Scaling presales often means removing redundancy through automation and eliminating the demos that aren’t qualified. But not all demos can be eliminated or automated. Even after implementing these scaling strategies, your technical sales teams may still feel overburdened. If that’s the case, don’t panic. There’s a third scaling principle: learn to share responsibility thoughtfully. Would it be a good fit for the AEs or BDRs to assume responsibility for some of the repetitive demos? Then the sales representative or BDRs deliver the demo covering the same information without having to get presales involved.
Focus Time
Delegating certain types of demos is not just about scaling down SE time wasted on unqualified and repetitive demos, it’s also about eliminating any fragmentation of their focus.
Even though they may only have to jump off for a micro demo, it disrupts their workflow removing them from projects that potentially have a larger impact on other sales.
In Gary Keller’s book, The ONE Thing, he mentions research that suggests that even if you’re highly focused, glancing at a text message for two seconds can take as long as three minutes to mentally get back to where you were in your state of focus.
The types of things that sales engineers are uniquely capable of doing (and the things that they are really good at) often take a lot of focus time. You can imagine that you’re deep down into setting up a POC or preparing for a custom technical demo and all of a sudden you’ve got to bounce out to do a micro demo and then come back, it must be quite disruptive. The mental switching costs are higher than we think.
What to Delegate and to Whom
At least 29% of SEs already say they’re not the sole demoers. Of those who are delegating, 74% are using AEs, 8% are using SDRs, and 12% are using both.
The best demos to delegate are vision and micro demos at the top of the funnel. Buyers at this stage aren’t ready to dive very deep yet, so you can provide some basic information on the product to the sales team for them to give the prospects a peek. That frees up the sales engineers for the more detailed technical demos.
This has the added benefit of preventing sales engineers from unwittingly demoing too deeply early in the buying process, which often leads to prospects getting overwhelmed.
Delegating to Sales
Not sure on where to get started on demo delegation? Here are a few ideas on how to delegate demos to the sales team.
● First, delegate the vision demo. Salespeople almost always already have a slide deck that focuses on the value proposition of your product. Take some of those slides, include information focusing on the problem, solution, and benefits of your solution, and add some screenshots. The buyer doesn’t often need to see more than this at this early buying stage and this will present a picture of what they can expect at a broad level.
● The micro demo is more focused on the product itself but still in an early stage. You may want to supply simple screen recordings for sales reps to play. Depending on the technical skill set of your sale’s team, you can either have the videos include the sales engineers narrating, or you could have a script that the salespeople read as the screen recordings are playing. Either way, you and your sales counterparts should review common FAQs that happen at this stage to prepare them for and follow up questions after the demo.
● Finally, delegate the use of intelligent demo automation. Create a library of reusable interactive video demos that sales reps and SDRs can send and track using intelligent demo automation. Delegating demo automation reduces the number of live demos they have to do and of course, it helps accelerate the sales cycle as well.
Multilingual Market Coverage
Another key challenge to scaling presales is multilingual market coverage, which is particularly acute in areas of the world like EMEA or APAC. To address this, use screen recordings or interactive videos. Record the demo in the primary language, then dub over the narrator’s voice with a native speaker. Use captions in the native language if you don’t want to try to get a voice narrator in the native language.
We have a customer from a large Fortune 500 company operating in France, selling all throughout EMEA. They recently told us they had an interactive video demo that was in Dutch that they were able to send to their stakeholders without delay when asked about an add-on product. Without the lag of having to get a translator or a presales counterpart involved that could speak Dutch, they got the upsell the same day because they were able to deliver so quickly.
Webinars
Other tools to help scale resales are webinars or live mass demos. These options draw in some prospects who are not ready to engage with sales yet, but are still interested in hearing from you.
Focus on vision, micro, and qualifying demos in webinars. Since these demos are intended for a broader audience, combine the vision and micro demo into one webinar which would include an introduction to the company and the main value proposition followed by a very brief product demo. Later in the month, do a standard product demo webinar, which provides a deeper dive into the product.
Between delegating, preparing content in different languages, and utilizing webinars, you should be able to effectively scale your presales.
