Conducting Effective Product Demonstrations

Most car buyers only have a simple understanding how it works and can only identify a small number of parts on the car. They often buy the car based simply on appearance and affordability.

House buyers delegate the inspection to a hired professional, and primarily make a house decision today based on the location and appeal of the kitchen and master suite.

Computing solution buyers may not care what brand disk drive is used and may only need 30% of the software features. They buy the solution closest to their desired attributes.

Given this, why then do most product demonstrations take as much time as needed to show all the product features? Even when the customer cares only about 3 pertinent features, we insist on showing all 20 product features. We show a feature of no interest with hope it helps sell our solution. It could ultimately confuse the customer. Stumbling our way through every part of the product we show an ugly user interface that sticks in the customer's mind months later. Sadly, in their potential use of the product, they would have never ever used that interface.

Now, think about a better way. Regardless if the demo is for interest generation or solution proof, only show those features important to the real solution. Make every effort to use that precious demo time to reinforce the solution vision you have built and only that vision. Plan and rehearse the demo to eliminate all unnecessary stuff.

If your technical resources often balk at doing demonstrations for you, insist on first speaking with the customers directly, or require you to use a detailed multi-question demo request form to schedule a demo, they have likely participated in poorly prepared demos with you.

Every thing we do is to advance the sale. with proper preparation you can make sure your demo advances the sale and doesn't create opportunities for objections.

Good luck and good selling.