Presales Demos – The Missing Value Link That Connects Tactical & Strategic
When it comes to presales demos, the endgame is to advance the sales process to the next stage. At a minimum, that means you’ve made the shortlist. Ideally, you’re the preferred solution.
The easiest way to get there is to show how your solution makes users quantifiably more successful at their job in ways that have strategic value to their organization, i.e., the executive buyer.
But there’s a common gap that exists in most presales demos, and it not only takes the impact out of your value story, it also erodes your differentiation.
When you try to connect a tactical user benefit all the way up the food chain to something executive buyers care about, it’s a big leap and it can be perceived as a stretch or a generic benefit that sounds salesy. It can also create the perception that you don’t understand the business of the buyer as well as they think you should.
Here’s the missing link that makes the connection more realistic and improves your credibility. It also ups the ante on your differentiation.
Department Priorities & Goals – The Missing Link
Imagine you have a platform with a suite of loan products for credit unions and community banks. Forget about those products for a minute and think about the dynamics in the buyer organization starting with their c-suite.
Senior executives in the buyer organization set strategic goals, for example, “grow the customer base of local small businesses.”
In early discovery meetings, it’s really important to uncover specific strategic goals for the buyer organization, otherwise you might default to articulating the typical benefits of your loan products such as streamlined processes, reduced risk and greater compliance. While those benefits are important to everyone, they may not be the highest priority, and you run the risk of totally missing the mark.
Let’s follow the breadcrumbs from the c-suite down to the operational areas of the business and look at the goals and priorities for the department heads. Keep in mind that strategic goals established in the c-suite always, always, always result in an operational to-do list for every department.
If your products target the commercial lending function, your discovery process has to uncover the top priorities for commercial lending and their relationship to the buyer’s strategic goals, i.e., “growing the customer base of local small businesses.” Then you have to uncover the obstacles standing in the way of those commercial lending goals in order for your demos to have maximum value impact.
Once you understand that, you have 2/3 of the value picture.
Keeping with the example above, let’s say one of the top priorities for commercial lending is to “grow the portfolio of small business loans” by making the loan process faster and easier. Now, the connection is obvious. If the banks and credit unions make it more attractive for small businesses to apply for loans, they’ll grow their customer base of local small businesses.
The third and final layer of value discovery is to understand the user job tasks that have to change to meet the commercial lending department’s goals, and why they have to change.
For example, take the loan application process. It’s too cumbersome for small businesses because it was designed for much larger and more complex loans instead of small business loans that are simple and straight forward in relative terms.
Now, you can connect the dots between user benefits (simplifying a loan application), commercial lending’s goals (grow the portfolio of small business loans) and the buyer’s strategic goals (grow the customer base of local small businesses). It works from the top-down or bottom-up.
Here’s the bottom up version. If you make it easier for small businesses to apply for loans (tactical), you’ll grow the portfolio of small business loans (operational), which supports the strategic goal of growing the customer base of local small businesses.
The flow of your demo narrative (the top-down version) would go something like this.
- Demo Theme (strategic goal): Grow the customer base of local small businesses.
- Commercial Lending Goals (operational): Simplify the loan process for lower value loans that are typical for small businesses.
- Demo Scenarios: Show how you simplify loan applications, background checks, credit checks, fraud verification, etc. to attract more small business loan customers.
- Summary: you’ve shown a series of tactical user scenarios that result in “faster and easier loans for small businesses” (operational goal), collectively making a measurable impact on the strategic goal of “growing the customer base of local small businesses (strategic).”
Here’s the point in all of this. If you don’t understand both the strategic and operational goals and the relationship between them, you run the risk of showing how your suite of loan products (in the above example) solves your typical run-of-the-mill loan problems at the user level, and you can completely miss the outcomes that are most important to the department heads (influencers) and how they support the agenda of the executive buyers (the ultimate decision-makers).
Here’s the other point, and it goes to your credibility and differentiation. When you’re able to speak eloquently about the business of the buyer (aside from your products) it creates the perception you understand them better than the competition. That perception leads buyers to believe your products are better because you know them better.
It exemplifies the buying psychology that buyers buy because you understand them, not the other way around!
If you want to learn presales demos that differentiate because of you, the presenter, contact us about a product demo workshop that’s personalized to your products and your target markets. Our unique hands-on learning format means you’ll know exactly what great presales demos look like for you because we’ll create them together in the classroom.
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