7 Sales Demo Best Practices to Close Prospects

A sales demo cannot (and should not) be underestimated. This is the point where prospects get to see the value of your software with their own eyes, and understand how it’s going to transform the way they work. Here are 7 sales best practices, from what you should do – to what you should never do when you’re using a demo to close a sale. 

1.   Do… your homework

Perhaps the most irrefutable fact in sales demo best practice is that no two prospects are the same. So no two pitches are the same. Create a mandatory checklist before any first-time meeting where you research and answer issues like:

• Is the audience experienced, perhaps with a competing product?

• What is the prospect’s level of technical ability?

• Do they have a clear, existing need to solve, or are you “teaching” them about problems they may not even recognize yet?

Are you looking to impress them with a feature list? An elegant user experience? Business benefits? There may be overlap, but it’s rarely all three at one time

2.  Do… set expectations

One helpful best practice can be to send out an agenda before the meeting to make sure you’ve satisfactorily completed your “homework assignment.” First, this will prompt their confirmation (and alert you to any issues you’ve missed). 

On top of that,  it’s also a great way to encourage the client to include all relevant stakeholders, to minimize the number of repeat performances you’ll be asked to present. This agenda will also prompt the client to let you know that certain areas don’t interest them as much, saving everyone time, and giving you advance notice of where you should focus.

3. Do… create a story script, but keep it dynamic

The most engaging pitches are those that begin with some basic structure, but then change and adapt in real-time as the prospect engages. Start with a story – perhaps a character facing a challenge your product will help her overcome. Pre-load plenty of simulated data to support both your intended plotline and alternative paths the prospect may ask about. Encourage your audience to ask questions, not save them until the end when the context and relevance may have faded.

4. Don’t… rely on screenshots in PowerPoint

Many conservative salespeople take this safe, predictable approach, to simply screenshot different elements of the product and create a presentation in MS PowerPoint or Google Slides. Fair enough – nothing can fail here. Well, unless the laptop doesn’t start up. There are no connectivity risks, product updates, or features that could react unexpectedly. And of course, no data showing up where it shouldn’t. 

However, this underwhelming approach doesn’t show the product in action, can’t answer off-script questions, and gives the impression you don’t trust the product enough to demonstrate it live. It’s a rigid, brittle, limited approach, best left behind.

5. Don’t… rely on the in-office live demo

While certainly more engaging than the static PowerPoint, this approach, to perform the demo live in the customer or prospect’s own office environment, involves risks that often lead to embarrassed sales reps scrambling to call sales engineers for help. It could be bandwidth or firewall issues on location, software failure, re-appearance of proprietary data from a previous demo, or even other software alerts popping up (think, an email with uncomfortable subject lines, or a call from the kids). 

In short, it’s a roll of the dice. And it goes without saying that there is a limited number of people you can have around the screen, all of whom need to coordinate schedules to participate in one physical location. A stakeholder from other regional or global offices? They will need their own separate visits.

6. Don’t… opt for the one-way screen-share video-conference

Going online for your sales demo cuts down on travel time and allows for schedule flexibility, which clients appreciate. But using Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype – or any of the other remote meeting platforms – as the sum total of the sales demo environment, means that the experience for the viewer is passive. If they want to see a scenario beyond your canned presentation, they need to describe it, tell you what to click, and struggle to get the question answered.

The video-conference format creates an additional challenge – your pitch cannot be truly flexible or scalable. If your demo experience is essentially a one-size-fits-all “show and tell” presentation, it won’t satisfy anyone. The more participants you add to the audience (even if you can technically make it happen), the more you need to keep the presentation all-purpose and unfocused. This limitation is unfortunate because each viewer may have different needs, background, and experience.

7. Do… Go Hands-on and Virtual

So what sales demonstration best practice overcomes each of those obstacles for a genuinely engaging, interactive experience?

Get your software demo online with an interactive, remote, hands-on experience using a virtual environment platform.

These software solutions offer an “antidote” to the traditional sales demo:

1. An online solution means it can launch immediately. All you need to do is send out an email with a link. Seconds later, the system spins up a personal environment in which the prospect can work, with or without an initial guided tour. Participants can be around the world, in any time zone, and can even join at the last second.
2. Keeping the latest, bulletproof version of your product centralized – the only one available – means there’s no risk of an unfamiliar feature or untested functionality ruining an otherwise smooth demo. Your sales engineers can stick to their own tasks, rather than serving as internal tech support. And with a clean version (or one carefully pre-loaded with generic data), there’s no risk of sharing someone else’s info. Added bonus: You can create a catalog of pre-configured scenarios to pull out when you identify the perfect match for a particular prospect.
3. Perhaps the most appealing aspect is the hands-on approach. Rather than a one-way lecture, each participant can grab the controls and “kick the tires.” Every prospect can focus on the parts most important to them, at their own pace, and even – if you “leave behind” the environment after the demo – at their own schedule. Imagine a prospect already feeling like a product “ninja” … even before they’ve made the purchase!
4. Tracking and reporting tools mean that your training team and their managers can get unique, practical insights from each demo. They will discover which prospects are engaging the most actively, what features they are trying, which functions seem to confuse them, and what aspects of your product appear to be the most (or least) popular. This unbiased feedback represents vital business intelligence for sales, marketing, product development, documentation, and support teams. And it’s data you’d never get to collect from simply running a demo.

Utilizing sales demo best practices for the win! 

By utilizing these best practices, and being warned about what not to do to ensure engagement, your sales demo environments can be far more successful. Make sure to think about ease of use for prospects when they access the demo from anywhere, complete control over what you show sales prospects and the data that they can access and interact with, as well as the ability for prospects to use hands-on sales demos to get comfortable with the product and see time to value much quicker. 

Finally, as HubSpot advises, 50% of sales leaders say the sales demo is one of the most important productivity metrics to track. It’s critical to be able to get behind the scenes of prospect and sales teams’ activities with the demo, and understand key metrics that equate to business success. 

Interested in boosting your sales demos, and taking them from static presentations to dynamic, immersive experiences? Schedule a time to see a demo of the CloudShare Sales Cloud. 

This post was originally published in July 2021 and updated on January 16, 2023.