9 ms·

Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS

417 points by charlieirish 9y ago

blizkreeg 9y ago
How true is the perception (from the buyer's side) that a self-funded SaaS company is not worth talking to?
- GordonS 9y ago
  Is that really a thing? I would never think to check how a SaaS company was funded when looking at their products.
  - copyhackers 9y ago
    I dunno, but when it happened to me, it totally derailed everything. It was one of those moments when you want to argue with the prospect - "As if funded companies don't go out of business?" - but that's probably not a good strategy. :) So I just sat awkwardly and tried to explain that we'd been approached by VCs but hadn't pursued anything. I hope it doesn't come up that often. I worry, though, that it's actually some sort of signal to the average prospect (who's not in the startup world).
    - x0x0 9y ago
      patio11 has talked about this One approach -- besides make sure you have an answer ready to go next time -- is to talk about two things (straight up stolen from patio11, but if there are mistakes in memory, they're mine): 1 - who do you think you matter more to, some company with thousands of customers or me? 2 - I don't give a shit what their SLA says, when you call late at night, you don't get eng. If you call my cell, you get the person who wrote it all. Who is going to get your problem fixed faster?
      - blizkreeg 9y ago
        This is a fantastic way to respond to it. But I do fear if it's a slightly emotional response and not a more assuring one. It's probably the best way to address the elephant in the room though, aside from having a kick-ass product that addresses their pain points.
        x0x0 9y ago
        In my limited experience selling things, sales are all about emotion. Yes, there are a few actual deal-breakers, but things like a willingness to learn new things or adjust their workflow or deal with a mildly suboptimal workaround depend entirely on emotion. And the same suboptimality or problem in the hands of a person who wants a deal to work vs someone who doesn't swings in two different directions entirely based on the potential customer's emotions.
      - patio11 9y ago
        The real kicker to this line of argument is "When you call BigCo at 3 AM, you will get someone who listens attentively to your problem but cannot do anything to help you. When you call at 3 PM, you will get... an interchangeable replacement for that person. If you prioritize getting the problem fixed versus someone picking up the phone, pick us: we work defined hours but all of your requests will be handled by the person who build the system and can actually help you rather than just opening a ticket and sympathizing that nothing has been done about it." (Hat tip to Jason Cohen for this line of argument.)
  - blizkreeg 9y ago
    I think perception matters, and if you give off the vibe that your company may not have the resources and wherewithal to support my business in the long run, I'm not going to go with your offering.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    I always check, because it sucks to have a vendor go out of business unexpectedly. Good to know what the financial situation is. Bootstrapping is fine as long as they have been in business a while. It also gives a clue about their expectations for the relationship. Venture-backed companies are not necessarily more stable, because they are often under pressure to grow very fast.
wonderwonder 9y ago
You also need to account for losing internet connectivity. I had a demo before I knew what I was doing where I went to the customer site and they set us up in some sort of dead zone, essentially could not connect to either guest wifi or mobile hotspot to show the product for most of the time or when it did connect the lag was so bad it seemed like the product was incredibly slow. Most places will not allow you to connect via a wired connection to their network for good reason. I then started tripping all over myself because I had not prepared for this situation. I did not land the customer. If possible, running on local host is the way to go. It was a character building experience.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  ...and when running from localhost, watch out for any resources loading from a CDN, and, of course, for your local dummy data being total crap and/or accidentally offensive (and get ready for "Why is all this text in [Latin/French/Italian/something really bizarre]?" when you use lorem ipsum).
  - lostcolony 9y ago
    I learned long ago that -any- placeholders confuse people. Image placeholders? "Why is it showing me just an image of some random person with the word 'placeholder' over it?! I would have images of Y!" It's frustrating, but that's reality. Figure out the sort of thing users will actually have in there, and try to put something similar. Preface lorem ipsum with "Your text goes here. Fake text follows: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." or similar.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      A million times yes. I had a client tell me an example draft deliverable was "the worst document I've ever been handed" when I was showing them a preview of the document format in week two of a three month project. It was supposed to be documenting their entire architecture and solution I was building for them, so it would be delivered at the end of the project. They asked to see it early, so I put in placeholder data. They were not impressed, and it nearly tanked the whole project. They didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for obviously placeholder text. Problem is, none of their real information had been fleshed out yet, so I didn't have real data to put in. But then on another client, I put in better (more realistic) placeholder text for the same document and they thought I had sent them another client's information and got real scared about their own data privacy with our company. That's when I learned to refuse a client's request to show them a document before it's (at least nearly) finished. If they want to see the format, a static picture of very obvious placeholder data serves just fine.
ljw1001 9y ago
This is a very practical and insightful post. Thanks.
jaymzcampbell 9y ago
> Don’t waste time showing [prospects] the step-by-step process of doing something. Create a vision of what benefit they can get by using your product. This 100 times. This goes for many things too, it's often very easy to feel like you are being productive by painstakingly going over basics and step-by-steps but anyone who is genuinely interested will follow up themselves. Anyone else is going to get bored fast. This is why it's so important to have and show this big vision - you need to hook people to stay interested. Great post, it's also nice to see something well over 1,000 words! Thanks for taking the time to write all this up!
- wj 9y ago
  I learned this lesson as well. Step-by-step is a training session. For a demo start with the end (show the wow") and then dig down if they ask questions.
- frogperson 9y ago
  This is sales 101. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."
ams6110 9y ago
Don't forget to allow an extra 30 minutes for all the inevitable tech glitches with Zoom or Adobe or whatever your remote solution is. Get ready to bash your head on the wall when you discover that they are trying to use IE 7 on Windows XP to connect to your presentation, and nobody in the meeting knows how to "load chrome" or even has permission to do it. Finally throw your deck away and do a voice-only call via someone's cell phone sitting on the middle of the conference table.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  Don't forget the client that calls in with their phone (because it's "easier" and the conference bridge allows phone call ins) and therefor can't see your screen. I always make sure to stress the importance of using a computer to connect because of screen share.
- arethuza 9y ago
  Some places, particularly government networks, have extremely locked down Internet access - the tool that I've found to work the best for screen sharing is screen leap: http://www.screenleap.com/ http://www.screenleap.com/ No silly viewers for people to install to watch your demo.
pinaceae 9y ago
This is good advice, beware of seeing this as the whole story though. Once you play with the big kahunas, your prospects will be tightly controlled and briefed by their procurement teams. Which means most of the question techniques outlined in the post will fall flat as the proc guys have read the same playbook. This is where the side chats during coffee breaks, etc become the core. Be ready to show your software to anyone, anytime. The literal elevator pitch. Anything to outmaneuver the proc team. Good luck :)
- freehunter 9y ago
  But on the flip side, bigger companies will send out RFPs to have you answer their most important questions before you ever get to the demo stage so the line of questioning will change. If there's anything doing demos has taught me over the years, it's that clients really hate answering the same questions over and over. If you have any of that information ahead of time, don't ask them again. But also like the article says, don't assume their answer is still the same. Say "what I understand you're looking for is X, has that changed?" It shows you're paying attention and have read the information they sent you.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Depends what you mean by "the procurement team". People with procurement in their actual job title are glorified paper pushers who's job is to make you think that you need to offer a better price but are actually entirely subordinate to the people who've made the decision to recommend to buy your software. On the other hand, the level of upper management that tends to make the decision is exactly the sort of person this demo advice applies most for: the people who really don't care about the flexibility of your search function or UX (because they're probably not using it themselves) but are quite impressed when you use it to highlight a solution to a problem unique to their company/sector, and don't actually have time to watch a walkthrough of Feature X but do remember the story about how it saved a company facing similar issues $100k
  - kesselvon 9y ago
    A lot of the time the procurement team can tell the buyer to fuck off, or they'll suggest another software they already have a license for to try first
brightball 9y ago
Great read. Very much follows the "people buy pain relief" mantra that I was taught in sales classes.
Clubber 9y ago
This was very informative, thanks! I'm a software builder and this isn't my lane, but I might need to learn it soon.
vlucas 9y ago
Such a good post. I learned a lot of valuable insights here, right when I needed them! :)
thibaut_barrere 9y ago
Sharing a bit of my own experience: I used to do a lot of demos for my SaaS (usually 1 to 2 hour long, because it ended up in some form of coaching session on cash-flow forecasting habits), but after a while I realised that I got more churn from such users ultimately. I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things : - An in-app onboarding tour (fully self-service), implemented with mock data (see https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5b2 https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5... for a full write-up on how to implement that with Rails & Hopscotch) - A git-based detailed knowledge base (also self-service), https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-git-based-knowledge-base-for-my-saas-product https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-g... And I also moved from a CC-upfront trial mode, to a no-CC trial. Applying those 3 measures slashed my "customer support time" to almost zero & fewer churn. I suppose I'm attracting more savvy, self-service users too now.
- encoderer 9y ago
  How did the trial conversion go? Do you have a lot of in-app prompting and email around conversion? We tried that at Cronitor in 2015 but we saw less engagement from users who started a trial without a cc and less engaged users, predictably, converted at a lower rate for us.
  - thibaut_barrere 9y ago
    I have no in-app prompting at all, and I have a simple 5-email benefits-oriented email series (via customer.io). I don't have enough numbers for things to be meaningful (it's a small-scale SaaS), but I seem to recall that removing the CC without onboarding initially was not great, and things improved with the onboarding tour (sorry if I cannot be much more specific!). Removing the CC avoided the need to handle refunds for some people, which was a bit of hassle to handle.
    - softawre 9y ago
      > sorry if I cannot be much more specific It's much appreciated anyway. Sharing of the secret sauce is what makes this forum so valuable to the tech community.
thomasjudge 9y ago
As a backup, in case: the site internet is down/you're presenting onsite & their internet is down/ you're not running locally/ whatever - it can be useful to have a "virtual demo" ready to go, ie, a powerpoint deck of screenshots showing your intended demo flow. Not as good as the real thing but better than nothing...
twiss 9y ago
Many SaaS websites seem to try as hard as possible to hide the actual product from you, with no screenshots, no live demo, and sometimes even no free trial, and a "demo" page that only has a form to request a demo. And according to this article, even in that demo, you're not supposed to see much of the application. Now, I trust that this is sound advice for many (enterprise) customers, but personally I hate it.
- sly010 9y ago
  Selling is easier if you don't reveal your cards early in the game. Buying is much harder.
  - tertius 9y ago
    Elaborate please. Those not educated in sales may benefit.
    - tonyhb 9y ago
      This is what I take from it: by revealing your cards there's less room for manipulation. The buyer already has preconceptions that could range from: - This will not work; I didn't see this in the screenshots - I don't understand what I saw and now I have irrelevant questions If the buyer tells you the pain points, and only the pain points, as a seller you can focus on _those_ and cut out the bullshit. It makes manipulating easier as a seller, and as a buyer you're left to trust the seller that everything will work out in the end. Haven't got the experience to say whether or not this is a good thing.
      - tertius 9y ago
        > It makes manipulating easier as a seller You mean manipulating the pitch in a way to only focus on the benefits to their problems? Or in a bad way?
- moduspwnens14 9y ago
  It's got to be that they're not multi-tenant. I'm with you--I would only bother building for SaaS if the cost of a minimal new customer is insignificant. Then while your competitors are saying, "Give us your phone number and we'll call you," you can be saying, "Click here and try right now with no credit card." I think a lot of these companies, though, are more-or-less selling hosted versions of the stuff they've been selling for decades... which is very much not multi-tenant, but it's what they've got.
riskable 9y ago
I've sat through probably thousands of demos in my IT career and I must say this quote featured in the article is bullshit: People don’t buy features, they buy solutions, trust, and relationships. -Rob Gonzalez I can't count the number of times we (various IT teams) have selected products because they were the only one that had a feature we needed. I'm at the point in my IT career where if I'm watching a demo I politely let them do their little spiel for 5-10 minutes and then I'm like, "yeah yeah show us feature X" (because I want to see that it works and how it works). What always destroys a demo for me: * Sales people that don't know the technical details. "I'll have to get back to you on that." (for nearly every question) * Irrelevant use cases. "Schools use our product!" * Can't actually provide a *live demo*. Only slides or, "Let's watch this 10 minute video after which I probably won't be able to answer any of your technical questions!" * Complete failure to mention anything in regards to security or if they do it's nebulous bullshit like, "we your data in transit!". This one is becoming greatest concern lately. Everything I've read about this sort of thing says that the #1 thing you can do to improve sales of any software product is to add new features. At least, that works once your product has been established. Selling it initially? No matter how you slice it that's hard.
- freehunter 9y ago
  It goes both ways. Some companies only care about a specific feature and will overlook almost everything else. Some companies care about the relationship and are willing to sacrifice features. I know a company I was working for year ago was switching from IBM Notes email to a cloud provider. Microsoft and Google were the last two in the running. We ended up going with Google even though Microsoft had more robust DLP and auditing features because the Microsoft sales guys seemed to assume they already had the sale and would respond to emails without reading them or sometimes not respond at all, whereas Google actually sent someone out to our Midwest headquarters to walk us through it face-to-face. The decision makers didn't want to be just another sale, they wanted a company that cared about our success, and Microsoft lost the sale based on that alone. And take established players like IBM: why do people pay more for IBM when their competitors are faster, have more features, and have flashier sales pitches? Because IBM is comfortable, reliable, and you know what you're getting. Better the devil you know than the startup that's going to get bought out and shut down a year from now, right? But yeah, I've also seen a lot of companies turn down a great product because it was missing a feature they needed. It's always a cost/benefit analysis, is that sale going to offset the cost of developing and supporting that feature? If it's a feature built for one customer and no one else is asking for it, it's probably okay to lose that sale. But if someone else asks for it and you implement it later, go back to that first company and pitch again.
strictfp 9y ago
TL;DR: Business people only listen when you explicitly talk about them and/or money.
whisdol 9y ago
Sitting at the other side of the table (as a regular engineer in BigCorp), that was an interesting read. One thing I recognized from too many demos and product workshops (whether they are on site in our offices or remote) is this section: > Ask lots and lots of questions. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of the demo content should be about your customers, and 20% should be about your solution. Spending an hour explaining our systems, our business and our pain points to a random sales rep is usually not a good use of my time, especially if I still don't really know or understand your product yet (don't expect me to have even visited your website before the demo if I'm not the person who booked it).
- dastbe 9y ago
  So if you have a meeting scheduled for a demo, why wouldn't you check out the website? Are you actively trying to not have a good meeting? I almost always go through materials before a meeting because it makes me better informed and we end up having a much better conversation.
GordonS 9y ago
"Be sincere and ask them how their day has been" But, realistically, the sales guy doesn't give a shit about how their prospect's day has been - how is this 'sincere'?
- phonon 9y ago
  Good salespeople actually do care!
  - softawre 9y ago
    I care about my family, if they had a bad day then I'll work hard to cheer them up. How do I show that I care to the same level about some random client?
    - phonon 9y ago
      How does a therapist care about a random client? Or a clown?
    - betenoire 9y ago
      You don't care at the same level, and if you try to show you do you will rightfully be seen as phony. Normal human-to-human empathy is enough. You don't have to cheer them up, but you know what it's like to have a bad day. So do I, they suck.
    - bsder 9y ago
      Then you should stay away from sales. I have had people fall asleep in the middle of my presentation (after lunch-heart medication). I have had people throw up in the middle of my presentation. I have had people cry in the middle of my presentation. At that point, I stop politely. I'm not in sales mode anymore; I'm in human being mode. Maybe they need an ear. Maybe they need a beer. Maybe their staff understands that they fall asleep after lunch and that you can continue on. Sales is mostly empathy and education. I'm selling to you because I believe that I'm going to make your situation better. If I reach a point where I believe that is not true, I'm going to stop selling to you, refer you to someone else, etc. Occasionally, this loses me a sale. Oh, well. I generally engender so much good will when it happens that it almost always rebounds back to me later.
arkades 9y ago
So, the linked article mentions "know your audience," but I think glosses on emphasizing that a bit. Engineers, content creators, program directors, are going to be looking for different things and make decisions in different ways. Don't just ensure decision makers show up; make sure you're talking about the pros and cons those decision makers will care about, rather than the ones you think they should care about.
karussell 9y ago
Anyone experience with demoing an API :) ? Currently we have more or less simplistic demos, which also do not look shiny. And we have to highlight everytime that these demos are using just a tiny subset of the full API and much more stuff is possible. When we got more customers we were also able to point to some nice looking apps but this is also not always optimal.
- scott00 9y ago
  Twilio has a reputation for giving a killer API demo. Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368 and the links in comments within.
xhedley 9y ago
Advice probably applicable to more than demoing SAAS. Also the author has clearly acquired some sales chops by reading those books on demos - the note at the end about researching and writing the post in 9 hours using airstory had me clicking on the links! Of course they disclosed they were an airstory founder on their blog.
e2e4 9y ago
https://appear.in https://appear.in has been the best software for demos for me (p.s. just a happy customer) works from within the browser excellent video/audio quality good screen sharing set up meeting with just a simple url

417 points by charlieirish 9y ago

blizkreeg 9y ago

How true is the perception (from the buyer's side) that a self-funded SaaS company is not worth talking to?

GordonS 9y ago
Is that really a thing? I would never think to check how a SaaS company was funded when looking at their products.
- copyhackers 9y ago
  I dunno, but when it happened to me, it totally derailed everything. It was one of those moments when you want to argue with the prospect - "As if funded companies don't go out of business?" - but that's probably not a good strategy. :) So I just sat awkwardly and tried to explain that we'd been approached by VCs but hadn't pursued anything. I hope it doesn't come up that often. I worry, though, that it's actually some sort of signal to the average prospect (who's not in the startup world).
  - x0x0 9y ago
    patio11 has talked about this One approach -- besides make sure you have an answer ready to go next time -- is to talk about two things (straight up stolen from patio11, but if there are mistakes in memory, they're mine): 1 - who do you think you matter more to, some company with thousands of customers or me? 2 - I don't give a shit what their SLA says, when you call late at night, you don't get eng. If you call my cell, you get the person who wrote it all. Who is going to get your problem fixed faster?
    - blizkreeg 9y ago
      This is a fantastic way to respond to it. But I do fear if it's a slightly emotional response and not a more assuring one. It's probably the best way to address the elephant in the room though, aside from having a kick-ass product that addresses their pain points.
      - x0x0 9y ago
        In my limited experience selling things, sales are all about emotion. Yes, there are a few actual deal-breakers, but things like a willingness to learn new things or adjust their workflow or deal with a mildly suboptimal workaround depend entirely on emotion. And the same suboptimality or problem in the hands of a person who wants a deal to work vs someone who doesn't swings in two different directions entirely based on the potential customer's emotions.
    - patio11 9y ago
      The real kicker to this line of argument is "When you call BigCo at 3 AM, you will get someone who listens attentively to your problem but cannot do anything to help you. When you call at 3 PM, you will get... an interchangeable replacement for that person. If you prioritize getting the problem fixed versus someone picking up the phone, pick us: we work defined hours but all of your requests will be handled by the person who build the system and can actually help you rather than just opening a ticket and sympathizing that nothing has been done about it." (Hat tip to Jason Cohen for this line of argument.)
- blizkreeg 9y ago
  I think perception matters, and if you give off the vibe that your company may not have the resources and wherewithal to support my business in the long run, I'm not going to go with your offering.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  I always check, because it sucks to have a vendor go out of business unexpectedly. Good to know what the financial situation is. Bootstrapping is fine as long as they have been in business a while. It also gives a clue about their expectations for the relationship. Venture-backed companies are not necessarily more stable, because they are often under pressure to grow very fast.

wonderwonder 9y ago

You also need to account for losing internet connectivity. I had a demo before I knew what I was doing where I went to the customer site and they set us up in some sort of dead zone, essentially could not connect to either guest wifi or mobile hotspot to show the product for most of the time or when it did connect the lag was so bad it seemed like the product was incredibly slow. Most places will not allow you to connect via a wired connection to their network for good reason. I then started tripping all over myself because I had not prepared for this situation. I did not land the customer. If possible, running on local host is the way to go. It was a character building experience.

bshimmin 9y ago
...and when running from localhost, watch out for any resources loading from a CDN, and, of course, for your local dummy data being total crap and/or accidentally offensive (and get ready for "Why is all this text in [Latin/French/Italian/something really bizarre]?" when you use lorem ipsum).
- lostcolony 9y ago
  I learned long ago that -any- placeholders confuse people. Image placeholders? "Why is it showing me just an image of some random person with the word 'placeholder' over it?! I would have images of Y!" It's frustrating, but that's reality. Figure out the sort of thing users will actually have in there, and try to put something similar. Preface lorem ipsum with "Your text goes here. Fake text follows: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." or similar.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    A million times yes. I had a client tell me an example draft deliverable was "the worst document I've ever been handed" when I was showing them a preview of the document format in week two of a three month project. It was supposed to be documenting their entire architecture and solution I was building for them, so it would be delivered at the end of the project. They asked to see it early, so I put in placeholder data. They were not impressed, and it nearly tanked the whole project. They didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for obviously placeholder text. Problem is, none of their real information had been fleshed out yet, so I didn't have real data to put in. But then on another client, I put in better (more realistic) placeholder text for the same document and they thought I had sent them another client's information and got real scared about their own data privacy with our company. That's when I learned to refuse a client's request to show them a document before it's (at least nearly) finished. If they want to see the format, a static picture of very obvious placeholder data serves just fine.

ljw1001 9y ago

This is a very practical and insightful post. Thanks.

jaymzcampbell 9y ago

> Don’t waste time showing [prospects] the step-by-step process of doing something. Create a vision of what benefit they can get by using your product. This 100 times. This goes for many things too, it's often very easy to feel like you are being productive by painstakingly going over basics and step-by-steps but anyone who is genuinely interested will follow up themselves. Anyone else is going to get bored fast. This is why it's so important to have and show this big vision - you need to hook people to stay interested. Great post, it's also nice to see something well over 1,000 words! Thanks for taking the time to write all this up!

wj 9y ago
I learned this lesson as well. Step-by-step is a training session. For a demo start with the end (show the wow") and then dig down if they ask questions.
frogperson 9y ago
This is sales 101. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

ams6110 9y ago

Don't forget to allow an extra 30 minutes for all the inevitable tech glitches with Zoom or Adobe or whatever your remote solution is. Get ready to bash your head on the wall when you discover that they are trying to use IE 7 on Windows XP to connect to your presentation, and nobody in the meeting knows how to "load chrome" or even has permission to do it. Finally throw your deck away and do a voice-only call via someone's cell phone sitting on the middle of the conference table.

throwaway2016a 9y ago
Don't forget the client that calls in with their phone (because it's "easier" and the conference bridge allows phone call ins) and therefor can't see your screen. I always make sure to stress the importance of using a computer to connect because of screen share.
arethuza 9y ago
Some places, particularly government networks, have extremely locked down Internet access - the tool that I've found to work the best for screen sharing is screen leap: http://www.screenleap.com/ http://www.screenleap.com/ No silly viewers for people to install to watch your demo.

pinaceae 9y ago

This is good advice, beware of seeing this as the whole story though. Once you play with the big kahunas, your prospects will be tightly controlled and briefed by their procurement teams. Which means most of the question techniques outlined in the post will fall flat as the proc guys have read the same playbook. This is where the side chats during coffee breaks, etc become the core. Be ready to show your software to anyone, anytime. The literal elevator pitch. Anything to outmaneuver the proc team. Good luck :)

freehunter 9y ago
But on the flip side, bigger companies will send out RFPs to have you answer their most important questions before you ever get to the demo stage so the line of questioning will change. If there's anything doing demos has taught me over the years, it's that clients really hate answering the same questions over and over. If you have any of that information ahead of time, don't ask them again. But also like the article says, don't assume their answer is still the same. Say "what I understand you're looking for is X, has that changed?" It shows you're paying attention and have read the information they sent you.
notahacker 9y ago
Depends what you mean by "the procurement team". People with procurement in their actual job title are glorified paper pushers who's job is to make you think that you need to offer a better price but are actually entirely subordinate to the people who've made the decision to recommend to buy your software. On the other hand, the level of upper management that tends to make the decision is exactly the sort of person this demo advice applies most for: the people who really don't care about the flexibility of your search function or UX (because they're probably not using it themselves) but are quite impressed when you use it to highlight a solution to a problem unique to their company/sector, and don't actually have time to watch a walkthrough of Feature X but do remember the story about how it saved a company facing similar issues $100k
- kesselvon 9y ago
  A lot of the time the procurement team can tell the buyer to fuck off, or they'll suggest another software they already have a license for to try first

brightball 9y ago

Great read. Very much follows the "people buy pain relief" mantra that I was taught in sales classes.

Clubber 9y ago

This was very informative, thanks! I'm a software builder and this isn't my lane, but I might need to learn it soon.

vlucas 9y ago

Such a good post. I learned a lot of valuable insights here, right when I needed them! :)

thibaut_barrere 9y ago

Sharing a bit of my own experience: I used to do a lot of demos for my SaaS (usually 1 to 2 hour long, because it ended up in some form of coaching session on cash-flow forecasting habits), but after a while I realised that I got more churn from such users ultimately. I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things : - An in-app onboarding tour (fully self-service), implemented with mock data (see https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5b2 https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5... for a full write-up on how to implement that with Rails & Hopscotch) - A git-based detailed knowledge base (also self-service), https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-git-based-knowledge-base-for-my-saas-product https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-g... And I also moved from a CC-upfront trial mode, to a no-CC trial. Applying those 3 measures slashed my "customer support time" to almost zero & fewer churn. I suppose I'm attracting more savvy, self-service users too now.

encoderer 9y ago
How did the trial conversion go? Do you have a lot of in-app prompting and email around conversion? We tried that at Cronitor in 2015 but we saw less engagement from users who started a trial without a cc and less engaged users, predictably, converted at a lower rate for us.
- thibaut_barrere 9y ago
  I have no in-app prompting at all, and I have a simple 5-email benefits-oriented email series (via customer.io). I don't have enough numbers for things to be meaningful (it's a small-scale SaaS), but I seem to recall that removing the CC without onboarding initially was not great, and things improved with the onboarding tour (sorry if I cannot be much more specific!). Removing the CC avoided the need to handle refunds for some people, which was a bit of hassle to handle.
  - softawre 9y ago
    > sorry if I cannot be much more specific It's much appreciated anyway. Sharing of the secret sauce is what makes this forum so valuable to the tech community.

thomasjudge 9y ago

As a backup, in case: the site internet is down/you're presenting onsite & their internet is down/ you're not running locally/ whatever - it can be useful to have a "virtual demo" ready to go, ie, a powerpoint deck of screenshots showing your intended demo flow. Not as good as the real thing but better than nothing...

twiss 9y ago

Many SaaS websites seem to try as hard as possible to hide the actual product from you, with no screenshots, no live demo, and sometimes even no free trial, and a "demo" page that only has a form to request a demo. And according to this article, even in that demo, you're not supposed to see much of the application. Now, I trust that this is sound advice for many (enterprise) customers, but personally I hate it.

sly010 9y ago
Selling is easier if you don't reveal your cards early in the game. Buying is much harder.
- tertius 9y ago
  Elaborate please. Those not educated in sales may benefit.
  - tonyhb 9y ago
    This is what I take from it: by revealing your cards there's less room for manipulation. The buyer already has preconceptions that could range from: - This will not work; I didn't see this in the screenshots - I don't understand what I saw and now I have irrelevant questions If the buyer tells you the pain points, and only the pain points, as a seller you can focus on _those_ and cut out the bullshit. It makes manipulating easier as a seller, and as a buyer you're left to trust the seller that everything will work out in the end. Haven't got the experience to say whether or not this is a good thing.
    - tertius 9y ago
      > It makes manipulating easier as a seller You mean manipulating the pitch in a way to only focus on the benefits to their problems? Or in a bad way?
moduspwnens14 9y ago
It's got to be that they're not multi-tenant. I'm with you--I would only bother building for SaaS if the cost of a minimal new customer is insignificant. Then while your competitors are saying, "Give us your phone number and we'll call you," you can be saying, "Click here and try right now with no credit card." I think a lot of these companies, though, are more-or-less selling hosted versions of the stuff they've been selling for decades... which is very much not multi-tenant, but it's what they've got.

riskable 9y ago

I've sat through probably thousands of demos in my IT career and I must say this quote featured in the article is bullshit: People don’t buy features, they buy solutions, trust, and relationships. -Rob Gonzalez I can't count the number of times we (various IT teams) have selected products because they were the only one that had a feature we needed. I'm at the point in my IT career where if I'm watching a demo I politely let them do their little spiel for 5-10 minutes and then I'm like, "yeah yeah show us feature X" (because I want to see that it works and how it works). What always destroys a demo for me: * Sales people that don't know the technical details. "I'll have to get back to you on that." (for nearly every question) * Irrelevant use cases. "Schools use our product!" * Can't actually provide a *live demo*. Only slides or, "Let's watch this 10 minute video after which I probably won't be able to answer any of your technical questions!" * Complete failure to mention anything in regards to security or if they do it's nebulous bullshit like, "we your data in transit!". This one is becoming greatest concern lately. Everything I've read about this sort of thing says that the #1 thing you can do to improve sales of any software product is to add new features. At least, that works once your product has been established. Selling it initially? No matter how you slice it that's hard.

freehunter 9y ago
It goes both ways. Some companies only care about a specific feature and will overlook almost everything else. Some companies care about the relationship and are willing to sacrifice features. I know a company I was working for year ago was switching from IBM Notes email to a cloud provider. Microsoft and Google were the last two in the running. We ended up going with Google even though Microsoft had more robust DLP and auditing features because the Microsoft sales guys seemed to assume they already had the sale and would respond to emails without reading them or sometimes not respond at all, whereas Google actually sent someone out to our Midwest headquarters to walk us through it face-to-face. The decision makers didn't want to be just another sale, they wanted a company that cared about our success, and Microsoft lost the sale based on that alone. And take established players like IBM: why do people pay more for IBM when their competitors are faster, have more features, and have flashier sales pitches? Because IBM is comfortable, reliable, and you know what you're getting. Better the devil you know than the startup that's going to get bought out and shut down a year from now, right? But yeah, I've also seen a lot of companies turn down a great product because it was missing a feature they needed. It's always a cost/benefit analysis, is that sale going to offset the cost of developing and supporting that feature? If it's a feature built for one customer and no one else is asking for it, it's probably okay to lose that sale. But if someone else asks for it and you implement it later, go back to that first company and pitch again.

strictfp 9y ago

TL;DR: Business people only listen when you explicitly talk about them and/or money.

whisdol 9y ago

Sitting at the other side of the table (as a regular engineer in BigCorp), that was an interesting read. One thing I recognized from too many demos and product workshops (whether they are on site in our offices or remote) is this section: > Ask lots and lots of questions. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of the demo content should be about your customers, and 20% should be about your solution. Spending an hour explaining our systems, our business and our pain points to a random sales rep is usually not a good use of my time, especially if I still don't really know or understand your product yet (don't expect me to have even visited your website before the demo if I'm not the person who booked it).

dastbe 9y ago
So if you have a meeting scheduled for a demo, why wouldn't you check out the website? Are you actively trying to not have a good meeting? I almost always go through materials before a meeting because it makes me better informed and we end up having a much better conversation.

GordonS 9y ago

"Be sincere and ask them how their day has been" But, realistically, the sales guy doesn't give a shit about how their prospect's day has been - how is this 'sincere'?

phonon 9y ago
Good salespeople actually do care!
- softawre 9y ago
  I care about my family, if they had a bad day then I'll work hard to cheer them up. How do I show that I care to the same level about some random client?
  - phonon 9y ago
    How does a therapist care about a random client? Or a clown?
  - betenoire 9y ago
    You don't care at the same level, and if you try to show you do you will rightfully be seen as phony. Normal human-to-human empathy is enough. You don't have to cheer them up, but you know what it's like to have a bad day. So do I, they suck.
  - bsder 9y ago
    Then you should stay away from sales. I have had people fall asleep in the middle of my presentation (after lunch-heart medication). I have had people throw up in the middle of my presentation. I have had people cry in the middle of my presentation. At that point, I stop politely. I'm not in sales mode anymore; I'm in human being mode. Maybe they need an ear. Maybe they need a beer. Maybe their staff understands that they fall asleep after lunch and that you can continue on. Sales is mostly empathy and education. I'm selling to you because I believe that I'm going to make your situation better. If I reach a point where I believe that is not true, I'm going to stop selling to you, refer you to someone else, etc. Occasionally, this loses me a sale. Oh, well. I generally engender so much good will when it happens that it almost always rebounds back to me later.

arkades 9y ago

So, the linked article mentions "know your audience," but I think glosses on emphasizing that a bit. Engineers, content creators, program directors, are going to be looking for different things and make decisions in different ways. Don't just ensure decision makers show up; make sure you're talking about the pros and cons those decision makers will care about, rather than the ones you think they should care about.

karussell 9y ago

Anyone experience with demoing an API :) ? Currently we have more or less simplistic demos, which also do not look shiny. And we have to highlight everytime that these demos are using just a tiny subset of the full API and much more stuff is possible. When we got more customers we were also able to point to some nice looking apps but this is also not always optimal.

scott00 9y ago
Twilio has a reputation for giving a killer API demo. Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368 and the links in comments within.

xhedley 9y ago

Advice probably applicable to more than demoing SAAS. Also the author has clearly acquired some sales chops by reading those books on demos - the note at the end about researching and writing the post in 9 hours using airstory had me clicking on the links! Of course they disclosed they were an airstory founder on their blog.

e2e4 9y ago

https://appear.in https://appear.in has been the best software for demos for me (p.s. just a happy customer) works from within the browser excellent video/audio quality good screen sharing set up meeting with just a simple url