Today's main topic was Digital Tactics, and we talked a bit on a few related areas including hiring remotely, practicing your demos, cultural awareness & dealing with bias, and discovery for Presales
Digital Tactics
• Getting creative in hiring process
○ Applicants perspective
○ Be flexible and give applicants more time to understand what is happening
○ Preparing for presenting back in the interview
○ Don't show the company’s product back to them - it's a trap!
○ Show LinkedIn or Slack or things that are open and accessible.
• PSC Demo day
• Demo training
○ Great Demo
○ Demo2Win
○ Practice structure
○ Reinforcements
○ Weekly practice
○ What content to put in
• How can managers do enough coaching
○ How they deliver their demo
○ Do they say the right things?
○ Work together on content first
○ Can be a challenge making huge improvements in one go
○ Focus on 1 or 2 things at a time
• Cultural awareness
○ Current events: Shootings in Atlanta
○ Handling how others perceive you in meetings
○ Working with prejudice
○ From your own company, and from customers
○ Women feel this too
○ Have allies in your team, work with colleagues to help make sure you can signal you have something to say
• Sometimes we focus too much on our demo and not how people are receiving it
○ Get people to engage
○ Don't just assume they get it
○ Silence doesn't mean acceptance or approval.
• Discovery- targeting on your audience
○ How do you do good discovery these days?
○ Tools?
○ Do you schedule separate discovery and demo sessions?
○ Multiple separate discovery meetings can be overkill
○ Can have SC join some earlier sessions, or review call recordings/notes
○ Why do we do discovery? Getting to know people, qualify the opportunity better, etc
○ Why not send a form?
○ Consensus kind of form/video
○ If you are there to do a demo, don't disappoint them! You can make it a light demo, and then use that to develop further
○ Use your discovery questions to gain engagement.
○ Good discovery leads to focused demos, shorter sales cycles, and more wins.
○ "Never stop asking questions"
○ Get the customer to ask questions
○ Help them lose their fear.
• Types of demos
○ Proof demo - later on show that it is the best
○ Discovery demo - higher level, discover topics of most focus
• Remote demos
○ Can be easier to team
○ Bring in experts for portions of the meeting/demo
○ Ask questions via chat.
Next week
• Next steps after a demo
○ Who else to include (Architects, Services, POV)
• Win/loss analysis