How to Give a Powerful Product Demo

Product demos enable us to show prospects how the solutions we are offering can be valuable to them. They constitute a critical part of the sales process in a company, especially one in the SaaS market. In many B2B cases, they make the difference between getting the business of a prospect and losing it.

It takes time and resources to prepare for product demos. But imagine after having planned for months everything just goes haywire at the crucial time. The demonstration we have done a lot to prepare for fails to go as expected or desired. How disappointing that could be! But it’s the reality that many teams are confronted with.

What could make product demos fail and how do we get them right?

Causes of Poorly-Executed Product Demos

Product demonstrations can fail for any number of reasons. Let’s consider a few major ones.

Reason #1: Unnecessary preambles

It is common for people giving demos to begin with some background information that most prospects aren’t really interested in. Often, the individual in charge starts with information about who they are or maybe even goes ahead to introduce the rest of the team. Demonstrations begin in some instances with a “brief” history of the company.

What does all this have to do with the product? Prospects might wonder. Even when the focus is on the product from the start, it often involves sharing information that isn’t exciting to the skeptical audience.

Prospects aren’t usually interested in who we are. They just want to know what benefit(s) the product has for them. We would only shoot ourselves in the leg if we started with the history of our company or needless introductions.

Reason #2: Too much focus on the product

What’s that? You might ask. Isn’t a demo supposed to be about the product? It is, but we could go about it the wrong way if care isn’t taken.

We can become so excited with what we have created that we feel like showing everything to prospects. Without caution, we might find ourselves showing screens and screens of features, going from the beginning to the end.

Prospects didn’t make themselves available for us to talk proudly about the shiny new thing we are offering – they want to know how we’re going to solve their problem! That’s what prospects (or anyone for that matter) will be more interested in.

Reason #3: Making prospects think

A common piece of advice for designing great products is to not make customers think – we shouldn’t expect them to connect the dots of how the product will create value for them

Demanding prospects to get analytical to make sense out of our presentation is usually asking for too much. They don’t want to be made to try and figure out the usefulness of our product by simply being taken through the features one after another. If we cannot capture their attention within the first few seconds, it’s probably a lost cause already.

With all that said, how do we make a killer product demo? Let’s get to it.

Reason #4: Start from the End

A product demonstration is about telling a story. Stories by their nature are linear, going from the beginning to the end. But that’s not how we want to approach our product demo.

In this case, the end is what benefits our prospects can expect from our product. That is where we should start with. Our audience doesn’t want to wait until the very end to find this out. If we waited that long, chances are that we have long lost them.

It’s not important to go through all the benefits if they are many. Two or three most important ones could suffice to grab the attention of our audience.

Reason #5 Give Attention to the Problem

It’s not simply about walking prospects through all features but making them know what problem we are solving for them. During our presentation, we should be laser-focused on this problem.

Prospects gave their time to find out what we could solve for them. They are not interested in how fantastic our product is. What matters most to them is how we can solve their problem. We need to focus more on that in our presentation.

Reason #6: Aim to Inspire

We already mention how we don’t want to make our prospects think too hard. So what’s the better approach? We should instead aim to spur their emotions. It’s been proven that prospects or customers mainly take desired actions based on these rather than logical reasoning.

So we want to do all we can to stimulate their emotions to our advantage. Stories go a long way in achieving this. We should find a way to tell a captivating story about what our product brings to the table. We could, for instance, share an experience or observed pain point that made us consider building the product.