DEMOFESTx East Coast

Headshots, Check In & Breakfast Buffet

Keynote - Three Dimensional Interactive Demos: How Personalization, Context, and Explorative Experience combine to meet the needs of today's sophisticated self-directed buyers

Research shows that buyers are hungry for product demostration content that is “rich in technical detail and cannot be easily faked”. They want this content early and often throughout the buying process. The challenge is that buyers today will not wade through automated demo content that is irrelevant to their unique role or interests, placed out of context, or locked in a sequence that doesn’t allow them the freedom to choose. In this session, we’ll explore three key buyer needs and how to meet them in a way that enables buyers to move more quickly through the buying process.

The SE Dilemma: Balancing Effectiveness with Efficiency

It’s well established that presales leaders have historically had to do “more with less”, especially in this difficult economy with countless organizations reducing presales headcount. And when tech companies begin to expand, they tend to invest in sales resources first, before investing more in presales, putting that much more pressure on sales engineers to increase capacity. On the other hand, because we are engineers at heart, we tend to strive for precision and perfection, acutely aware that our credibility is constantly on the line. And therein lies the SE dilemma: balancing our drive for excellence with the need to be highly productive. The two can often be in conflict. To achieve one can mean sacrificing the other. But it doesn’t have to. In this talk, author Chris White will dissect this dilemma of efficiency vs. effectiveness and provide tangible measures that SEs can take to maximize both.

You Can't Close What You Didn't Open: Discovery That Drives Business Outcomes

For decades Revenue Organizations have been bemoaning the difficulty of developing strong discovery skills across their sales teams. Why does this problem persist?

Discovery is the art of opening a topic with your customer to discuss admitted and latent pains. You can’t close business based on a topic you didn’t discuss. And most sellers have a hard time moving the conversation forward to a place where more than severe immediate pains are discussed.

What if your sellers COULD discuss these topics? What if they could discuss them in a way that the customer built their own business case to sell your product or service internally? What if the adoption rate of advanced discovery skills across your sales organization was 100%? Would that move the needle in your business?

It can be done. In this course Elisabeth will explain the discovery strategy and training program currently bringing Semrush subsantial gains in closing rates, as well as decreasing customer churn. Her innovative program is relatable and scalable to most complex sales, whether B2B or B2C.

“Forget About The Pain – What About The Gain?”

Hit the Ground Running with Consensus: Best Practices for a Successful Implementation, Launch & Onboarding | A Consensus Case Study

Firstup launched Consensus to its sales organization in early June 2023 with over 70 demos in its Demo Library. In the first 6-weeks, Firstup employees created over 1,000 DemoBoards. In this session we will discuss what we learned from our sprint to implement Consensus, how we got buy-in from sales to use Consensus, our Sales Training launch meeting, and our 6-week onboarding and training plan.

Lunch

Choice and Priority Buyers: Target both for the Win

In any buying cycle, you encounter the choice team and the priority team. The choice team may like you for your ability to solve day to day tactical problems, but the priority team can easily derail everything.

The key to winning over both buying teams lies in understanding what matters to them both. This session will outline the differences between choice and priority teams, help you identify them and understand how to reach them for the win.

The Cutting Edge Method: Your Users Are Your Best Solution Consultants

Truly differentiating your company from takes time and effort. The traditional way of demonstrating your products and solutions doesn’t always create the engagement you want, or your customers are demanding. Today everyone wants to experience technology through real-world situations utilizing decision-making examples and showing outcomes. Join this session to hear how Medidata Solutions, the leading technology company in life sciences, provides an immersive experience like no other.

During this session, you will learn the following:
Why Medidata wanted to change its approach to conference interactions and in specific client engagements
How to set up an experience
Creating a user story for the demo experience
Tactics for showcasing product value through real-life examples
What’s important about this approach and how Medidata used it to effectively differentiate vs. competitors

The Road to Immersive Customer Experiences to Enhance the Buying Journey

The future of solution showcasing is all about the immersive experience. Whether it’s AR, 3D, metaverse – based apps or even the tours feature in the Consensus Platform, it’s a must to give your customer the ability to understand what it’s like to utilize your solution. Tara Merry and Andy Pollard show you why an immersive experience is the future of what we do.

Lessons of Failure for Technical Sellers

It is easy to overlook lessons learned when everything in a sales cycle moves seamlessly. Often it’s not until we experience a complete loss that we force ourselves to stop and think about what could have gone better to achieve a different outcome. In this session I will share first world experiences of lessons learned and how to overcome those challenges. I will also build on an idea of building up your technical sellers “toolkit” that I shared in my previous Demofest session around “What Makes a Technical Sales Presentation Great?”

Actionable Insights from the 2023 Consensus SE Report

The 2023 Consensus SE Report is more than a bunch of boring statistics.

In this session, we’ll dig into actionable insights which will allow you as a Sales or SE Individual Contributor, Manager, or Sales Enablement leader to dramatically improve the way Presales and Sales work together as a team to enable Client Success, drive higher ARR (a key metric for almost everyone), improve Technical Close and Deal win-rate, and achieve your personal financial and career goals.

Let me tell you a story - The art of storytelling in selling your solution

People buy from people they connect with. Do your teams struggle to keep their audience engaged through all the interactions they have? Demos, discovery, follow-up meetings? Come hear how storytelling can be your secret weapon for your entire team.

Tours with Mike Trionfo

Closing Keynote Panel

Networking Happy Hour