How to Present a MIND BLOWING Software Demo That Closes Sales

Imagine this you're about to hop on a sales call to actually demo your software product. Now, if you got this demo through an inbound motion, you have a 50% chance of winning this deal. If you got it through outbound, you call the emailed them and convince them to come. Then you have a 20% chance of winning this deal. Here's a big problem though. You think about your last few calls and you haven't quite been winning those deals. Maybe they ghosted you or they went with a competitor, or even worse. They looked at everything, nodded their heads, and then just decided to stay with their current solution, even though yours is ten times better. Here's a big question. How do you actually win these deals? demo your product in a way where you blow their minds and they're compelled to take the next step and actually do business with you? In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the three part sales demo framework that I use to win deals. First, I'm going to walk you through the three parts and how they work. Then I'm going to explain why this works. And finally, once you nail this and you're winning these deals, we show you the three things you can do to get even more demos. So you actually close more sales. And when you implement this three part demo framework, you will be able to accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. Intro. What's up everybody? Welcome to unstoppable I'm TK and on this channel, I hope I and SaaS founders like you grow your business faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches and how to grow your I and SaaS business faster. So if you're new, be sure hit that subscribe button and that bell icon. You'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TC energy. Now, if you're already part of this community, if you're part of my go to market program, my people, welcome back. Really awesome to see you over here. Now, in my last company tout app, we pioneered the sales engagement category. We were backed by the likes of Andrews and Horowitz, Jackson Square Ventures, Founder Collective, and even 500 startups. We scale that company, and as we sold to sales leaders. I to get really, really great at doing demos. I learned it the hard way. We sold it out to Marketo and I joined Marketo as their SVP of strategy. That was a nearly 450 million. Our company and I was in the front lines of go to market across different regions, and I had to learn how to do demos at that level as well. But thankfully, I learned from some of the best on how to do demos across different stages. Even when you're selling to the enterprise and doing million dollar deals. We did a two year transformation in Marketo. We then sold it to Adobe for $4. 75 billion. Fast forward to today. I have since started my current company, unstoppable, where I've helped hundreds of founders completely transform their go to market strategy and absolutely crush their sales demos. In fact, every single time I worked with a founder and they hit a new inflection point in their revenue growth. I shipped them a trophy to celebrate the win. this episode, I'm going to teach you my three step demo framework. Inside of this framework, I'll walk you through exactly the three parts that make up for a successful sales demo that blows your minds and helps you win the deals. I'll explain why this works. And then once you nail it, you'll want more demos. I'll even show you how to actually get more demos. So if you're excited, you can go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. So the big thing that I want you to understand is you want to split whatever time you have for this sales demo into three parts. So if you have a 30 minute call, you want to think about how to split it into ten, ten. So it's 30 minutes. You have an hour and you want to split it a third, a third in the same way. And budget your time across these three parts. That's rule number zero. Now the first part of the call that you want to dig into, it's not your demo where you're going to totally blow their minds. You're going to ask them questions. Now. Before the demo comes we call this phase discovery. And discovery is a fancy word. So that's why when I'm working with founders who architect their sales process, we call it questions. When you ask them questions so that you can craft the mind blowing demo. This is one of the biggest things I learned about app. Not every sales leader, not every sales organization was the same. And this became even more true when we were doing million dollar deals in Marketo because we had actual sales engineers coming along, and they were completely crafting the demo based on the questions we asked in the sales process. So whether you're selling to the SMB, the mid-market, or the enterprise, you need to ask questions first. And that's a third of the time that you're going to spend in your sales conversations. as you get into the questions, there are some specific things you really want to understand. The first question that dig into with them is why? Whether you did inbound or outbound, they actually came to you and booked a meeting with you where you get a 50% win rate, or you bribe them with a gift card to book a time with you, in which case you get a 20% win rate. If you're good and you have all these pieces dialed in. Either way, they decided to spend time with you. So the first thing you want to deal with the call is, hey, you said yes to this meeting. What is going on in your world that prompted you to join this call today? Why did you say yes?

And that's going to give you a ton of ammunition, ton of information to craft the demo, which will come in the second part. The second thing that you really want to ask is what failed? Now, if this is truly a problem that you're solving, that is top of mind for them. That's why they probably said yes. But chances are you're not the first person that tried to solve this problem for them, which means there have been failures. It could be another vendor. It could be a current solution that is failing, or it could have been an engagement that just didn't actually succeed to production. Either way, you want to understand what failed and you want to use that information in the second part again. and the last thing you want to ask is what's important. Everyone has a certain favorite feature everyone is thinking about like, hey, does your software do backflips? And you're like, oh my God, we totally do back flips. And we want to show them how amazing our backflips are. But you don't want to show backflips, and back flips aren't important to them. That's one of the key pieces. That's how you blow their minds. So you want to ask, hey, what's important to you? I'm sure you've looked at platforms like this. You've considered solving this problem. You have a current solution, what's important to you, and you want to write that down. You want to spend a third of your time just asking these three simple questions, and you want to write them down. Even though that sounds a little old school, and I know you have your AI note taker, but you need this live. You need to write this down so that by the time you go to the second step, which is the demo, you actually speak to each of these. So that's the first part of the call. Questions. Discovery. Once you have that you have a bunch of ammunition. Now you want to know how you actually deliver mind blowing demos. Well the key is to personalize the demo based on the answers they gave you. Now, if you don't ask these questions and you just jump to a demo and you spend the entire 30 minutes of a 30 minute discovery call giving a demo, then you're speaking at them. You're not personalizing anything. You're not blowing their minds. Maybe you will, but maybe you won't. Maybe you think that backflip feature is super amazing, but they might not care about it. But by asking these questions, you can now personalize your demo, which goes to the second part of the call. Now this is the actual demo where you're going to blow their minds. But the big thing to remember is you don't want to spend the entire rest of the call on the demo. You want to make sure the demo is short enough so you get to the third part. Now here's what to cover in a demo. The first thing you want to cover, based on the answers they gave you, is the actual aha loop. Every software, including AI platforms today have an aha loop. This is where you do a series of steps and you get to an aha moment, and the user and the viewer and the actual buyer is like, oh my God, that's cool, we need that. We don't have that. So you want to go through your aha loop. Now, this may not be if you're selling an ERP system for manufacturers, actual client of mine. You can't go through the entire aha loop because it's a big platform. But there's always micro aha loops that you can show to show them what they can expect out of the platform. So that's up for you to figure out. the second thing you really want to show is the ultimate result. So this ideally is some sort of a running dashboard, whether it's a production dashboard, a demo dashboard, or an example case study dashboard. You actually want to show them like, hey, you do this aha loop. You deploy our platform? Here's what you can expect. This is the manager view. This is the board level ROI view. This is what the dashboard is going to show you when you get it all up and running. And this is an example of what's already running in production for one of our best customers. And you can always anonymize the data. You can show a demo. You want to be sensitive to privacy policies, but ultimately you really want to get them tasting what success looks like. And that's the point of the second part. And then the third part is integrations. Even today, even for that client of mine that is selling, ERP platform, the top of mind for me because they're fundraising. And we were looking through their pitch stack and everything. But even for them, they don't stand on their own. There are other platforms they're integrating into, and every buyer is going to be concerned about that. So you want to talk to you, the integrations that your platform has and how it seamlessly integrate into the existing ecosystem that they have, which is going to be one of their top concerns. As you're going through the loop, the ultimate result and integrations, these are going to be your core pillars in your demo. You are weaving in the talk track, highlighting why you're not going to fail, highlighting the features that they said are important, and tying it back to why they're here on this call. It's not because your feature is so amazing, and I know you're working on that one more feature that's going to make it so amazing, where everyone's going to buy, and you're never going to have to do sales and marketing. Just kidding. That never happens. But more importantly, in order to actually blow their minds and win the sale, what you really need to be doing is structuring your demo in a way where you're personalizing it for them, and the only way you can personalize it is if you spend a third of the call asking them questions. Now, you might be saying, okay, if I do that and I start asking questions, they're going to be like, oh my God, he needs to show me the demo. We just want to see the demo. We don't want to answer these questions which you can say, hey, listen

I can show you a demo of the product, but honestly, our product is pretty big. It has a bunch of use cases and I won't know how to structure this demo if you don't answer these three simple questions for me. So if it's okay with you, I just need to understand how to tailor the demo for your specific use case. That's it. And if they're still like, I don't want a demo, I don't want this call anymore. I'm leaving right now. Then let them go, because chances are that's not an ideal customer. Chances are they don't have an urgent, important problem, and chances are they're just not going to buy. You're better off letting them go. So before I go to the third step, and you're probably wondering like, what is the third step? why am I dedicating ten entire minutes of a 30 minute call on this third step? Let me pause here for a second. If you start to see the power in this, can I just get a demo in the comments below? Just put demo that way. I know you're here with me. Also, if you're in this stage where you're architecting your sales process, you're architecting your demo, you're architecting your messaging, your sales stack, and honestly, you just need even more demos. This is why I created my SaaS Go to Market transformation program. This is where I work with you to transform you go to market strategy and get you more demos, structure your sales stack, and actually win more deals. You don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. Let's go to point number three, and I'm going to learn why and how to get more demos and I'll tell you about the program and also link to it in the description below. But right now smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. And so do we. the third step. The third part is next steps. Your entire job in this sales call is to figure out the next step. Now for some of you, you are a one call process. I have some clients that are selling a certain price point and they can win deals in one call. So the next step is sending a proposal and getting them to sign. And you talk about why they won't sign. For others, they run a 12 month, 18 month process because they're doing $3 million deals. I have clients that are on each side of the spectrum. the next steps might differ. But what doesn't change is the fact that you need to talk about next steps. objections. You need to talk about what they are doing on their side what they're buying processes. Because if you don't do that, you will not hit those benchmarks or 50% win rates or 20% win rates, depending on where the deal came from. So there are a few things that you can do. There's a lot of things that go into architecting a sales process. I'll give you some pointers. The first thing is you want to talk about proposal, proposal. You can bring up the fact, like, hey, you saw the demo. There's a lot more to it. We can schedule another call if necessary. You can bring in more people if necessary, but we can structure a proposal based on what you've seen. Where are you in the buying journey? process? You want to actually just ask them, are you ready to buy this? What is the next step? How are you thinking about this? You said this was important. You said the other things have failed. You said these features are important. And I just showed you in the demo. So where are you in the process? The big reason you're doing this, and you're allocating ten minutes of a 30 minute call on to this, or even longer if it's an hour call, is because you're trying to understand what the objections are. Everyone thinks that the job of a salesperson is to actually just talk, talk. But actually, the best salespeople and I saw this at tout ab, I saw this on Marketo. saw this with the founders that I've coached. I sales teams, with the CEOs that I coach. The best sales reps don't talk a lot. They listen, they ask the questions and they listen. what you really want to be asking in this stage is, hey, what do we need to do to earn your business? And what are the objections that you have? And you can structure that in different ways. It just depends on ICP, the ideal customer you're selling to. You. You can phrase that differently, but ultimately that's what you're looking to figure out. So you could send a proposal, but even if you are sending a proposal, you should say, hey, I'll put together a proposal, but let's put a meeting so we can review it together. It's a one call close and you always do a one call closing and say, hey, in the proposal, I'll include a link where you can fill out the order form. And if you have any questions, Just let me know and we'll get on a call. If it's a multi-step process and, you know, this is a 12 month journey. You absolutely want to say, hey, before I send the proposal, why don't we book another call so we can review it together? We can talk about who else needs to be involved, and we'll figure it out from there. But ultimately, this is a give and take process so you can offer up a proposal. We're working with a company right now that's in the support space, and we actually don't send a proposal out to first call. We architected their sales process. So we do a pilot design because that's the next natural step. Or if it's a multi-step journey, multi-month journey, you can do a deep dive where you say, hey, let's do another call. We can do a deeper demo. We can customize it even more, but let's also bring in the rest of the people in your buying committee so we can get everyone aligned. you want to allocate ten minutes to this. don't want to just say okay well this is the demo you're going to buy. See you later. And at this stage they might not give you another meeting. And your job is to understand why. So if I'm like, hey, I'd love to send you the proposal. And how about we book 30 minutes, say, a week from now so we can review everything together once you've received it and, yeah, you have questions and they say no, no, no, we don't want to book another call right now. We're early in the process. We're looking at some other competitors. Just send me a proposal and we'll figure it out from there. our sales rep that is starving will just say, cool. That sounds great. Hopefully you get back to me

and then they're going to spend the next six months following up on an email thread saying, hey, is now a better time to chat and that person is going to lose. Now, if you're a pro sales rep, you're going to say, interesting. Can you tell me a little bit around how you're thinking about the buying process? I'm happy to send over a proposal, but typically what we do is book another call to review the proposal together and answer any questions that you have, and also bring together anyone else that's on your side that needs to be aligned on this decision. So maybe you can walk me through how you're thinking about this. That's a simple ask. That's a simple question. Because remember, you just also gave 20 minutes of your time to this person educating them, guiding them, demoing to them. So they owe you an answer. And at that point they're like, you are a terrible sales rep. I'm never talking to you again. How dare you ask me this question? Then they were never going to buy. They're not an ideal customer profile. They don't have the urgent problem. And you're better off anyway. But what happens most of the time is they say, well, actually, we're meeting with this competitor tomorrow, and my boss is on vacation next week. And the following week, I'm supposed to put together a report that tells my boss which one I should go with and how to think about the space. So I'm meeting with five more competitors next week. That's info and the best sales reps, nor ask the questions to figure out what the objection is. So now the sales rep can say, about this. I'll send you the proposal. Let's just you and me get together after I send you the proposal. And after you do the next two calls, I do this all day long. All I do is help people like you navigate this decision. So why don't we just walk through the proposal answer any questions you have on the competitor calls, and just see how we can help? No pressure at all. Will that be okay? That's what a pro does. that's how you spend ten minutes to define the next step. So you keep the momentum going. So those are the three steps for my three step demo framework. And as you'll see only a third of it is actually showing the demo. Because let's be real. If the demo was all that was needed, you didn't need to understand the questions and answers to actually structure the demo and personalize the demo. And you didn't talk about how to do next steps, so you can actually build the momentum and alignment. Then, you know, every software company would be so successful. The reason we have sales, whether it's a founder doing sales or actual salespeople earning commission, the reason salespeople earn a huge commission is because this is hard and the best sales reps know how to do these three pieces. Now let's talk about why this works. I hinted at this already a little bit. But there's a few things that really comes together. How do you blow their minds when you do the demo? You personalize it. So the reason this works is you're not delivering a generic demo. The number one reason this works is because you're personalizing the demo. You're not just assuming that they love backflips in your software and you're like, let me show you our backflip feature. And they're like, what is with this guy? And backflips. We hate backflips. You're actually trying to understand, like, hey, like what's going on in your world? Why do you take time to meet and what failed in the past and what's important to you? And then you're catering the demo to that. And if you can parrot those pieces back as you're giving the demo, you actually increase your likelihood of winning. The second reason this works is ICP qualification. when I work with clients, we've structured their ideal customer profile. We structured their sales stack and their messaging and the strategic narrative. We've structured their sales process, and we've got demos flowing in and getting booked on the calendar. And because we have all this going and there's an overabundance of demos and we can keep cranking the dial up to get more demos. actually encourage sales reps and founders that are doing sales to completely delete calendar events that are on their calendar, with people that are not ICP. Ideal customer profile because we know they're not going to win, so why waste of time? So I encourage founders and sales team members when I'm working with them to say, delete it. If it's not ICP, delete it. You're better off. You're better off leaving that slot for someone that actually is an ICP lead and is more likely to buy it versus a 0% chance of buying. you don't always know fully. So usually we structure the demos and the demo booking page. So we ask a couple of questions to pre-qualify. But then you also don't know until you get on the call. You might ask why is this important to you. And they don't have a real answer. what's failed? And they're like, we've never even tried to solve it. Then you can ask like, what's important is like, I have no idea. I'm an intern. I'm just getting on calls. Believe it or not, there are people like that. You qualify and say, hey, listen, I don't think this is a fit. I'm happy to give you a demo, but this doesn't feel like it's an A priority for you. And you're better off with your time. And I'm better off with my time if we just focus on what's a priority for us. That'd be okay. You can close it out. And we encourage sales reps and founders to do that because one, we will save our time and our energy for qualified deals. And because we have a scalable go to marketing machine, we know there's going to be more deals. It's not a scarcity mindset. So the second reason this whole thing works is you're qualifying right up front or even before because you know who your ideal customer is. the third reason this works is this whole process where you're asking the questions and collecting the ammunition. You're doing the personalized demo, then you're spending time on next steps. Is it builds momentum? The worst sales reps and founders doing sales for the first time. don't understand momentum.

They don't understand that deals and compounding and scale doesn't happen on just a one call close all the time. It's to always have the next step and to keep going and keep going. Have a rhythm. There's a certain cadence to this when you personalize it and you give the personalized demo and you talk about next steps and you send the proposal and you follow up on the email highlighting the answer to discovery questions to agitate the pain. You create momentum. So even if someone gets busy or they get more enamored by competitor's demo and the sales rep that's really driving this process, then you can go back and say, hey, on our call, you said, this is the number one priority. You said that competitor XYZ failed you already. You said that this feature is important, which were the best ad and you said that you were thinking about X, Y and Z. And I have an answer to that can be book another call. You create momentum. that is a sales process. process that has momentum. And the only reason you can have that momentum is because you did the questions and the personalized demo and talked about the next steps, which feeds back into how you keep following up in the right way. That's why these three steps work. Okay, so now that I've covered the three parts and I'll explained why this whole process works, you can implement it. And on your next demo you're going to be able to do a third, a third. Ask the questions. Do the demo work through your sales stack, talk about next steps, do the follow up. Then you're going to be like, okay, it's already feels better, but how do I get more demos? That's everyone. Everyone wants more leads and more pipeline. So there's three things you can do. And we talked about this in the beginning of the video. Right. There's three ways to get more demos. The first way is to do outbound. This is you spamming everyone. No judgment. My last company tore it up. Invented this whole category. So you get about a 20% win rate and about a 1% response rate. It's okay. It's not bad. You can do inbound. Inbound is where they become a lead through your marketing efforts, they start to trust you, and, they book a call on your calendar. This has a 50% win rate when you have all these pieces dialed in. And the last one is referrals. You likely have some customers. You have some people in your network, you get referrals. This can be anywhere from 50% to 80%. Because these people already trust you. You have a lot of trust built because it's someone trusted referring you. So those are the three ways to get more demos. These the referrals doesn't really scale. You're going to cap out on the number of people in your network, or customer base that are willing to refer you and know another person, but it's pretty good. You should do that right away. These two is where you get, scalable. Go to market. A scalable go to market machine will first start with inbound, and it will keep driving in leads that convert to pipeline. And then it'll turn on outbound. And the trick here is to do outbound into the people that are coming in inbound. And that accelerates the whole thing versus starting from scratch, which gets like a 1%, open rate, 1% response rate. Probably both. a scalable go to market machine actually does inbound and then outbound. So it gets a whole bunch of people coming in and then you outbound into them and you convert them to more and more meetings and that skills the growth. And you can turn on ads, you can do organic. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do. That's how you get more demos. And the more demos you get, the more you can apply the three part framework and the more deals that you can win. Now, if you're in this stage where you're like, hey, I need to get this structure set up, I need to figure out what questions to ask and how to ask it. I need to figure out how to drive the demo and personalize it. I need to make sure I have the right sales deck. That's kind of structuring all of this. I need to think about how to architect the next steps in the overall sales process. And I also need to think about how do we just get more demos then this is why I created my SaaS go to Market transformation program. So if you'd like to work with me one on one to actually transform your go to market strategy so that you can actually get more demos, pipeline, and you can actually drive more sales with the right sales process. Then I encourage you to join my go to market program to work directly with me. when you and I work together, nothing is held back and we get speed to results. Here's how the whole thing works inside. Oh, my. I SaaS go to market transformation program. There's three core pillars. The first pillar that you and I will focus on is the ideal customer profile. there's a 29 point framework that I follow to actually build out your ideal customer profile. Now some of these pieces, you already have, some of these pieces you don't have, I didn't think to address. And we pull it all together. Once we have your ICP, then we move to the next phase. That's your manifesto. Your manifesto is your messaging. It's just strategic narrative. Once we do this, this is my manifesto framework. We actually have your homepage messaging revamped, we have your sales deck revamped, and we have your ad messaging revamped. All three start to actually get defined so that we can actually do the sales and marketing motions. So once we have those two pieces, then comes the third pillar. The third pillar is what I call the Broadway show. The Broadway show is a consistent set of marketing activities that actually generates pipeline and demos, and a consistent set of sales activities that runs this three step framework all the way to the sales process that follows up the Broadway show, helps

you execute on this scale, will go to marketing machine that we build inside of the transformation program. It's an incredible program. It's my sixth year running it. We've shared so many success stories that I'm happy to share with you once you apply so to work together, here's how it works. The better the fit, the better the results. So all I ask you to do is check out this page. On this page you get all the details on how the program works and how you and I work together. So to join, all you have to do is fill out a short application form. The application form will ask you a few questions on where you are, what you're struggling with, and what your goals are. I will review it personally. If it's a fit, then I'll send you all the details right away, including all the case studies that I've collected over the years of doing this program, including all the trophies that I've sent. Now, once you join the program, nothing is held back. You don't get another YouTube video to watch. You don't need another ChatGPT conversation. I give you the exact framework to follow, and I work with you to transform your go to market strategy and start testing it in the market to generate more demos and win more deals. Founders that join the program are able to do this within the first three weeks of joining. we launch a Broadway show, and then I teach you exactly the metrics to collect so we can look at it together and iterate on it and scale it so that you can scale your growth. So just go to TK intercom sgt M TK hater. com/gtm for all the details. Or you can also follow the link in the description below. now you know my three part demo framework, why it works and how to get more demos with the scale go to market machine, and if you want to work together to actually build your scalable go to market machine, if you want speed to results, then you can join my AI SaaS Go to Market transformation program. Take our eCommerce GTM. Also, if you got value from this video before you go to apply for the program, quit smash that like button for me. Just for the YouTube algorithm. We want to help as many founders as possible, and it just means the world to us because we put a lot of love to these videos. Also, I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies on how to think about growing your SaaS and AI business faster. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. That way you get notified every single time I drop an episode. And lastly, remember everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours, it's going to be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode or inside the AI SaaS go to market transformation program. Take care everybody.