent most likely to believe if you use numbers? This is not true, but we are guessing you found this phrase more reliable because of the statistics. Using proven statistics and data is vital in remote sales. There is a psychology behind sales, and one of the basic principles of persuasion is consensus. And whenever you add relevant customer stories, industry news, statistics, and ROI benchmarks to your pitch, you gain credibility.
This is not the most crucial part of your SaaS product demo. However, in many instances, this is the most neglected part.
4. Relying on wrong data to gain transparency
As a sales rep, you collect information in every aspect of the demo process – prospecting, qualifying, negotiation, and so on. But do you have the data that provides an objective view of what is effective and what is not?
The objective view provides you with transparency into your product demo process. Once you get this level of transparency, you can begin determining winning sales plays, test and adopt client propositions, onboard new sales reps much faster, and enhance consistency among you’re A-players. The possibilities are endless!
5. Ignoring product demo best practices
If you want to enhance your demo conversion rate, you need to learn, structure, and implement demo best practices into your playbooks and sales process. This usually includes:
- Properly preparing for every demo: Have you prepared all of your demo assets? Did your reset your last demo? Are you logged in?
- Using sales demo tools: What are the top-tier tools you use to optimize demo performance further?
- Developing a demo structure: Did you build your product demos according to the attention curve?
- Applying demo methodologies: These methodologies provide a basic set of tools that prevent possible mistakes making sure high-impact demos.
- Reducing stress levels in the demo process: This is when you need to provide your SaaS team with tactics and tools to reduce their stress and improve the overall workflow.
6. Not building rapport at the very start
Many of your prospects are quite doubtful of demos. They do not know what to expect, and they are alert, knowing that a salesperson is about to try and talk to them – the guard is up!
So, make sure not to jump right into the demo at the very start. Do some small talk with them to warm your prospects up a bit.
7. Not tailoring the product demo to the discovery
You have developed this fantastic SaaS solution. And you are super excited to showcase to your prospects what it can do. You even exerted effort to train your sales team on how to deliver a great SaaS product demo to ensure they carry it out successfully. Only not much.
The demo should not be the same thing every single time. Take note of this. In fact, it is essential to use the discovery you just made and apply it to the demo. And since every demo your salespeople will deliver is unique and different from one to another, ensure to highlight the most important parts. Only the best demonstration software like Demostory.io can help you execute an excellent demo experience, making your prospects more convinced about what your salespeople offer.
8. Not teaching your prospects about the trends
One of the great ways to win your prospects is to develop trust. And wonder how you can build trust? You need to show off that you know what you are talking about concerning your services and SaaS products.
Make sure to have a short slide deck (4-6 slides) at the beginning of your SaaS product demo to set the stage straight. Ensure your prospects understand the whole demo. Give them a glimpse of the many trends in the sales world, the transition that has been taking place, and how your SaaS solutions help them adapt to these transitions.
Prevent Demo Mishaps with Demostory.io
All mistakes we cited above are the ones you will most likely encounter in your sales process. So beware!
You can prevent errors and mishaps if you deploy a demo tech like Demostory.io. This tech guarantees a slick and bug-free live demo. One of the biggest benefits of this online demo tool is that it can help you deliver the best sales demo experience for your prospects. In addition, it allows you to see the overall demo in a more organic and life-like way.
