I’m a founder, not a sales person, but we don’t have any sales staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could just speed talk through a demo. But I don’t. I directly ask the person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help them. If they don’t know, that’s fine, I have material prepared. But I’d much rather you tell me how I can help you, and then we drive the call from there.
Yeah, I have been in calls like those. Despite me pushing for "can you show me what your product can just do?" I kept getting "Please tell us what you want first" and that finally culminated into a follow up demo call. The demo was super generic and nothing I said (except 1 item) was really considered).
Frankly, by the time we were done I was zoned out and doing other things.
If the CEO had considered to demo in the first call I would've almost pushed to buy it right away but at the end we decided we'll just do a light weight solution in house with a few devs
Not that this works all the time. But the point is to listen to your customer instead of just taking a single approach and sticking to it
This is why I laugh every time I hear that salespeople are obsolete.
While some drone is pushing forward to collect their brownie points for identification of next steps, the people with agency are finding a solution to my problems.
