Peter Cohan

People (and companies) perceive themselves as unique, particularly with respect to their situations – but they also want to feel that they are not alone, that others suffer from similar problems (and have found good ways to solve those problems that may also apply to them…).

When doing Discovery, one objective is to make the customer feel comfortable that you understand their unique situation. This is best accomplished by asking good, relevant questions.

A second objective in the Discovery process is to help the customer visualize the possibility of a solution to their problems (not the details, just that a solution is possible). One way to achieve this is, after you have a clear understanding of their situation, is to comment “We’ve been able to help others in situations that were very similar to yours…” This places them into a group where they perceive they are not alone… [Some sales methodologies, e.g., Solution Selling and CustomerCentric Selling, call this...

A common complaint amongst presales folks is that they rarely get a chance to see one another’s demos. Individuals form habits and fall into ruts (“we are victims of momentum”), repeating demos over and over (sometimes numbingly!) with very few opportunities to improve.
Presales teams are equipping and operating out of more home offices, struggling to learn more products and technologies, dealing with an ever-increasing pace of business, and gathering at fewer face-to-face meetings (e.g., sales kick-off meetings and quarterly inquisition events, with agendas already overstuffed) – and the challenge is only getting tougher.

Carving out time for “Demo Days” accordingly becomes very much more important. In the past, Demo Days were often face-to-face sessions where individual presales team members would share particularly successful demos, tips, best practices and introduce new products, but they often consumed ½ day or longer to make them useful, since teams didn’t get...

I am constantly amazed at how vendors, in their demos, expect audiences to retain and remember the (often) enormous number of features and functions presented – particularly when human brains are rather poor at remembering undifferentiated lists of information. For example: Have you ever had the following happen to you?
You drive to the grocery/supermarket with a mental list of 5 items in your head. Everything is fine until the moment you step through the door into the store, when you suddenly can’t recall 2 (or more) of the items on your mental list. You can remember the first item or two, and perhaps the last one, but – darn it! – what were those other items? Being presented with the hundreds of items (and advertising) seems to have knocked those middle items off of your mental list – and you often don’t recall what they were until you exit the store…

What can we do to combat this when WE are presenting demos? Here’s a short list (additions welcome):

A number of people have asked about how to draft Discovery Documents – should one use full-length questions or something shorter, for example?

One starting point is to use full sentences. This may be good for people who are new to an arena or who are learning how to do Discovery, as it provides a script, essentially, that new folks can follow.

However, once people have become moderately practiced and reasonably knowledgeable, I recommend a crisper technique – more of a template or outline approach.

In my use of Discovery Documents, each topic is presented as a word or short word phrase, and not as full questions. These serve as prompters for me to remember to address or explore what can be a large number of topic areas. For example, my current Discovery Document (used for exploring my prospects’ demo practices) is about 1 and 3/4 pages long, where each topic is typically 1-5 items (often a header “topic” with one or a few “sub-topics”, all shown as a word...