Often, too often, the agenda is not clear, the audience is not understood, and the purpose of the meeting hasn’t been communicated.
As Pre-Sales it is our responsibility and delight to save the day:
Look at that. You’ve been memorable.
Surely you’ve run across a messaging structure that helps boil down everything you have to get across into simple steps. These frameworks are easy to use and help you think while reducing the time and effort required to prepare a customer presentation. Let’s look at two of them:
Is-Does-Means
If you have a module or a feature, you can quickly and clearly get across what it is, what it does, and then close the point with what that means to your audience, e.g. “my mobile phone is a small, battery-powered mobile device which helps me do email, messaging, and phone calls, which means I can stay in touch with family, friends, and business partners wherever I am.”
What-How-Why
As you prepare your solution and how it specifically applies to your customer, you might find it helpful to write the words What, How and Why on separate pieces of paper and brainstorm through a mind-mapping exercise. You’ll come out with something like “our product is a call center (what), it handles inbound and outbound communications and manages tickets through to resolution (how), so that you can better serve your customers (why).”
The direction of these structures is from your product to the benefits they provide the customer. What happens if we play these in reverse?
If you want to stay in touch with your family, friends, and business partners no matter where you are, it would be helpful to have a single device that can help you do emailing, messaging and phone calls, like a mobile phone!”
If you want to serve your customers better, you’ll need to handle inbound and outbound communications and tickets through to resolution. Our call center product…”
If you want to grab your audience’s attention, start with the value to them, progress through what they’d logically need to accomplish that value, and conclude with your product as the solution.
The Whys and Means will usually jump out at you during discovery. Flag them. When you craft your messaging, simply collate and prioritize them.
Surely in your qualification and discovery conversations* you’ve covered the basic purpose of your planned meeting: who will be in the audience, what their expectations are, and an agreed upon agenda.
But when it comes to the meeting itself, have your host open the meeting and lay these details out for agreement. In this way, the meeting is by the customer, for the customer, and about the customer, rather than by, for, and about you and your products and services. If there’s disagreement or there are political struggles going on, the audience members can resolve these things themselves without you having to defend.
The stage is now set on their terms. Your presence is to help them in their decision-making processes.
Now you can begin to share why you’re there to show, how you’re going to do that, and what you want them to take away.**
I once had a humorous poster listing Murphy’s Laws on Technology, which included this shrewd observation:
Any given program, while running, is obsolete
…because everything can be improved. You’re never done. There’s always something that could be added or taken away; another angle, a new technology, a change in the market that will render your solution, well, obsolete, even if it’s fresh into customer beta.
Claiming a solution to be complete, fully integrated, and end to end is an unnecessary and lazy sales tactic. Any skeptic in your audience will perk up and start challenging you.
For a recent demonstration…
I sat down to a web-meeting and conference call (VOIP telephony) and shared my desktop, while connected to my corporate VPN, running a virtual computing system (the demonstration system) accessed remotely (through a desktop emulator), which was itself running a virtual phone system / communications technology (the product being demonstrated), dialed into via cell phone by a peer on-site at the customer, which came back into my USB headset, which was itself full-duplexing the concall, the inbound call, and a conferenced demo role all at once through the same headphones and mic, recording the calls themselves to boot. All from my laptop, wirelessly connected to a router connected to a cable-modem inside my home office.
I took a smooth sip of coffee and showed them how easy the products were to use.
I’m sure you would have done the same.
Our audiences best understand complex solutions and messages through analogies.
There are many brainstorming techniques to help find the right analogy.* While creative people seem to come up with them on the fly, there may be a better source for analogies:
What are your interests?
Do you play a musical instrument? Are you a photographer? Is economics or politics a passion of yours? Can you quote Shakespeare? Can you explain what a nickel-defense package is? Have you read the daily comics for twenty years?
Your interests are ripe fruit for an analogy, and your depth of knowledge and passion in these areas will enhance its detail and relevance. Subject matter expertise in your area can represent subject matter expertise in the customers. Heuristics** are compatible.
Sharing your interests also improves your relationship with the customer. You’re human. You’re thinking. You’re sharing.
From way outside the enterprise software space, here is a pair of demonstrations we can learn from.
I would buy this product based on this fundamentally sound,* informative, and compelling demonstration:**
Let’s dissect it just a little:
There was joy and enthusiasm on the part of the presenter from the opening seconds, and he showed us enough to let our imaginations fill in the rest. Wouldn’t you love to be able to coax your own sounds out of this unit? Don’t you want to discover what else it can do?
I wouldn’t buy this product based on this rambling checklist:***
Let’s rip it apart:
There was no joy on the part of the presenter. Does he even like playing guitar? Nothing was left to the imagination, no stone left unturned, and you walk away thinking “that’s all it does.”
On YouTube, actually.
While your engagements will keep you busy discovering, preparing, presenting, and following up, it’s a good practice to check out your competition once in a while.
Watch their demos. Take notes. Observe what they say versus what they show. They reveal an awful lot about themselves in a few short minutes.* See if you can duplicate their use cases with your solutions.
Your customers are watching these demos too**, so you’d better be familiar with the expectations they’ll have of you. These demos are the table-stakes in the game. The better ones will set the competitive bar. Match the competition’s bid, raise ’em, and call.
You should be knowledgeable enough of your competition to do a better job positioning their solutions than they would.
Because you’re the best.
Anyone who has been witness to a political argument will recognize the mental contortions and logical leaps the participants will put themselves through to justify their initial position. Each starts with their end in mind and the debate is merely flogging a dead horse, more entertaining than useful for the witnessing crowd. Minds are rarely changed.
What is the perception your customer has of your business, your solutions, your position in the marketplace?* What end will they justify throughout your presentation?
If it’s positive, then your job is simply to reinforce. If you don’t stray too far on your walk through the woods, the customer will see the path for themselves, even through incomplete messages and proof-points. They’ll fill in the gaps to justify their perception.
If it’s negative, then heaven help you. You have to change perception and overcome every spike of doubt that enters your audience’s mind. No amazing features or functions will overcome that bias. They’ll fill in the gaps to justify their perception.
So you have to set the perception first. You have to tell a better story than they’ve told themselves, a better story than the competition has told them. Your audience has to be onboard with your premise before you begin to show the clicks, screens and apps which will solve their problem.
How? Here are some positioning approaches:
Good luck; you have minds to change.
I don’t care if you’re the CEO of Wal-Mart, the President of the United States, the Pope, or the Global V.P. of Self Importance.
Never,
never,
never,
never,
never,
ever
have someone else click and advance your slides for you. It is insulting and condescending to your audience.
And it’s unprofessional.