Ask IH : Is demo'ing the product your major customer acquisition strategy?

I can only speak for the B2B perspective, but I think for B2C you likely need quite a quick sales cycle based on average deal size.

I used to demo within the first 5 minutes of the first conversation with a prospect. This took me literal years to fix. As a product guy, I wanted to lead with product, and I got on fine when talking to product people. When it came to prospects farther down the innovation curve, the success slowed.

After speaking to some peers who'd been doing this a lot longer than I had, I learned a demo should not be the first thing you do for a prospect. It's counterintuitive, but I was doing myself a huge disservice by leading with the product. I was showing off a set of features while fishing for problems to attach them to.

Instead, I began to start with standard qualifying questions to understand the problems faced by the potential customer. I fished for the pain they had. When I had sufficient information, I'd give them the high level pitch and as much as possible, tie my solution back to their pain.

If the potential customer is the only decision maker needed to move forward, then I'd often move to a demo if I felt like my solution was a good fit for their problem.

If not, I suggest that the next step be to get the other stakeholders in the room for a demo. I'm going to have to do a demo with them anyway, and better to leave the prospect thinking that my solution is designed to solve their problems (assuming it is), than introduce doubt around minutia and user experience.

I also wager a lot of money that you could charge significantly more for your product following this process vs. show and tell.

Heya @mpatel – I think this is one of the most overlooked customer acquisition strategies by most startups. I think in short, many founders (often technical or product focused), are in love w/ the idea of viral growth or more "scalable" ways of acquiring customers.

That said, in the early days of any business, you have will something to exist. Doing cold outbound (emails, calls, etc) paired with a demo flow can be a great strategy.

For a quick primer, check out @NathanBarry's awesome post on sales for startups: http://nathanbarry.com/sales/

When we first launched our social inbox product at Buffer (buffer.com/reply/), outbound email + demos single handedly got us from $0 to $20k in MRR.

This is indeed more of a strategy for B2B, though that said, if you can make the numbers work it shouldn't matter too much. Some rules of thumb would be: average contract size (yearly revenue per customer) of ~$3k+ (so you can afford someone doing sales full time) and an average time to deal close of ~ < 30 days.

Lastly, a few great reasons to demo w/ customers:

• It works :-D
• It's one of the fastest ways to learn from customers, hear their objections and improve your product in response.
• You'll get damn good at selling, pitching and explaining your product.
• There's almost no faster way to build trust and a relationship w/ your customer than some virtual face time.
• Churn will typically be much lower for these customers.
• Lastly, you can go to market a bit faster as you walk customers through wonky onboarding flows, teach them best practices before you've got great documentation, content or ebooks and you can even skip building the self-serve flow for your product until you truly understand what a successful onboarding looks like.

I am pro demo-ing the product, regardless if it is for B2B or B2C.

Here's why.

Together with some friends we've built a small mobile app (soft launched). During day one of our soft launch we shared it with friends and family. We got about 25+ installs and about one third of them are from friends of our friends. So word of mouth is the first bonus you can get. Secondly we started to get opportunities for promotion (e.g. get featured on the FB pages of our coworking space). Finally we've learned so much and we're able to adapt really quick to the needs of our users.

I say never to miss an opportunity to pitch/demo your product. It's a bit of gamble as in you're not sure what will come out but sometimes one demo can have a huge impact.

Good luck!