
Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS - charlieirish
https://thebetterstory.co/everything-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started-demoing-saas-f83c1c4fad99
======
riskable
I've sat through probably thousands of demos in my IT career and I must say
this quote featured in the article is bullshit:

    
    
        People don’t buy features, they buy solutions, trust, and relationships. -Rob Gonzalez
    

I can't count the number of times we (various IT teams) have selected products
because _they were the only one that had a feature we needed_. I'm at the
point in my IT career where if I'm watching a demo I politely let them do
their little spiel for 5-10 minutes and then I'm like, "yeah yeah show us
feature X" (because I want to see that it works and _how_ it works).

What always destroys a demo for me:

    
    
        * Sales people that don't know the technical details.
          "I'll have to get back to you on that." (for nearly every question)
        * Irrelevant use cases.  "Schools use our product!"
        * Can't actually provide a *live demo*.  Only slides or, 
          "Let's watch this 10 minute video after which I probably
          won't be able to answer any of your technical questions!"
        * Complete failure to mention anything in regards to security
          or if they do it's nebulous bullshit like, "we your data
          in transit!".  This one is becoming greatest concern lately.
    

Everything I've read about this sort of thing says that the #1 thing you can
do to improve sales of any software product is to add new features. At least,
that works once your product has been established. Selling it initially? No
matter how you slice it that's hard.

~~~
inthewoods
I think what you're describing is the difference between a technical
buyer/recommender and an economic buyer. You're obviously a technical buyer,
so for you, features that solve your specific pain are important and you
probably acted as gatekeeper to the whole process. But at some point in large
purchases, there has to be an economic justification - and that is where the
solutions/trust/relationships become more important.

~~~
shostack
I'm not sure how trust or relationships let you make a solid economic business
case...

------
thibaut_barrere
Sharing a bit of my own experience: I used to do a lot of demos for my SaaS
(usually 1 to 2 hour long, because it ended up in some form of coaching
session on cash-flow forecasting habits), but after a while I realised that I
got more churn from such users ultimately.

I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things :

\- An in-app onboarding tour (fully self-service), implemented with mock data
(see
[https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5...](https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5b2)
for a full write-up on how to implement that with Rails & Hopscotch)

\- A git-based detailed knowledge base (also self-service),
[https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-
a-g...](https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-git-based-
knowledge-base-for-my-saas-product)

And I also moved from a CC-upfront trial mode, to a no-CC trial.

Applying those 3 measures slashed my "customer support time" to almost zero &
fewer churn.

I suppose I'm attracting more savvy, self-service users too now.

~~~
encoderer
How did the trial conversion go? Do you have a lot of in-app prompting and
email around conversion?

We tried that at Cronitor in 2015 but we saw less engagement from users who
started a trial without a cc and less engaged users, predictably, converted at
a lower rate for us.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I have no in-app prompting at all, and I have a simple 5-email benefits-
oriented email series (via customer.io).

I don't have enough numbers for things to be meaningful (it's a small-scale
SaaS), but I seem to recall that removing the CC without onboarding initially
was not great, and things improved with the onboarding tour (sorry if I cannot
be much more specific!).

Removing the CC avoided the need to handle refunds for some people, which was
a bit of hassle to handle.

~~~
softawre
> sorry if I cannot be much more specific

It's much appreciated anyway. Sharing of the secret sauce is what makes this
forum so valuable to the tech community.

------
ams6110
Don't forget to allow an extra 30 minutes for all the inevitable tech glitches
with Zoom or Adobe or whatever your remote solution is. Get ready to bash your
head on the wall when you discover that they are trying to use IE 7 on Windows
XP to connect to your presentation, and nobody in the meeting knows how to
"load chrome" or even has permission to do it. Finally throw your deck away
and do a voice-only call via someone's cell phone sitting on the middle of the
conference table.

~~~
arethuza
Some places, particularly government networks, have _extremely_ locked down
Internet access - the tool that I've found to work the best for screen sharing
is screen leap:

[http://www.screenleap.com/](http://www.screenleap.com/)

No silly viewers for people to install to watch your demo.

------
twiss
Many SaaS websites seem to try as hard as possible to hide the actual product
from you, with no screenshots, no live demo, and sometimes even no free trial,
and a "demo" page that only has a form to request a demo. And according to
this article, even in that demo, you're not supposed to see much of the
application.

Now, I trust that this is sound advice for many (enterprise) customers, but
personally I hate it.

~~~
kesselvon
the conversion from a trial to a sale for enterprise software is super low for
two reasons: \- software only really works when you commit to it by importing
all your data and your daily workflow within it \- no one wants to put that
much effort in a trial

companies are also super paranoid about competitors getting a hold of your
product and ripping the good features

~~~
solatic
It's only super low because people expect to sell to enterprises with
relatively low-touch sales methods. If you want to sell to enterprise, with no
prior customers, you need to be setting meetings with several stakeholders
(engineering, financial, legal, infosec, upper-management if possible...)
within that company, demonstrating to each how your software fits their
specific burning need, and helping them adapt the evaluation instance to their
specific needs until it becomes indispensable. In short, as a founder, you
ought to be expecting to practically work out of your customer's offices, at
least in the beginning of the sales process.

If the feedback you're getting from an enterprise sales meeting is "we need
solution X which isn't part of your product," then either a) you're still
doing market research or b) the enterprise is asking for something that
doesn't fit your cost/benefit curves.

~~~
mattmanser
I worked for what is now a £10 million p/a turnover that didn't do this, so it
really does depend on what you're selling.

They sold a document/project management system, extensible like salesforce
that was generally used by the whole company.

AFAIK, they targeted CEOs and IT heads, but they targeted SMEs and gave up on
larger customers because they believed it simply wasn't worth the effort for
those customers, they just got mucked around too much and closing sales took
far too long.

------
jaymzcampbell
> Don’t waste time showing [prospects] the step-by-step process of doing
> something. Create a vision of what benefit they can get by using your
> product.

This 100 times. This goes for many things too, it's often very easy to feel
like you are being productive by painstakingly going over basics and step-by-
steps but anyone who is genuinely interested will follow up themselves. Anyone
else is going to get bored fast. This is why it's so important to have and
show this big vision - you need to hook people to stay interested.

Great post, it's also nice to see something well over 1,000 words! Thanks for
taking the time to write all this up!

~~~
frogperson
This is sales 101. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

------
wonderwonder
You also need to account for losing internet connectivity. I had a demo before
I knew what I was doing where I went to the customer site and they set us up
in some sort of dead zone, essentially could not connect to either guest wifi
or mobile hotspot to show the product for most of the time or when it did
connect the lag was so bad it seemed like the product was incredibly slow.

Most places will not allow you to connect via a wired connection to their
network for good reason.

I then started tripping all over myself because I had not prepared for this
situation. I did not land the customer.

If possible, running on local host is the way to go.

It was a character building experience.

~~~
bshimmin
...and when running from localhost, watch out for any resources loading from a
CDN, and, of course, for your local dummy data being total crap and/or
accidentally offensive (and get ready for "Why is all this text in
[Latin/French/Italian/something really bizarre]?" when you use lorem ipsum).

~~~
lostcolony
I learned long ago that -any- placeholders confuse people. Image placeholders?
"Why is it showing me just an image of some random person with the word
'placeholder' over it?! I would have images of Y!" It's frustrating, but
that's reality. Figure out the sort of thing users will actually have in
there, and try to put something similar. Preface lorem ipsum with "Your text
goes here. Fake text follows: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." or similar.

~~~
freehunter
A million times yes. I had a client tell me an example draft deliverable was
"the worst document I've ever been handed" when I was showing them a preview
of the document format in week two of a three month project. It was supposed
to be documenting their entire architecture and solution I was building for
them, so it would be delivered at the end of the project. They asked to see it
early, so I put in placeholder data. They were not impressed, and it nearly
tanked the whole project. They didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for
obviously placeholder text. Problem is, none of their real information had
been fleshed out yet, so I didn't have real data to put in.

But then on another client, I put in better (more realistic) placeholder text
for the same document and they thought I had sent them another client's
information and got real scared about their own data privacy with our company.
That's when I learned to refuse a client's request to show them a document
before it's (at least nearly) finished. If they want to see the format, a
static picture of very obvious placeholder data serves just fine.

~~~
lostcolony
Good idea! If it's an image, you can watermark "DEMO" or "DRAFT" very visibly
over it, and that hopefully will help them realize it's neither real, nor
intended to be what is submitted.

~~~
bshimmin
I think a large part of the problem comes down to two somewhat related things:
people only understand things based on their own experience, and people have
very little imagination.

As developers, we spend all day building things that don't have the right or
final (or any) content, and we understand that a box filled with lorem ipsum
will look fine once the real text (which doesn't exist yet) is in there, or a
screen with just a big red rectangle adorned with "PLACEHOLDER 500x300" will
look perfect once the final image is inserted. But for consumers of what we
build, they have no experience of non-finished products: they don't ever see
placeholder images on Facebook, they don't see unwritten copy in the
newspaper, and when they open up Microsoft Word, they don't type "The quick
brown fox..." into it, they type the actual text they want. We know that the
hard work from a development perspective has been done, and it's now someone's
job to write the copy and pick the images (which is, of course, no easy
job)... but to the end user who has no concept of the code whatsoever, all
they see is a page where everything is totally wrong.

Secondly, imagination: if all they can see is a red rectangle, many people
will find it very hard to imagine a tastefully chosen hero image there
instead. We built a product a while back which, in large part, was intended to
be flexible and extremely configurable - that was a really key feature of the
software. When I was initially demoing it, I showed it in two configurations:
one that was incredibly basic, and one that was a wild mix of various garish
colours and fonts. I had anticipated that people would use their imagination
to interpolate various tasteful designs between the basic and the garish, but
no - all they could see was boring or ugly. Even with a careful explanation -
"Of course I've used awful colours, you can easily choose from your corporate
palette!" \- it just never went down well. (Now when I demo it I show off the
configurability by tweaking in real-time two pre-existing designs, very
different but both very pretty, and both of which are firmly grounded in real-
world use-cases, which avoids nitpicking like, "Well, it looks very nice, but
we'd never use it like that, we'd have another foo after the bar...")

To the guy saying to use Bacon Ipsum, just no. That's fine and funny when
you're a developer sharing something within a development team, but otherwise
for a surprisingly large number of clients it will be confusing and possibly
seem extremely unprofessional.

------
GordonS
"Be sincere and ask them how their day has been"

But, realistically, the sales guy doesn't give a shit about how their
prospect's day has been - how is this 'sincere'?

~~~
phonon
Good salespeople actually do care!

~~~
softawre
I care about my family, if they had a bad day then I'll work hard to cheer
them up.

How do I show that I care to the same level about some random client?

~~~
bsder
Then you should stay away from sales.

I have had people fall asleep in the middle of my presentation (after lunch-
heart medication). I have had people throw up in the middle of my
presentation. I have had people _cry_ in the middle of my presentation.

At that point, I _stop politely_. I'm not in sales mode anymore; I'm in _human
being_ mode. Maybe they need an ear. Maybe they need a beer. Maybe their staff
understands that they fall asleep after lunch and that you can continue on.

Sales is mostly empathy and education. I'm selling to you because I believe
that I'm going to make your situation better. If I reach a point where I
believe that is not true, I'm going to stop selling to you, refer you to
someone else, etc.

Occasionally, this loses me a sale. Oh, well. I generally engender so much
good will when it happens that it almost always rebounds back to me later.

------
thomasjudge
As a backup, in case: the site internet is down/you're presenting onsite &
their internet is down/ you're not running locally/ whatever - it can be
useful to have a "virtual demo" ready to go, ie, a powerpoint deck of
screenshots showing your intended demo flow. Not as good as the real thing but
better than nothing...

------
xhedley
Advice probably applicable to more than demoing SAAS.

Also the author has clearly acquired some sales chops by reading those books
on demos - the note at the end about researching and writing the post in 9
hours using airstory had me clicking on the links!

Of course they disclosed they were an airstory founder on their blog.

------
strictfp
TL;DR: Business people only listen when you explicitly talk about them and/or
money.

------
arkades
So, the linked article mentions "know your audience," but I think glosses on
emphasizing that a bit.

Engineers, content creators, program directors, are going to be looking for
different things and make decisions in different ways. Don't just ensure
decision makers show up; make sure you're talking about the pros and cons
those decision makers will care about, rather than the ones you think they
should care about.

------
e2e4
[https://appear.in](https://appear.in) has been the best software for demos
for me (p.s. just a happy customer)

works from within the browser excellent video/audio quality good screen
sharing set up meeting with just a simple url

------
whisdol
Sitting at the other side of the table (as a regular engineer in BigCorp),
that was an interesting read. One thing I recognized from too many demos and
product workshops (whether they are on site in our offices or remote) is this
section: > Ask lots and lots of questions. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of the
demo content should be about your customers, and 20% should be about your
solution.

Spending an hour explaining our systems, our business and our pain points to a
random sales rep is usually not a good use of my time, especially if I still
don't really know or understand your product yet (don't expect me to have even
visited your website before the demo if I'm not the person who booked it).

~~~
dastbe
So if you have a meeting scheduled for a demo, why wouldn't you check out the
website? Are you actively trying to not have a good meeting?

I almost always go through materials before a meeting because it makes me
better informed and we end up having a much better conversation.

------
karussell
Anyone experience with demoing an API :) ?

Currently we have more or less simplistic demos, which also do not look shiny.
And we have to highlight everytime that these demos are using just a tiny
subset of the full API and much more stuff is possible. When we got more
customers we were also able to point to some nice looking apps but this is
also not always optimal.

~~~
scott00
Twilio has a reputation for giving a killer API demo. Check out
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368)
and the links in comments within.

------
Clubber
This was very informative, thanks! I'm a software builder and this isn't my
lane, but I might need to learn it soon.

------
blizkreeg
How true is the perception (from the buyer's side) that a self-funded SaaS
company is not worth talking to?

~~~
GordonS
Is that really a thing?

I would never think to check how a SaaS company was funded when looking at
their products.

~~~
copyhackers
I dunno, but when it happened to me, it totally derailed everything. It was
one of those moments when you want to argue with the prospect - "As if funded
companies don't go out of business?" \- but that's probably not a good
strategy. :) So I just sat awkwardly and tried to explain that we'd been
approached by VCs but hadn't pursued anything.

I hope it doesn't come up that often. I worry, though, that it's actually some
sort of signal to the average prospect (who's not in the startup world).

~~~
x0x0
patio11 has talked about this

One approach -- besides make sure you have an answer ready to go next time --
is to talk about two things (straight up stolen from patio11, but if there are
mistakes in memory, they're mine):

1 - who do you think you matter more to, some company with thousands of
customers or me?

2 - I don't give a shit what their SLA says, when you call late at night, you
don't get eng. If you call my cell, you get the person who wrote it all. Who
is going to get your problem fixed faster?

~~~
blizkreeg
This is a fantastic way to respond to it. But I do fear if it's a slightly
emotional response and not a more assuring one. It's probably the best way to
address the elephant in the room though, aside from having a kick-ass product
that addresses their pain points.

~~~
x0x0
In my limited experience selling things, sales are all about emotion. Yes,
there are a few actual deal-breakers, but things like a willingness to learn
new things or adjust their workflow or deal with a mildly suboptimal
workaround depend entirely on emotion. And the same suboptimality or problem
in the hands of a person who wants a deal to work vs someone who doesn't
swings in two different directions entirely based on the potential customer's
emotions.

------
brightball
Great read. Very much follows the "people buy pain relief" mantra that I was
taught in sales classes.

------
vlucas
Such a good post. I learned a lot of valuable insights here, right when I
needed them! :)

------
ljw1001
This is a very practical and insightful post. Thanks.

------
pinaceae
This is good advice, beware of seeing this as the whole story though.

Once you play with the big kahunas, your prospects will be tightly controlled
and briefed by their procurement teams. Which means most of the question
techniques outlined in the post will fall flat as the proc guys have read the
same playbook.

This is where the side chats during coffee breaks, etc become the core. Be
ready to show your software to anyone, anytime. The literal elevator pitch.
Anything to outmaneuver the proc team.

Good luck :)

~~~
notahacker
Depends what you mean by "the procurement team". People with procurement in
their actual job title are glorified paper pushers who's job is to make you
_think_ that you need to offer a better price but are actually entirely
subordinate to the people who've made the decision to recommend to buy your
software.

On the other hand, the level of upper management that tends to make the
decision is exactly the sort of person this demo advice applies most for: the
people who really don't care about the flexibility of your search function or
UX (because they're probably not using it themselves) but are quite impressed
when you use it to highlight a solution to a problem unique to their
company/sector, and don't actually have time to watch a walkthrough of Feature
X but do remember the story about how it saved a company facing similar issues
$100k

~~~
michaelt
The article covers a bunch of different stuff - some of which I'd expect
buyers to try and dodge, some they won't be so concerned with.

For example, when I hear this bit from the article:

    
    
      Sales rep: “So, currently your company is losing out on
      sales opportunities because leads are falling through
      the cracks. [...] how much revenue do you think you’re 
      missing out on just because of ineffective lead 
      management?”
      [...]
      Sales rep: “So we’re talking hundreds of thousands of
      dollars in lost deals every year.
    

What I hear is a sales rep asking "What is the highest price you'll ever pay?"

Revealing this strikes me as an unconventional approach to price negotiation.

I would imagine senior executives at major companies would know such things -
be it from their procurement teams, their education, or elsewhere.

~~~
notahacker
You'd be surprised how often they don't!

Though it can be much easier if you're asking the more sensitive questions as
a plausible part of a demo rather than grilling them at the beginning.

e.g. "So this is how you track your lost deals from each month, and we allow
you to use different ways of handling bulk leads and smaller volumes of high
value leads. So what sort of number do you think might be falling through the
cracks in a typical month?"

[...]

"that definitely sounds like something you'd want the ability to monitor
individually. Particularly as _earlier_ you mentioned your typical deal size
was at least $10k, so that's over $50k each month that our better lead
management system could help you with accurately tracking and following up"

[Eureka moment!]

