This article is for founders and teams who have a software product demo at the core of their sales process.

It focuses on practical, relatively small things which you can easily change and implement to improve your demos almost instantly.

This is based off my experiences of researching, hosting, listening to and iterating on hundreds of product demos over the last 3 years or so.

These suggestions are split this into 3 sections:

Before the demo
During the demo
After the demo

Before the Demo

A lot of time, money, effort and resources goes into getting people booked onto demos. Making sure they turn up is vital.

1 - Get In Their Calendar

A very simple one, but an important one. Whatever you are using to book prospects in for demo's, make sure they are getting a calendar invite.

Tools like Calendly, and some CRM's, (we use Hubspot) will handle this for you.

If you're using more of a manual process, booking them in manually, send a calendar invite from your calendar of choice and also send your prospect the links to pick the calendar of their choice.

We've used a tool called AddEvent in the past to do this.

2 - Set Up Demo Reminder Emails

Setting up a couple of emails to remind your prospects about the demo, is a really effective and easy way to reduce your 'no-shows'.

Depending on the tool you use to book demo's into your calendar, there may be a feature to do this for you.

We use Hubspot, and don't particularly like that we don't have complete control of the message in the reminders.

So we set up a Zapier trigger which monitors our Sales team's calendars for new demo's, and then triggers an email direct from the sales person to the prospect 24hrs and 1hr before the demo.

3 - Treat Reminders & Calendar Slots as Opportunities

Related to the previous two points, your reminder emails and the slot you have in your prospects calendar are an opportunity to remind them why they are interested in what you do, and increase the chances that they show up.

Treat the calendar invite like an email. The meeting Title is your subject line, and the Description is your email body.

We use something like:

Invite subject: [Company Name] + [Product Name] Demo

Invite description: Thanks for booking a live demo of [Product Name] to explore how we can help you to X, Y and Z.

If for any reason you cannot make the slot, please notify me and we can rearrange. I look forward to our demo.

In our reminder emails, we suggest to the prospect that we've done some prep work ahead of the demo, so they will feel bad about not showing up. Like this:

"I'm all set for our demo tomorrow / today and looking forward to discussing how we may be able to help."

On the Demo

Adding some structure to your demos, and making sure you deliver a few key 'components' will will help ensure that everything goes smoothly and your prospect comes away with a good impression.

4 - Don't Show Them Everything

Most software product demos are far too long.

This is usually because you show too many features and generally just try to give them too much information. This quickly turns what should be a sales pitch into a training exercise, where you show them what every single button does.

The prospect ends up becoming overwhelmed, confused or bored.

I'd suggest either deciding what your two or three most important and valuable features are (to customers, not you), and just demo those.

Or...

5 - Five Minute Fact-Finding

Even better than that, only show each customer what they *need* to see.

How do you know what they need to see?

You ask.

Chances are you won't have all the information you need about your potential customer before the demo.

So rather than jumping straight into the demo blind, showing your prospect what you *think* they want to see explain that you want to spend just 5 mins asking some questions.

I'll cover this in more detail in another post, but if you focus on finding out the following, you will have a much clearer idea of which features to show them.

What are their goals?
What challenges do they have in reaching these goals?
How will things be better if something (your product) could help them to overcome their challenges and achieve their goals?

6 - Set an Agenda

We picked this one up from a really useful book called 'Just F*ing Demo'.

The idea is that once you have decided exactly what you are going to show your prospect on the demo, whether predetermined or based on your fact-finding, you want to outline this plan to your prospect,

This helps with a few things:

It makes you sound organised and in control (and actually makes you organised and in control)
It puts the customer at ease, because they know what is coming and when, so they are less likely to get distracted because they are wondering when they are going to see X
It reduces the amount of interruptive questions they ask, because they know they will have a chance for this

Once you've set the agenda, ask them if you've missed anything they thought they were going to see, or need to see.

7 - Ask Questions Which Get Them to "Buy" All the Way Through

Most demos are split up into sections where you cover one feature at a time. At the end of each section, most people ask the exact same question:

"Does that all make sense?"

9/10 prospects will say yes, whether they understand or not. Because most people don't want to sound dumb.

Instead, try asking a question which relates back to how the feature will help them, like:

"Can you see how you would use X to help you to Y when Z happens?"

We've found that people are more open to saying 'No' if they don't get it or disagree with this approach - meaning we can try again with a different approach, or dig into why we've missed the mark.

Equally, those who agree usually expand with other use cases, and generally start getting enthusiastic.

Either way, it's a better outcome.

8 - Finish with a Summary

Very similar to setting the agenda at the start, we always close with a summary, which mirrors the agenda, plus anything unplanned we covered.

This usually goes something like this:

"We've covered quite a lot, so I just wanted to do a quick recap before we finish up with any more questions you have.

We looked at Feature 1, which as we discussed, should help you to do X
Then we dived into the Feature 2, which will be great for Y
And finally we looked at how you will be able to use Feature 3 to do Z

Is there anything you feel we missed or that you're still wondering about?"

This is great for providing a final, really clear reminder about why your product is really going to help, and also cover any key points that they may have missed or forgotten about.

And it gives them one final opportunity to say, "Actually, I was also wondering if it could me to..."

After the Demo

Once you've completed the core 'demo' part of the demo, it's important to finish and follow up strong.

9 - Ask for the Close

This is as much a general sales tip as it is a tip for demos, but for some reason, particularly on demos, lots of people seem reluctant to ask for the close.

They end the demo with, "Thanks for your time, hope you liked it, get in touch if you have any questions. Bye."

This is missing a huge opportunity.

After the summary, we simply ask something along the lines of:

"With all that in mind, how do you see [product] working for you to [achieve goal / overcome challenge]?"

Even if you don't feel comfortable with it, or don't think it's the right time / person, you should always at least ask for a theoretical close.

For example, if we were demoing to someone who we know needs to get a boss to sign off on it, we ask something like:

"I know you need to speak to XXX about this. But if it were just up to you, today, would you be looking get signed up?"

If they say yes, then it becomes you and them in a team to get XXX to sign off. You're now just helping them to get what THEY want.

10 - Send a Follow Up Email, Right Away

As soon as you get off the call with your prospect, get an email over to them.

In this email you want to:

Thank them for their time
Remind them of what you covered (we pretty much use the summary we finished the demo with)
Include any additional information, attachments etc. they required
And finally, reiterate the next steps agreed on the demo

That's it.

10 relatively quick, easy and practical steps you can take to improve your product demos.

Any questions, feedback or details of how you've improved your product demos, I'd love to hear them :)