Research from Gartner shows that customers name demos as the number one most sought-after resource when evaluating a solution.
No surprise there.
But remember we’re dealing with a complex sale, where buying groups usually include at least six people and sometimes as many as 14. They’ll all need a demo, and do they all hop on the first call? Never ever.
This poses a problem. An SE is trained to architect a bespoke solution, to get into the weeds, to spot the “gotcha’s”. But they spend most of their time robotically repeating the standard introductory demo for the latest stakeholder to join the discussion 11 months into an 18 month sales cycle.
On top of that, growing organizations will find that demand for demos far outstrips what SEs can accomplish in a 40 hour work week. You can ask them to work overtime, but that’s a short term solution, and you want to talk about a painful employee to turn over? In practical terms, many teams just end up delaying the demo. After finally engaging with a supplier, going through an often-obnoxious qualifying interrogation, and requesting a demo, customers must often wait three weeks or more to take what they consider the most important step in their search for a solution. Not the ideal customer experience.
But before you get all huffy with presales for holding out on getting you your demo, consider the last soul-crushing obstacle faced by technical sales teams:
Despite the best efforts of BDRs and AEs to qualify live product demos, presales teams frequently report that as much as 50% of their live demos are wasted on unqualified prospects.
Ouch.
So to summarize, we have a highly trained, highly paid expert who can craft solutions to some of the most complex problems in the industrial world robotically repeating a standard demo at 8:30 pm local time for a prospect who has a 50/50 chance of being real.
And it will only take two short years to get another one.
But what can sales teams do? Sales Engineer expertise is essential to a successful sale, that much has been proven by the data time and again.
Video? Maybe. But asking a prospect to comb through an hour long video for the bits that are relevant to them is a tough sell.
This is where Consensus demo automation came from.
Interactive video demos automate the most repetitive customer interactions, freeing up SEs to do what they do best: solve customer problems.
See one in action
