Hi there, I'm Ben Pearce and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Every episode we talked through had to thrive in the tech world, not just survive. Now, if you want me to work with your team, just give me a shout. I love to help teams to be more influential, memorable and successful with their stakeholders. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to book a chat.
Hey everyone and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. It's a very special episode this time. Why? Well, it's our 50th episode. Can you believe it? So thanks so much to the thousands of people that have listened to the show over the years, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you over the digital airwaves. Now, can I ask a favour? Could you give the show a five star rating wherever you listen to it and follow or subscribe to the show? It really helps tick all the algorithms and make sure that we can continue to get great guests. Do it now if you can, go on, give that button a little press.
So anyway, enough of that to the matter at hand. Today, we're talking about how you don't need to demo tech to win. You don't need to show people loads of stuff to convince them that your solution is the best. What? Controversial. Well, our guest today to talk us through this is a seasoned pre-sales veteran and general manager at the pre-sales collective. So please welcome to the show, Jack Cochran. Thanks so much, Ben. Actually excited to be here, excited to talk through this today. I'm a huge fan of the show, so it's fun for me to be actually here on the 50th episode, no less. It's very exciting. How does it feel to be on the 50th episode of the show? A big, big honor. I really hope the topic lives up to the hype, I guess. We'll see. Well, thank you so much for joining us all the way from near Las Vegas. So thank you so much for beaming over the airwaves to me here near London. For everybody that doesn't know who you are, Jack, could you introduce yourself?
Yeah, absolutely. So as you had said before, I'm currently the general manager of the pre-sales collective. I've been in the pre-sales industry for the past 10 plus years, actually, where I've done everything from work at giant companies, been overlay SCs, I've sold hardware and software and spent a lot of time in MarTech at startups and have spent a lot of time as well building different communities, being a part of the pre-sales collective myself, as well as before that actually being on the customer side for 10 years. So I've got a very kind of all the way around the circle perspective of what it takes for someone to sell and more importantly, what it takes for someone to buy software, which is where a lot of this kind of perspective on we're gonna be talking about today comes from. Brilliant. And just maybe a chance. What's the pre-sales collective? Can you just tell me in a couple of sentences what the pre-sales collective is? Absolutely. So we're the the biggest community of pre-sales professionals. And it's a place where if you're in pre-sales, if you're thinking about pre-sales, you're adjacent to pre-sales, you're curious about what this word I keep using is called pre-sales, you're welcome to join. We've got a slack community, we do things like webinars, in person events, all a way to just better the craft of what we do and kind of help people to know actually what this profession is that we've been doing. Brilliant. Well, I think enough of the intro. I think, you know, I need to get to the to the crux of the matter now, Jack. I've worked in tech since I had a full head of hair, which is a long time ago. What do you mean? I don't need to demo. What are you talking about?
Uh, well, you know, listen, everyone likes a good clickbait title. Maybe they don't, right? You are going to need to demo, right? But I think the crux is the assumption that people have that I have to demo in order to convince someone my software is the right thing, and that your demo is the thing that everyone's going to love the demos going to convince someone to go and buy. That's what I'm pushing against today. And that's what I think, if we explore a couple reasons, dig into the reasons why I think no matter where you're at, whether you are someone who uh sells even services or someone who maybe doesn't have something to demonstrate, you're going to see a lot of value in kind of taking a different approach to your presentations.
So, so can I post back on this a little bit already? Right? Sure. So let's have a good conversation. Let's handle the objections. Everyone is having it. Let's talk through that. Can I give you two? Can I give you two objectives? I'm going to give you one from yesterday and one no both from yesterday. In fact, so first of my wife, I'm going to bring her into this. So my wife yesterday was invited to a demo about some new software that they're maybe going to use in her company. Got invited to the demo and was expecting to see what this new thing that they might use is and didn't even get a demo. What she got was a load of slides. Yeah. Which wasn't what she was expecting. And she was, let's say a little bemused, but by that, or let me give you another example. The amount of meetings that I sat through, you know, over my over the years, where I have had corporate slide deck after corporate slide deck. I've seen the values. I've seen the quote from the hallowed leader. I've seen their commitment to ESG, what their mission is. I've seen everything and all I just want to know is does this thing work? What does it look like? How would I stick it together? And so now you're coming into and the theater of it, is it going to work? Is it not going to work? Is there anything going to crash and burn the jeopardy? So all of this kind of stuff that I've had for years. Don't we don't we love that, don't we? You know, compared to the corporate slide deck. Yeah, I I'm with you. I've seen enough NASCAR slides. I've seen enough how many logos use your solution. I've seen enough. Here is the slide showcasing the case study that we paid for that that paints us in a brilliant light. I've seen enough of those myself, especially when I was on the customer side. I was just like, can we can we move it along here? Because I wanted same way. I wanted much like your wife. I wanted to get to the demo, right? I wanted to get to that point where I could see it. And you're not going to get away from that. In fact, I would say it's a whole separate topic that you should be demoing sooner in the engagement. Okay. The argument I'm making, though, is that it's a mindset from you as someone who's selling what your services, your software, your hardware, whatever it is, you need to get out of the mindset of thinking the demo is going to do the work of closing the deal of making the sale. Here's the story that I can tell you the story that I've had. This is not picking on one person I've worked with. This is picking on many people that I've worked with because I've had this, I've had this AESC relationship many times, both with me personally, as well as with the teams that I've led, where we go into a meeting and we're prepping for prepping for the meeting that we're going into. And it's like, okay, what are they, what, what are they interested? Well, this is a meeting where they wanted to talk about risk, how we, how we help them over some risks that they have. Okay. So what's the plan? Well, I'm going to show them our slide deck, which goes through all our customers who have used our software. Then we're going to throw to you and you're going to do a demo. Okay. Sure. We can do that. The next meeting, what do they want to know today? Well, now they want to know if we can handle this particular use case. So what are we going to do? Well, we're going to show them a slide deck that shows who's used this before and show some of their quotes. And then you're going to do a demo. And no matter what the scenario was, even if they just wanted to talk about something related to the contract, you know what, we can show them a demo, right? Yeah. And the thinking being, it's that I have one tool in my tool, my toolbox, and I've got just a hammer and everything looks like a nail or wherever that quote is. Right. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A lot of sellers, tech sellers have this idea that the only thing I have in my toolbox is my Essie coming in and showing a demo. And that's just not the right perspective because your demo can certainly help people to understand what it looks like, what it does, but it doesn't answer some of the fundamental things you need to do in order to convince someone that you're the right solution for them. So, so I guess what we're, what we're really railing against, you know, we're kind of both on the same sort of pages. This idea of corporate slide deck that is me, me, me, me, me, me, me, you know, me, me, me, look what we've done. Look what we've done. Followed by often featured checklist, right? Like now here's a really pretty, pretty lame, pretty lame demo that's not customized, not necessarily relevant. It's like, this is the box where you put the IP address in. This is the box where you set the threshold to 71, but you set it to 74. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that kind of feature led. So, so what we're railing against is corporate plastic corporate slides followed by off the shelf demo that lasts for a long time. I would even say the absolute yes to that, but I don't want to get anyone thinking that the answer to the solution is make sure you tailor your demo and then every time you go in, it's a different demo because in the end you're still just showing a different slice of your features packaged in a different way. So I don't even think that's really the solution. It kind of skips a couple of fundamental things around what a buyer needs in order for them to be comfortable with you, which is really, I think the first step of anyone to think about is stop thinking about what you're wanting to show someone to stop thinking about this person showing up. What do they need? And the answer is not they need to see a demo. Okay, that's even if they tell you they want to see a demo, why do they want to see a demo? Once you start to really get into that, you get into what it is that they're going to need after they see a demo, you'll start to approach things a little bit differently. Okay, so, so if you're going to try to sum up the problem that you're kind of seeing that you're kind of trying to get us away from, what's the problem that we're in at the moment? Yeah, the problem that we're in at the moment is that there's a there's a disconnect between the current state of kind of the modern buyer, even of just I'd say the last three or four years, really, since we went virtual, and a lot of the way we consume content, a lot of the way that we just connect with people has changed, right? What we're doing now doing this podcast, from nearly halfway around the globe from each other. This is normal now. And whereas it this wasn't the way a lot of podcasts, a lot of podcasts were more in person, right? In the past, we're seeing a lot more podcasts that are being more virtual now, they're doing the sort of remote recording, we're seeing sales being the same way, it's less in person, it's more remote. But also the way that you and I in our personal lives, we consume information has changed more, we more reliant on a little bit of self service. And that's where buyers are at as well, they are not coming to you to understand everything, they're coming with a lot of things already done, research already done, opinions already made potentially.
And so the reason why they're connecting you isn't to get those things answered, which is a fundamental shift from how things used to be. And so I guess what you're saying there is it's around buyer education, it's around buyers being more educated. So by the time they're thinking, "Do you know what, I'm happy to commit some non-refundable time to this person." They've already been through the what does it do, they've looked online, does it cover my key features that I really need to make this happen. They've then maybe looked on YouTube, seen some demos that you guys have got out there or whatever it might be, TikTok, wherever it is, they've gone and looked and some stuff. So they've already gone, I think it's kind of fit for purpose. I think I've seen what the product looks like. So now actually, I want to have that next level of conversation with somebody. It's not that entry level conversation. Right. And buyers today as well, if you think about their experience, they're buying more today than they used to buy, which is weird because it's not necessarily the person you're talking to. The person you're talking to may have never purchased anything before, but their company has gone through a purchase process more because the tools, the hardware, the services are getting more specialized.
It's not uncommon for you to buy something that will handle a very small subset of your problem. And you'll buy another piece of software that will handle a different part of the problem. Versus if you think back to the ERP days, the days where you would buy something to handle in a process from start to finish, not so much how people are buying anymore. And so there's a very much smaller set of capabilities that someone is exploring. And like you said, they may have already made up their mind. So then the question is,
why are they talking to you? What are they trying to understand? What are they trying to develop? And I could kind of, this for me is the crux of it. I think there's really two things that someone who is at the meeting, who has set up time with you, who is going to be sitting there on the demo, there's two things that you need to do that they need to understand from you in order to make a purchase decision. And the first really gets into this idea of trust. So think of it this way. They've done some education on their own. They've gone out. They've said, it looks like your solution that you sell is going to be what I want to buy. Great. So now I'm getting on and it's not fully just, oh, you're a trustworthy person, though that plays into it. If you're not being a trustworthy person, that's a whole separate podcast, I think. It's more about, do they trust that you understand their business? Okay. Because we can't move forward with anything you're talking about if you don't get me. If you're trying to sell to me and you don't get my business
and you don't understand what we do, you've not really processed enough of what we're doing, how can you possibly suggest a solution? How can you tell me your solution is going to fit my needs if you don't understand my needs? This is some of the classic discovery things, but it's not so much discovery for the purpose of what you're going to present. It's discovery for the purpose of trust and understanding, which is a different way to think about doing discovery.
Can you unpack that a little bit for me? Absolutely. Let's contrast this to the way I was taught to discovery when I was first getting started, which was, okay, I have a demonstration. It comes back to I have a demonstration, right? And right now I'm thinking of my demonstration as everything. I'm doing discovery so that I can tailor that demonstration to fit what the person wants to see. So the purpose of discovery was me learning what I need to learn from you so that I can show you something better next time. Not necessarily bad. You should definitely do this.
The discovery I'm talking about is I now am trying to understand your business, ask the questions, and get to a point when I can ask my very most important final discovery question, which is, is there something I'm not asking about your business that I should be asking? Because this question lets the person know all of these questions have been for me to make sure I understand completely your business. I've seen that question unlock whole different threads of problems that we have not gone down before. I've seen it get to the point where, especially if it's done right, the person can say, no, I feel like you understand everything about what we're doing right now. Okay. So say that question. That question is in case anybody's owned out. Just in case you zoned out, here's the tweet for you. Here's the, or whatever you're going to go to blue sky or where you throw this thing. Right. Now I forgot it. Let's see. It's
the pressure under the spotlight. Yeah.
I'm trying to, I'm trying to reel all the way back here. Remember my own question. At the end of discovery, you want to make sure you can ask, is there anything about your business that I've not asked that I need to be asking? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just that catch all. It's just that catch all, isn't it? Yeah. And, and, and that's really good because like you say, if you've just missed and completely, you know, you've thought down one train and actually there's a whole area that you've not even considered suddenly that can open it up, which can lead to either completely rethinking your strategy or unlock new sales, new business, new opportunities, all of all of that kind of stuff. And I can tell you a story about this. I can tell you a story about this when I was on the customer side of the business. And I was talking to someone, I liked their software going into this. I already knew their software. I had, I had seen it already, but we were going through a discovery process where I was trying to help this person. I was actually trying to help this person to show the right demo the next time. And we went down all their tree of questions and they kept asking good questions and I kept giving them answers. And then I asked another good question about it. We were going down this path and the whole time I'm going, it's great that we've gone down this path, but unfortunately this path is in the path that I care about. But I had no opportunity to say that at the end of the meeting. They said, well, great. I feel like we know what we need to show. And I had to actually stop them and say, that's great. Unfortunately, like you shouldn't show any of what we've talked about because that's not what's important. So all the right discovery was done. They were following the tree, they were getting into everything, but they were missing the most important point, which was what is the important part of your business? What am I not asking? What is it that you want me to know about you so I can propose the right solution to you? Okay. Really interesting. I tell you where my brain's gone, just as we were thinking about this was so far we've thought about the customer,
being the customer, like it's a single entity. But the reality now, like when we're talking about trustees, you're actually selling to 20, 30, 40 different personas. You've got architects, you've got developers, you've got CFOs, you've got the business unit, you've got network teams, you've got the security team, hundreds of different personas, all with their own agendas, all with their own view of what success is like, all with their own view of what's important, of what the business is. How do you overlay that on this idea of building, focusing on building on trust rather than just showing them a few features in a tick box?
I guess a little bit indirectly by saying this, is there really a demo that you think you could show that would satisfy all those various different groups needs in the right way? Because that's what we attempt today. I've never seen anyone successfully demo to that varied of a group. When you've got the whole buyer group, everyone in the evaluation committee there, there is no single demo that you can show that's going to make them all go, now we like your software. Because they all, like that's a four hour meeting where you're boring people for most of the part of it until their section is up, which is also a demo I have done and sat through and realized, this isn't the right way of doing it either. It's a similar exercise, it just is one you have to do over and over again. Because what's going to be important to your database architect team, if you're having to sell to them, it's going to be very different from what you sell to a business user who's got a process problem, even if it's the same solution. And so understanding their business and having them know that you understand
what's important to them, what's important to their industry, what's important to their day to day jobs, and what they specifically are looking for from a solution, that's still an important exercise. And so practically, how do you do that? How do you work out the influencers and then work out what's important to them?
Carefully.
I do not have, I do not have, I mean, I do not have the solid gold answer of way to do it. A lot of it comes from practice and learning from those people who have been talking to those groups. Because honestly, if you put your heads together, if you've been selling your own software for over a year to two at minimum, you likely have talked to enough of these different types of people to know probably the things they care about. And so you're picking a starting point with them and saying,
"So here's the types of things we typically see, which of these resonate with you as a starting point?"
And often, and this is where getting back to almost the very beginning of things where I said, you know, we're saying, "Hey, you don't need to demo your tech." Sometimes in order to unlock something, you do need to show something. But what you're not going to do is show a 45-minute demo. You're going to show them a minute.
You're going to show them something that you know is going to resonate with them based on who they are for a minute, for two. Just a quick in and out. Here's something real briefly, something that we do.
And you're saying, "I want to show you this. I want to make sure this is thinking down the right direction." You show it, stop sharing your screen and say, "Are we in the ballpark of the types of things you're looking for?"
That can unlock so much. And this is where it gets a little bit, it's starting to think differently because my main goal is to try and have you trust that I understand your business, that you can trust me, that you can trust that I understand. And when you're then showing a little piece of your demo in order to do that, when you're then showing a little piece of your demo in order to confirm that I understand you, that's powerful.
Very different way of thinking about utilizing your demo as well. And to your wife's point from her argument from yesterday, you actually are showing someone something when they're expecting to see something. And so it's a little bit of give and take as well in the conversation.
Yeah. And again, I think it's just worth, as I start to think about the nuance when I think about some of the meetings I've been in over the years and how this plays out. Sometimes you get invited to a customer meeting and it is very much that, it is a meeting, right? You've been invited to a meeting and then the vendor or the seller or the person trying to convince somebody the solution turns it into the corporate presentation. "Oh, I've just got this little deck. Here we go. Brosh." And then there might be a demo that's this. And that's the bit that we're really saying. So in that meeting, what we're saying is actually we're doing this really detailed discovery, this real understanding of what the pain the customer's feeling is. What are they trying to achieve? What are they trying to test?
And I guess if you've been able to research that beforehand from working with your account executive or working with other people that understand the customer even better because there is less. Because the other side, the flip side, isn't it, is when you turn up and you ask a lot of questions and then customer sits and says, "We told you all this last week."
"Look, I know you want to understand me, but I've already told you, so speak to your mate before you come and I'm going to say questions again." Yeah, that drives me just as equally crazy because that doesn't build trust. No, no, no, no. Because if it's something that was already told, if it's something that's easily available on our company's website, let's start there. Like you're having a conversation like we're doing now. We're having a conversation with humans. And being very straightforward about what you're doing is my point of asking these next couple of questions because there's a couple of things I don't feel like I understand. And I want to understand, make sure I completely understand your business. Do you mind if we take a few minutes to do that? I've never, anyone ever say, "No, that's a waste of time." If you say, "There's a gap in my understanding of your business," the person who is trusting that you are presenting a solution that fits will absolutely say, "Let's fix that. Let's make sure you get what we're going after."
And that's the foundation before you take, I think, the next most important step in the purchase process, which isn't going, which isn't doing the demo. Again, at some point you're going to demo, right? But let's get away from the importance of that because once you've built trust, well, what's the next thing? So I, as a buyer here, I trust you. Let's say you've been selling to me, Ben, and I'm like, "You know what? Ben gets my business. He understands my problems. He's been very invested in making sure he's not misrepresenting me." And through that, I actually trust that he actually has my best interest in mind as much as I can, right?
Well, what's the next step? Well, the next step is, now I got to figure out how I take what Ben's presenting to me and sell it internally to everyone I have to sell to.
And that's the part that we often forget about as sellers is that the one person you're talking to or the four people you're talking to are likely not everyone who's going to be involved in this decision-making process.
And it's very difficult for them to figure out, "Okay, I'm going to be asking for money. What's the value tied back to? How does this actually work? What do I need?" You as the seller need to take that on you as, "Now we've got to figure out, here's all the things you need to do in order to sell it so that you can successfully make this purchase." Yeah. So you've identified your champion. You've converted somebody, turned them into a bit of an evangelist. They need to now go and position that to all the stakeholders that they've got. So how can you arm them so that they've got everything they need to go and fight the fight or win the battles that they need to to do what they want to do?
Absolutely. And that's a part that you have to keep in mind.
As much as the person might, at this point, feel like an expert on the solution because you've been talking at them maybe for a few different meetings, right? And this person gets what we do. Excellent. This is still the first time they're buying your software. You've sold it countless times. So you should know what it takes. You should know the different people who are going to speak up and say something. I actually have a story about this where I wasn't doing this and the impact of it. We were in a conversation. We actually had three different people who are stakeholders from different departments. We kind of run this process, helping them to understand our business, helping them to understand what we provided. They trusted us. They'd seen a little bit of the software enough to go, "Yeah, this thing is real." Right? Which whole different topic, that should be your goal of demoing. Just make sure people know it's real. But that's a whole different topic.
So we move past that as quickly as possible so we can get into the next step, which is, "Okay, let's make this sale happen." But what we didn't do was tell them all the things they were going to run into that we knew they were going to run into.
They wanted to move right to contracting, and as any happy salesperson people, we were like, "Yes, let's move right to contracting. Let's get it signed." Literally waiting for the final signature, and two teams said, "What are you buying? You do realize we have a whole architecture review process." And we're like, "I was hoping they didn't have that, even though every other customer we sold to has had that." And that derailed and almost lost us the deal because that team now felt like they were being run around by the vendor. Right?
You know what it takes for someone to purchase what you're selling, whether it's services, hardware, software, it doesn't matter.
They might not know all the things that they need to know. It's your job. The buyer. The contact that you... And when we say the buyer, not the big company, the individual that you have spoken to that really wants to solve a problem might not know of all these problems that you know they're going to face in the future. Absolutely right. And they trust you. They like yourself. Why not help them in this? Why not make it easier for them? Right? The easier you make it for someone, the more they're going to like you, to be honest. If someone had... If I'm buying something, I actually had this happen when I was a pre-sales leader. I was buying pre-sales tech, which is a new industry, which is growing like gangbusters, which is fantastic. And I forgot about a step in the buying process, which is funny. But the person I was buying from was like, "So have you thought about this step? When are we going to do it?" And I was like, "Oh my gosh, you're the best person ever. Thank you. I completely forgot. This would have gotten... Like it would have gotten completely sidelined and I would have been in trouble for trying to push something through." So that builds even more trust with you and you're not going to get stuck at the end of the deal. Because now what you've done is you've taken someone from, "All right, here's a person. I trust them because they're wanting to engage with me. They understand my business. They understand my problems."
And they're telling me their software can solve my problems. I've seen enough of it to believe it's real. And by the way, they've now helped me to navigate my internal ways of actually making the purchase. They're making my job easy here on this off the selection process, right? That's what I would want as a buyer. And so how much of a leadership role, like if you're now a seasoned pro and you can envisage the stakeholders that they maybe will need to manage the questions, the objections, the challenges they're going to face, how much of a leadership role do you take? And when is that overstepping?
Take as much as you can, right? Take as much as you can. And the buyer will tell you when they're like, "No, no, no, that's something I need to handle on my own." Right? But offer up every single time, "Hey, so here's the people. I can get in front of them and present this. Would you like me to do that? Let's set up the conversations with all these different people. Let me kick off the process with your security team." Which everyone's going to have a security review no matter what you do. There's always a security review. "Let me talk to them. Let me get that kicked off." And they'll let you know, "No." Like I actually had one buyer who was like, "You only ever talk to me." Which was the very weird purchasing, but that's just how their company worked. Other times, you get a chance to talk to seven, eight, nine different people and build that same type of trust with them. Because the more you can do that, the more that more people in the company think, "Here's a person in the company who understands what we do. They get our problems. They have our best interest in mind and they're helping us to get this thing purchased." That's more champions inside the company.
Now, are there any key themes? When we're thinking about understanding a business and understanding a stakeholder, are there any macro themes that we need to make sure that we attach our solution to that's always going to help?
How does this help you make money or how does it help you reduce cost? Are there any sort of key themes that you can always attach to? Yeah. And yes, you hit on two of them. I understand the question now. Every time that someone is buying something and a buyer is evaluating software, in the end of the day, they need to be able to communicate to, especially if they're talking to executives, the C-suite or even the board, depending on the company, how an activity that's going to be undertaken or something they're going to be purchasing makes more money, reduces cost or reduces risk, which is kind of your classic consulting. Like if you've ever done IT consulting, you understand this very well. It's the big three. Make me more money. Make what I'm doing cost less than making money or reduce my risk in some way. And I have to admit a lot of us in the selling world don't often tie what we do back to that, right? Because it's a few steps removed. So many software out there, I've seen demos of how it saves me time. Great. If you go to your CEO and say, "We want to buy some software," it's going to save time. They're going to be like, "Great. So who are you firing after you buy the software?" That will be your question back. Which that might not be the real reason. If it's going to reduce cost in what way? If it's going to make money in what way? You need to arm your buyers with, "Hey, here's how you tie back to one of those three things." Otherwise, they're going to be answering some questions they don't necessarily want to answer. Now, we're rapidly going through time. Can you believe it? Now, let's talk about when you do demo.
We've thought about how we build trust. We've thought about how we show value, how we understand our different stakeholders, how we help them to elevate through the business, the things that you can help them elevate. So when and to whom do you show demos?
The short answer is, and it feels a little bit opposite of the title, but stay with me here, is show the demo to whoever asks to see it.
Never try to hide because that just will erode the trust. If someone says, "I really want to see a demo of what you do." Yeah, absolutely. Let's show you the demo. But your framework needs to be, when you're showing the demo, do not show as much as you can. Literally go the as opposite direction as possible. Ask yourself, "What's the minimum amount of things I can show to make them satisfied with the demo that I show them?" One of the minimum number of clicks, the smallest amount of time, keep it crisp and concise.
Because here's something fantastic. If I say, "I want to," and I love using actually Spotify as my example of this, right? We all know Spotify or streaming music, we get how that works. If I was looking for, let's say I was going to get a demo. Let's say that buying Spotify worked the way we buy our B2B software. And I said, "Hey, Ben, I really want to see a demo of your product because I just need to see it working." And you show up and you start walking through the settings and how to create playlists, how to share with your friends, how to set up custom smart things, and it's a half hour demo. I leave going, "This is the most confusing, complicated, hard to use streaming software." All I want to do is be able to go in and find my favorite artist, their latest album and hit play. Well, what if instead you had just gone in and said, "What's your main goal when you're using this?" And I'm like, "Oh, I like this artist. How can I find the latest album and just listen to that on repeat?" You'd be like, "Well, type in the artist, play." And then it's repeat. Boom. You're now listening to this album until you're sick of it. I'd be like, "Great. This is everything I need." It was quick. It was simple in and out. And now we're back to making sure everything we're talking about. How do I make that purchase? Is there anything else that I'm missing about your business? We're spending more time with the trust building and the value building and less time in the demo, but always show the demo when someone needs to see one. Now, I think maybe a challenge to that because I think that's a great example. When you are talking to business leaders, senior managers, functional leaders.
Now, I guess people that live in the world that I always used to live in, so let's say you're in a cloud provider, you provide a very complex, as far as Microsoft Azure, it was a Meccano set or a Lego set. These are all the things. And yes, we need to make sure it's commercially priced. Yes, we need to make sure we've got all of these business things. And then at some point, there's a group of technical decision makers that are comparing you to maybe some of the others that have maybe got very similar pricing, very, you know, there's a commoditization of what it does. And now they're really excited by, "Oh, how am I going to plug this together? What does this mean about how we define our role based access control? What does this mean about our storage? How much are we going to have to transfer data from here? What are our egress charges going to be to get from this solution in Oracle to this?" There's a group of people that that is what they do all day and may have the influence to kill a deal or put a deal through, may or may not.
What's your view on demos when you're talking to that type of audience?
It's actually surprisingly simple. If we bring it back to someone is trying to get a demo to ensure that what you're doing actually does the things that says that you can do.
But it doesn't mean that the demo is going to prove that your solution is different or measurably better. Like, let's, I think cloud solutions, right? If I was a Google cloud SC and I knew that people were also valuing AWS.
There's very similar functionality between the two. How stuff puts together, names are going to be different, how you do it's going to be different. I could spend a demo training someone on all the different ways that all these pieces fit together and they're going to leave going, "That's great." I now know a little bit how this works, but that actually has actually not answered any of your questions, but your question was more around like, what's the implications to egress and ingress cost on data movement between different systems? How can I ensure that I've got cost reliability? How can I ensure uptime and scale and support? None of those things are actually, none of those things are actually demoable, right?
And so you have to make sure through the understanding someone's business, that you're understanding their needs and also understanding actually asking the question, those are great questions.
How, what, what do you need in order to feel comfortable with our solution? Let them let you know what's important. They might want to see a little bit of it. They might want to just understand what the white papers are. They might want to actually hear your opinion on the differences in redundancy between different cloud providers.
But they need to be the one that tell you that as opposed to you going in and saying, "Well, our solution is a demo. Let's plop it in front of them and we just got to hope this answers the problem." Which is where I feel like most of us sit today, right? We just, we're like, you know what, we're just gonna, we're gonna spend the next 45 minutes in a demo because that's what I'm most comfortable with is just showing you stuff and clicking around.
And at the end of it, we're going to see if we have any questions like that's, whoo, spray and pray. Let's not do that.
Well, on that note, Jack, the sands of time sadly escaped us. So should we wrap up a little bit?
Key takeaways. What are the key takeaways that you would use to summarize what we've been talking about?
Yeah. You have more tools in your toolbox than just a hammer. More than you have more than just the demo. Figure out what those are and primarily focus on building trust and understanding.
Get the person buying to feel like you understand them and that will build trust in you and then do everything you can to make the buying process as easy for them as possible. And third, when you do show a demo, keep it simple. Show only the things they need to see and then get out and then get back to your conversation.
Yeah, really, really good insight. I think, you know, where my mind goes to as I reflect.
It's this idea, the old fashioned corporate deck standard demo for half an hour, just like, just forget that. That's just gone. And this idea that the people you're talking to are individuals, they are not the company. Everyone is not the company. They are individuals and they are already educated because of all the stuff that you've got out there via your marketing or your, you know, so they're educated and they're individuals.
And you need to understand them, understand how to make them successful and speak to them in their language and show them what they care about. I think that, you know, they're really powerful. So thank you so much for sharing that. Now, if people have loved this and are interested in more on what you've got to say, are interested in about the pre-sales collective, where can people get hold of you?
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Search for Jack Cochran. You'll find this mug there. And I'll put the links in the show link so a direct click through to your LinkedIn. Absolutely. Check the show notes for that. And then if you're interested in the pre-sales collective, I'm sure I'll link these as well. I would say if you're not a part of the pre-sales collective, even if you're not in pre-sales, even if you're, you know what, it's, there's more than just pre-sales people in the pre-sales collective. Fantastic community around tech sales. pre-salescollective.com. You'll find links to join there. And if you are already, get, we're doing stuff with local communities this year that we've never done before. And so join the Slack. You'll find stuff about potentially a local community near you. You can get connected up into and kind of take this virtual world, this virtual network we've been doing and make it more personal. I actually get to know some new people. So I would say that's the easiest way and hopefully I'll see you at an event.
Yeah. And what I'd say is anybody listening that's not in pre-sales, you know, I do a lot of work with pre-sales teams and also like internal IT teams and there's not that much difference because it's about how you convince different stakeholders that your idea is the thing they want to do. And whether that's getting a project over line or selling a customer, there's all these differences about money flow and blah, blah, blah, but there are so many similarities. It's, it's, it's unbelievable. So I think, you know, great, a great resource for everybody. So pre-salescollective.com where they can come and join up and that gets some access to the Slack and that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Well, one last thing for me to say is, Jack, thank you so much for beaming all the way across from Las Vegas. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much, Ben. I've loved being here.
Well, there we go. Thanks for listening. Remember, if the podcast is not enough for you and you want weekly tips delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the elevated new newsletter. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to sign up. Oh, can you do me a favor? Could you subscribe to the podcast and rate the show? It really helps spread the word.
