Podcast episode
The Demo Framework That Actually Closes Deals | Robert Friedland
30 Minutes to President's Club22 Apr 202532 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Assume your buyer has 60 seconds to pitch your product internally. When sending recaps or justification materials, skip the deck send 2–3 crisp bullets that clearly communicate the top reasons to buy. Reset the agenda mid-call if needed. If a buyer jumps straight into content or things go off the rails, pause and suggest how to best use the remaining time. This keeps the call focused and productive. Use a “vibey demo” to open, then do deeper discovery later. Morgan starts with a product overview to spark curiosity, then uses the second call to dig into what resonated and why—leading to richer discovery. Reverse-engineer problems from product interest. When a buyer reacts positively to a feature, follow up with, “People usually want that because they’re struggling with X or Y—what’s going on in your world?” PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB Sales Engineer @ Squint Head of Solutions Architecture @ Pave Field CTO @ Sisense Sales Engineering Manager @ Sisense RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Big Team Demo Deck 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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So I hope you enjoy this one and a 3, 2, 1. Let's roll. All right, Rob, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. Number one is demo the why. So whenever you're selling a product, the business outcomes that that product drives “are more important than how it drives those outcomes.” So you need to be talking to those outcomes and telling stories throughout your demo. So that looks like a demo flow that starts with the bad outcome. That's the status quo without your product. So that sounds like most people end up buying way more chapstick than they actually ever use. So you need to tell the story in that status quo and how that happens.
anytime I was starting an early stage demo saying, hey, by the way, while I pull this screen up real quick, are you looking at a tool to run comp cycles because people have been overspending? Like are you over budget or what's going on there? You get one free question every single time “because they perceive it as you trying to kill dead air.” That's where, you know, what all the outcomes are. That's when you're presenting to leadership. This is the big pitch as you're pulling it up. What you do is you reiterate the precise outcomes that you already know that they want to drive. Again, this isn't I'm about to take you through
So you ask your freebie question and they're like, yeah, our comp cycle has been running over. Yeah, it's been an operational pain. Oh my God, we're getting a little bit too big for these spreadsheets. And now it's time to kick off. Where do you actually decide to start in your demo? I'm curious, like how you think about like the entry point into the story. “what their problem is and what outcome they need to” drive. I actually think about when most people think about as one demo is probably like 15 little demos in between. So it's on you to pick that right entry point. So if somebody tells me that people are making mistakes, then what we'll start with is here's how we're going to make sure
we wanna have robust compensation analytics or reporting. How do you handle that when you know it's a feature gap? When you get hit with a question that ultimately leads to a gap is wondering discovery. You can't win it in that moment. And without good discovery, it's gonna be really, really tough to get out of there. But you should already understand the narrative. “You should understand where the problems are.” And then what you can do is you can ask them why. If you're asking me about analytics, what are you hoping to analyze there? And they'll tell you, and nine times out of 10, it's not something that's directly relevant to the problems that they're setting out to solve in your product. It might be a tangential problem, but what you'll uncover is that
How do you handle that when you know it's a feature gap? When you get hit with a question that ultimately leads to a gap is wondering discovery. You can't win it in that moment. And without good discovery, it's gonna be really, really tough to get out of there. But you should already understand the narrative. You should understand where the problems are. “And then what you can do is you can ask them why.” If you're asking me about analytics, what are you hoping to analyze there? And they'll tell you, and nine times out of 10, it's not something that's directly relevant to the problems that they're setting out to solve in your product. It might be a tangential problem, but what you'll uncover is that it's a different tools failing, not your own, that they're trying to solve.
is folks would be like, well, do you have analytics dashboards? And the bad thing to do would be like, yeah, we do, let me pull them up. You can look at attorney comp, you can look at different profitability by client, by matter, boom, boom, boom. And they were like, oh, well, we were actually hoping to see this over here. And so before demoing anything, you have to understand “why are they asking about that thing at all?” Because that helps you more nuanced understand how do I show it? How do I not show it and explain why I'm not showing it? Or how do I tell them we don't have it at all, but that's actually a good thing. There are three routes you can take someone if you don't do the thing they want. Route number one is what Rob described, which is you can say like,
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