Demonstration - Showing Off Your Product

Ever heard of the George Foreman Grill? How about the P90X? Ever considered buying a Thighmaster? Please tell me you don't have an old Thighmaster in the garage. At the height of the infomercial craze there were hundreds of different commercials on television demonstrating their products to a public with questionable critical thinking skills. Why? Because someone realized that they needed to do more than just talk about their product and show the box, they needed to demonstrate it. They literally made billions of dollars, and still are. I know you remember seeing Phil Swift replace the floor of a boat with a screen door coated in FlexSeal; one of my favorites.

While all terrible examples, at its core demonstrating the functionality of your product for a customer is one of the most powerful ways to develop familiarity and confidence in it. Customers who are familiar with your product and feel confident in it are far more likely to buy it over other options. Sales Engineers (SE) in most industries have developed ways to do this for their customers as well, minus the cringe of infomercials. As an SE it is a key tool in advancing a sale. Any SE that wants to be successful must learn to do it. Those who want to be among the best in their field must become exceptionally good at it.

Types of Demonstrations

Product demonstrations fall into a couple different categories. Most common are what I'd call 'familiarity demonstrations'. These tend to be less technical, more high-level, and give the customer an opportunity to see the product live. For customers it confirms that the product exists, it functions as expected, contains the features desired, and allows customers to begin envisioning that product being used in their environment.

The second category of demonstrations are 'enhanced feature demonstrations'. These tend to be shorter, more technical, and focus on demonstrating new or improved features in an existing product. In this case the customer is already familiar with the product; they may own one already or have a competing product. They know it exists, generally how it works, and you are simply hitting on the new features and helping them understand how these new features may enhance their existing experience.

The third category of demonstration are 'competitive advantage demonstrations'. These demonstrations compare features and functionality of your product with those of other industry products. Typically these are done as part of a competitor takout effort. They tend to be very detailed and highly technical. SEs must not only know the features of their own product but must know the competing features of the competition's product and how their own is better. They must also be aware of their product's weaknesses and how to mitigate those concerns, if brought up by the customer. These demonstrations require an SE who has deep solution understanding. Often, in industries where SEs are "generalists" who support dozens or hundreds of products, competitive advantage demonstrations are conducted by specialized SEs who focus on only one or two products and have deep solution understanding on those specific products.

The final category of demonstrations is 'retention demonstrations'. These are conducted when an existing customer is considering removal of your product from their environment. This is an attempt to "save the account" and these tend to be very difficult since SEs often don't find out about the discontent until after the customer has made the decision and told the AM. Most often this happens when there is a perceived lack of value in the product. Maybe it wasn't installed properly. Maybe it was more difficult to use than expected. Maybe the customer never fully onboarded it. Maybe it was a lack of training. There are dozens of reasons this happens. This lack of value most often occurs when the customer isn't taking full advantage of all, or even most of, the features and functionality of the product. The SE's goal during this demonstration is to help the customer see which existing functionality can or should be deployed so that the product becomes an important tool in their business process, thus removing the desire to remove it. 

Summary

Regardless of which demonstration type is needed, SEs need to be very good at each and prepared at any time to conduct them. I frequently have demo opportunities sprung on me. Sometimes, mid-meeting the AM will say, "why don't we just show it to them". Crack open the laptop, hook up the HDMI cable to the projector or TV, VPN into my lab, log into the product and kickoff the demo. No warning. No prep. No Ready, Set...just Go. Sometimes I offer it myself if it feels like the customer isn't truly grasping what I'm talking about. As they say, "seeing is believing". Sometimes the customer will ask, "can you just show it to us". Again, it doesn't matter how it comes about, SEs should be ready, practiced, and confident at all times.

As with many other aspects of being an SE, none of these SE Skills exist in a vacuum. They are all intertwined. Giving a good demo relies as much on technical skills like product knowledge and having the product in a demo-ready state as it does on soft skills like presentation skills, ability to read a room, and the tour guide skill. They all combine together to make a great demo that brings the customer that much closer to buying, renewing, or re-buying your product.

If you are in the position of hiring SEs it is critical that you understand their ability to demonstrate products. This may come in the form of asking them to perform a live demo of something, such as Zoom features if you're on Zoom. It may be asking them to record a demo and send it in. If those aren't options, it may be simply asking them to describe their demonstration style and preferences. These, and other methods, will help you understand their experience with giving live demos and, by extension, their ability to move customers closer to the sale. It will also give you insights into the soft skills they may, or may not, have.