The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow the customer's lead in what to showcase.
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.
I am working on a project to try to quantify exactly this. Where are our standard assets and demos creating obstacles rather than opening doors? Are there opportunities to deliver something to the customer that will accelerate processes, based on all other deals that have been worked on.
I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.
That’s a nice theory that works better in theory than practice. Specifically, launching into a demo without having a common framework of understanding — terms, how the solution works at a high level, etc. is risky. Sometimes your prospective customer will understand the space where your product fits and you can safely conduct a demo (if that’s what the customer wants,) and sometimes they won’t know what they won’t know, say they “just want to see a demo and not a bunch of marketing slides” and will smile and nod during a demo of which they have little understanding and the meeting will be a waste of everyone’s time.
I’m not advocating for “show up and throw up”, but connecting with your prospect and giving them just the information they need/want is an art form, and simply asking them produces…mixed… results.
I spent about half an hour poking around Microsoft's documentation for PowerApps and then their Youtube channel trying to find a concise demonstration of the tool, and it was all totally impenetrable. Everything was either too high-level- speaking aspirationally about the potential business value without really showing anything being made or used- or too low-level, off in the weeds tutorializing a very specific esoteric integration with a bunch of other tools, writing reams of backend code in some other language and environment.
I feel confident in my evaluation that PowerApps is in a completely different universe of accessibility and complexity from Hypercard.
I use a similar trick for text expansion. All my abbreviations start with a semicolon (;). It’s on the home row, it never occurs at the start of a word in normal typing so I never have a false positive expansion, and it’s easy to remember.
My strategy to handle a too-long someday/maybe list is to clarify how often I want to revisit the list. I have a list to review weekly, a separate list to review monthly, quarterly, etc. I have separate lists for someday/maybe date night ideas, vacation ideas, professional development ideas, and so forth.
Someday/maybe exists to get something out of my head and into a trusted place where I know I’ll see it again at an appropriate time. If I know that I only need to see something quarterly (or when planning a date night), I don’t need to revisit during every weekly review.
What I find is that, when I have more distance between reviews, it is easier to call the list organically. After a quarter, I haven’t thought about some of those items for months and I can easily say, “Actually, that doesn’t sound interesting any more.”
The thing I've never understood about memory palaces or location reminders is: do you reuse the same locations all the time? If so, how do you mentally distinguish between your current memorized set, and the set you remembered a dozen times ago with the same palace?
I don't know about memory palaces, but the technique I describe involves no memorization; the association isn't that strong. Once it's served its purpose and I no longer need to remember it, I quickly cease to do so, and I haven't noticed problems with overhang from past uses of the same objects.
For the same reason, I wouldn't expect this kind of - I dunno, "mnestic nudge?" - to last very reliably over significant spans of time. I can do it over spans of a few hours to a morning-and-afternoon day, but I don't recall having tried it overnight and I wouldn't want to rely solely on it if I did. I don't really know whether or how well it parallelizes, either; if I've tried that before now, I no longer recall how it went.
What I'm describing really isn't like a "memory palace" at all, even if I mentioned it in a thread about those. That concept claims quite a general and systematic sort of utility, while this is just one among a set of tools that for me also includes a pocket notebook, phone reminders, a diary, and so on. When circumstances preclude immediate access to any of the others, I use this one instead, and also by choice because without at least a bit of practice it might not work when I do need it. (Also because it's really convenient, with less friction even than pen and paper - and besides, my phone can't "remind me of something the next time I pick up my diary".)
The memorized set goes away fairly easily. However, profesional mnemotechnicians who do several demonstrations a day will sometime take the time to 'destroy' the pictures in between demonstrations (setting them mentally on fire for example) in order to reduce the risk of confusion.
Agreed that this was my biggest disagreement with the article as well. You describe the solution to "falling behind" as giving the team a few days to decompress. I would create that decompression in a different way - by setting and sticking to priorities.
Ultimately, if you're falling behind, there's not enough capacity in the system, and so some things won't get done. Better to make that judgment explictly by setting priorities, rather than having it happen ad hoc.
Power Apps in Office365 are darned close. I never had a deep experience with HyperCard, so I'd actually love to hear folks with deeper experience contrast the two.
Except that you do not own it and apps may disappear. We can still run hypercard stacks many decades later... I doubt we will be able to run actual power apps in 15 years.
