This episode is a MUST watch and listen. James Marland is part of the Sales Excellence team at SAP. He is focused on helping sales explain complex ideas in simple ways that people can remember and most importantly share. He is in essence a storyteller. With so much emphasis placed on the demo by both enterprise software sellers and buyers, James reminds us that just looking at the screen (i.e. the demo) does not really explain anything. There needs to be a narrative to go with it. Join this episode and literally learn from the master!
A good demo requires a proper narrative or story. And James gives us the perfect analogy. Watching a typical demo is like sightseeing with a guidebook. We are told what to look at, but don't really have much context. But if you have a guide that tells a story, everything changes. It what you see is much more memorable. Therefore, pre-sales and sales need to act like the docent and explain what the prospect is seeing. WOW. A great example is not just explaining a feature, but why the company developed it!! Look at features as solutions that solve problems other customers used to have.
So what are the keys to storytelling. The most effective presentation hits an argument in three ways: Ethos (Heart), Logos (Brain), and Pathos (Gut). Ethos: Establishing authority to speak on the subject and that you are trustworthy. Appeal to the heart and be relatable. Logos: The numbers. The value. The logic of the argument if you will. Pathos: The one BIG idea. This is where you appeal to a person's emotions. For example, you will be able to sell more stuff through your existing sales team. And this is where you really need to know your audience. Use these three to craft a story/message that will appeal to your audience. Use one and you won't b effective, use two and you might be OK, but three is the best. And remember, the most successful demo is the one where the customer can imagine themselves in it!
In a nutshell, here is the storyline: Other people have had a similar problem. Here is how they solved it. Maybe that could work for you.
Connect:
Connect with James on LinkedIn and be sure to check out one of his whiteboard presentations. They are great!
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: I welcome everybody to another episode of the convenience factor podcast today. I'm excited James Marland is going to join us James, before we get into the context of what we're going to talk about, give me two seconds on what who James is and what you're doing today.
James Marland: So I've had joined Ariba the early days along with Greg and now he was part of SAP. So I'm part of the sap sales excellence team. I'm focusing a lot on how we can present complex ideas in simple ways that people can remember. So sometimes people call that storytelling, or explaining or the power of persuasion, but it's really, all the times we have to explain complex ideas that are intangible, and we want people to understand them and be able to explain them to others. And I think that's a really critical part of any kind of communication.
Greg Dickinson: Bingo. And that's why I had us on today, James, and I have known each other since 1998. And y'all think I'm blowing smoke here, but James was a storyteller back before storytelling was, was in the press. And so you know why I thought about James is if you think about the world we live in today, right? There's a couple things that are really important. One is a product experience, right? The demos always important. James and I are pre sales engineers, by trade, we think the product is the most important, the demos most important, but product experiences is important to the buyer. They want to do more on their own, they want the product experienced earlier. And then there's more buyers, they want to often and I think, James, we agree that there today more things are remote. The pandemic has speeded it up. So I want to talk a little bit about you What's your thinking about how, right that the explanation or the storytelling of their product experience, right? And lump it all into has changed and what skills and what things right, those people that are doing that job that demo meet you think about right? Because we agree it's changed, it's not the way it was in 1998.
James Marland: Sure, I mean, as I said, I'm not being at the office for six months not be on an airplane for a year, which is amazing, my British Airways gold status is expired, which is they'll have to queue up with the plebs next time around. But when we think about about software, particularly how people look at software, people think that they can look at it and understand it, just by staring at the screens. And generally, that's actually not often the case. So although they get some information from just looking at the screens, they need a narrative around it to understand how it could be used in their business. So for very, very simple applications, I can get it by looking at it. So I understand how Google Maps works. Here's a map on my phone. But for most types of software, there's that there's an extended process, it's going to traverse several screens and several parts of my workflow. And so I need a way to put that in context and just looking at screens by themselves probably isn't going to do it, or I'm going to miss the point of what I'm looking at. So that's why the narrated demo. Obviously, this isn't nearly always remote now is so important, because it guides me to what's important. It's, it's a bit like going to go into a country house that we have here in England. And if you have a guidebook, you never really looked looking at the right things, it's on the wrong page, or it wasn't detailed enough. But if you have a tour guide, he talks to as you're walking through what's the important things and what not. And that's a very effective way of thinking about about a demo is a tour guide, rather than a guidebook or some people go just at home, they have nothing. And they go that's a nice statue, Oh, that's nice painting, and they never even saw half the stuff and they waste their money. So I think that the idea is to provide this this, this docent, this Narrator This this tour guide to explain what it is you're actually seeing. It sounds simple. But even even, even in the simplest software, it's still actually a tremendous value add.
Greg Dickinson: I agree, I agree. Because you think about right, what you're really kind of hitting on is the fact that if I do I love your analogy, by the way, if the tour guide the statue, right, I see it's a statue, let me see what it's made of, maybe there's a date on it, but but I don't understand the value of the significance, the background. And to your point, right, I've seen a lot of pre sales and probably Greg Dickinson's been guilty of as well. You know, talking about all the features on the screen, you can add this field Oh, by the way, I can change the colors and so forth. And, and and you're and that's not the tour, that's not the what the value is and how you connect those dots. Why did the software company develop a list of 400 features not for you to talk about
James Marland: why this feature is important is to say, but here's why we developed it, we had a customer and they had this particular problem. So we actually now the software analysis, right so the software the artifacts of the software really are themselves you got the footprint of a store. We have another customer whose problem is now solved. And so what I'm really describing is it's like it's like a tracking in the desert. So what are what are the tracks? I'm looking at here? And what what was the original problem that the customer had that led to this this feature I'm seeing on the screen right now. And sometimes you can guess. But certainly, again, the the narration or the tour guide, you says, and the reason it works that way is customer access to do this, and now that problem is solved, right? And if you have that problem, then that resolved for you as well. So this idea of a very simple way of selling is, hey, there's another customer like you he had the same problem. Here's how they solved it. Wouldn't you like to be like him? Or could that work for you? Yeah, very powerful. And so the idea is to look at the features as a series of solutions to problems other customers.
Greg Dickinson: Know, beautiful, beautiful explanation. So James, let's talk a little bit like 1998 and 1999, when you and I were together, right? Every single solitary demo was in someone else's conference room meeting room, there was an audience, I can't imagine, you know, back in the 90s, right, that anyone on the phone right now, maybe in the 2000s, etc, we had more, you know, some remote people, but how has your experience of remote, you know, kind of disparate buying teams that even if you had a meeting, they're not all going to be there? Right? They're not going to all jet into a city, they're all over the place? How do you think that's impacted this idea of explanation or storytelling in the, in the in the world of the product experience, or articulating the value of the product?
James Marland: Well, so. So, one thing we always hear is that people are generally more educated when we meet them. Now, I mean, let's face it, when we used to rock up in 1999, people didn't know anything, right? They're going to zero research, right? So we would tell them everything they needed to know, that's why it took six hours to explain something simple, like typing a book. Now, people tend to do their own research. And so when they go on to LinkedIn, they go to YouTube, they read competitor information, whatever. So when they when they come to us, they're typically more more knowledgeable. So first of all, we must save time on that. So I always think about, yeah, when we have a certain amount of time with the customer, we want to split it between learning from them, and that we call discovery and then we educate them. Okay, so there's sort of two ways. So we don't get we don't get longer meetings, we in fact, we get shorter meetings, even though the fidelity of a zoom call is lower than being in a meeting room. So the idea of is can I use offline tools to do some of the knowledge preparation? So my face to face time? Is there more value? And I think this is where the mix of having pre prepared demos are available as some kind of a library, which a customer could self serve themselves? Do I have a good corporate website, myself, or I could send them ahead of time. And obviously, those tools I can track to see if they do these things, becomes more valuable. So when we have the face to face meeting, or even a demo that's live, we're focusing on what's actually important to the customer, and we've taken away some of the stuff that would basically be just just a waste of time. Right? Right. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: We always say that, you know, gosh, you know, when you and I are in a meeting, right, whoever the sales rep was right, we had an hour meeting, and they spent 20 minutes on the, you know, on the high level 50,000, who's where we are, here's our logos here's all stuff right now, right? They know who you are, they looked up James and Greg, on LinkedIn, they know your culture of your company, they've gone to glass door, and they've done all their research on who you are, what your turnover is, and how you treat employees and all your different things boom. And they know, you know, that basically the background, they've been to your website to understand e procurement if we go back to the day. So now, using those other tools, right, the extension of kind of maybe videos or other other tools that are available, now you're doing e discovery. So now when you have that meeting, right, you're focusing in because what you said about, you know, before we started recording, you said something really, really important that I thought was really interesting. And that was you said, Greg, when you and I used to demo, Ariba buyer in 1999. It was a two to three hour meeting just on E procurement, creating an invoice I mean, a requisition that turned into a PEO that turned into an order with the workflow. Now, SAP has 4050 products surrounding that process. And you couldn't if you had to demo everything right, you'd be there for days. So
James Marland: The customer doesn't give us any longer. We still got one hour meetings.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah. You know, there's no longer eight meetings used to be an hour now they need to be eight hours. No, now they're actually 35 minutes. 45 minutes, right? A lot of people subscribe to the zoom for free that only has a 35 Minute.
James Marland: Yeah, cheapskates.
Greg Dickinson: Yes. Right. Right. So so I think that you're that's a critical point there. So so you do a lot of research, right? You've been doing you still you did some storytelling training for us back at Ariba in the early 2000s. And, and, you know, that was the way you presented the way you talk. You've now continued that journey yourself personally. Walk me through some of that stuff, right? The keys of storytelling, or as you said, explanation right, explaining something that that on the surface is not obvious, and how do you explain it so people can understand it? So let's spend the rest of the time that are 10 minutes on that. I think we've talked enough about, you know, the remote. I just wanted people to learn from your expertise. You're very well versed in this topic.
James Marland: Yeah. So there are several things here that I'm trying to get across in a product demonstration. So I always think about the different ways that you persuade someone, typically, it actually just goes back to Greek rhetoric. I know it's weird to be talking about Aristotle on these kind of calls. But it the most effective presentation material, whether it's a video or a demo, really hits at the arguments in three different ways. And so I was talking about this with a rather pompous Greek words of love versus ethos, and pathos. But let me give examples. So first of all, customers want to know how it's gonna affect them personally, like in the heart. So is this gonna be good? My job? Am I gonna get a promotion out of this? Is this going to risk my check? Might I get fired over this, what about my team, and then you get laid off. So this is the human aspect. And sometimes in our demos, we can be very technocratic and forget that some person has got the bag, this is gonna affect people's jobs. So that's what I call the ethos which affects the heart. The second, which we're generally quite good at is what are the numbers? Okay, well, the same is going to be what's the increase in my penetration, the revenue per customer, the return on assets? So we're pretty good at talking about that. And that's, that's awesome. That's, that's heads up that's in the brain. And the last piece is, is in the Gup. Like, all these paths, right, is the big picture. All right. So what's the what's the big story here, but I don't have the details. what's what's the big idea that I can if we had one sentence to explain somebody, what's the big message? And again, that's what he talked about, there's a danger, you can get lost in functions and forget, what's the big message? Mr. Customer, you'll be able to sell more stuff through existing sales teams. Oh, okay. That's, that's it. That's it. Okay. So this is the three types of messaging. So lagace, that's the brain ethos, that's the heart and pathos, that's the gut, and the most successful communications, try to get on all three of those. So if you look at the way that you because video, for instance, the most powerful ones are scoring that all three of those if you're only doing one it is not effective. Two is probably okay. But three is the best. Right?
Greg Dickinson: Right. So so you're what you're doing when you're preparing right for a conference or for a meeting or for you're trying to think of or come up with stories, right? Not, not. Now you're looking at this screen, and this screen has five fields on it, these five fields, we're trying to tell a story that will relate back to those three things is that
James Marland: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of simply, it's a sort of a case I talked about. Here's Bob, he has a problem. Here's how he solved it. Would you like to be like, Bob? Like? Well, that's a very simple way of thinking about storytelling. I'd be too fancy about this. I mean, you can study this in books about the hero's journey, and the way the Lord of the Rings works and Star Wars. And that's great. And, you know, you're not unless you have a very, very long cammo. You're not writing a one hour, 40 minute movie with $100 million budget for that matter. Okay, so you just don't get very simple ideas across. But this this idea of other people that had a similar problem. Here's how they solved it. Maybe that could work for you. Yeah, yeah. And whether that's, as I said, Yeah, that's that could just be and you see, that's why we have this, this capability on the screen here. That's it. Also, the other thing is, when we started out the software, we had to actually show that stuff actually worked. It didn't really catch fire. Well, no one does that anymore, right? I mean, like, if I see it on the screen, I assume it works. Your company, I can do my own research. Now you have customers, you have investors, you're not a fraudulent outfit. So if I can see it, I don't need you to go through it. I know it will work. So you can save time on that? By not having to. Okay, let me cut that requisition. And here we go. Nice enough to show us. You know what? I'm sure it does that. Yeah. And that's that three or four minutes of complex screen flashing? That really they no one needs to see. You know, if you think we're fortunate company, and we got legal problems.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. No, and I think i think i think what you're also hitting on too is the fact that what people today, right, they want authentication they want and they want to be authentic, right? Like it really what really, we did a big study here at Omedym, where the people were coming in saying Well, the problem with the videos is that you know that they they're very expensive to produce. So what do you mean by that? Well, you know, the music and so forth. I so we did a study, we found out that when you are watching a quote unquote what they call, someone will call it demo. It's all music and it's all fade in and fade out. So people walk on the street, it's cars, its horns, it's people don't watch it. They don't like it because it's they know what it is. It's spin, right? It's a marketing slip. When you're giving an explanation or you're trying to tell a story. They want it to be real. They want James to say oh shoot I meant to go here, you know, because that then they know that James didn't make that up, right. He's telling an authentic story, right. And I think that's what you're hitting on as well.
James Marland: So certainly I find that in the work that I do, I hand draw my slides. That sounds weird, right? How would you do that? Well, complicated. My first one is not really much slower. But the fact that in my own handwriting, obviously, authenticity that it didn't come down for some corporate guy, or even worse, some external agency, just polish it all up. Now, there's nothing wrong with doing that, I understand that there's a place,
Greg Dickinson: There's a place for it.
James Marland: There's a place for it. But a lot of times customers, they want to develop a relationship with the salesperson themselves. And I always tell people, having bad slides is actually a good thing. Because it shows that you did it, you know, by having them not completely line up and having crappy fonts and not using the step, the standard corporate this, it shows, it's something you've thought about. And so surprisingly enough, it's under duress, and not a goal that can be effective in being authentic. Also, I, you know, when you're doing videos, you know, try to find ways to use your own voice. Don't don't have to, you know, hire a voice actor or pay for an outside agency, try to find ways that they can be authentic, especially if you're if you're doing a summary for a customer. You know, why not? Why don't use your own voice? Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: No, we didn't listen to the early days, right. Omedym, we actually went out and did. I wrote the scripts, I did all the demos, and I hired, you know, on one of the one of those services that and they did it and it was terrible.
James Marland: They never got the emphasis right? My guess is they couldn't say the company name, right?
Greg Dickinson: No, yeah, it just yeah, it just, you know, it just didn't, it just seemed like it was a monologue. There's no excitement, there's no wow did you see that? Right. So, you know, what we talked about is the fact that in selling, it's still about relationships. And if you're remote, and you're not in the room with them, you're not taking them to dinner, you're not wimpleton. Right? How do you establish digital trust. So digital trust is all about, they can link and understand who you are, you can make some mistakes, but make it authentic. If you if someone goes to your website says, Hey, get a quick demo and and the end that first of all, the form pops up. Well, that's no trust. And second of all, if it's a if it's a music video that shows all this flashy stuff, or a cartoon, that's not what you're going to be buying, you're not when you go, you go try a car, they don't have a make believe car that you get into they have a real car. Why? Because I want to know, it's great. You have that feature called cruise control. But can I set it while I'm driving? That's what you want to know. And that's your point, hey, we have cruise control, there was a problem, we made it. So it's easy to do by the fact you can do with your voice. Because why? Because it was easy. You're telling the story of someone that's authentic. And that's what people want to know, they want to they want to demo the product experience because they want to see themselves using it.
James Marland: Yeah, that's the thing, right? So the most successful demos where you where the customer imagines themselves actually in it. So this is where it was where storytelling actually can actually fall apart. Sometimes, if you make your story too detailed. And, you know, you say, Well, imagine you're a miner and working in this mine. And this, obviously, you but I'm not a miner. I don't work at a mine. So it doesn't, you have to be careful about about the story, putting barriers in front. So anytime that you can, you can make it more inclusive, it's when that's not always possible. But if you can make it more inclusive than people imagine themselves. In the old days, at Ariba, we used to spend a lot of time hacking around the data. So the customers name was in it. And the customers materials were in it, and the customers addresses were in it. And he said that even though that was a lot of work and only appeared on the screen for like five seconds. They could imagine themselves in the software, because it's got their company name, their company address, the company logo company terminology of the company suppliers, the boss's name is correct. All that feels like, Oh, I could imagine myself. And then if you have a demo with, you know, fake data throughout, it's just, you know, I can I can logically imagine myself using it, but it seems hard.
Greg Dickinson: Right. Yeah, no, and we'd like we'd like video for that reason, right? I can do a, you know, a different I can do seven verticals. Right. And it's hard to do that, right. It's hard to win, but you can make it very personalized to that person so that they see it. And you know, again, we're not we're not trying to replace a presales engineer, we're saying that there is a spot in the pre sales Arsenal or in the sales aresenal where a video is convenient. Like we have a customer that sells into a certain market and 70% of all of the interaction, the engagement from the buyers is before nine after six and on weekends, no salesman's there, then it's convenient for them. Why? Because they're selling to a smaller market that the people are busy during the day. So, you know, I think that that bodes well
James Marland: I do pre sales people. It's a long day in pre sales, also for whatever reason, you don't seem to be responsible for figuring out the Wi Fi, figuring out the projector bringing the right kind of extension cord, figuring out the coffee machine. And I was like, it all falls on the pre sales guy. He's like some technical person, he's supposed to, hey, the air conditioning is done here, hey, pre sales guy, fix that. And so I let you know, demo systems can be complicated, they go down, I've got two or three different systems, I got an engineering system showing me a feature, it's a bit flaky, you know all these things. So it's a long day. And so if I can, at least you know what, I put a video on 10 seconds, but it took me 10 minutes. And it's because it's pre canned. And it's a different different voice, it's a different change of pace, and I can relax for a few minutes, then that is also a valuable tool for a presales person. It changes the dynamic in the room. And it's, you know, it's just something different. And for the pre sales person, they can go out and take a smoke, whatever we need to do.
Greg Dickinson: We have a client that you know that they have a scale problem, or they can't do this. And there's 50,000 job openings on LinkedIn for pre sales. So you can't find in
James Marland: I should get back in that career.
Greg Dickinson: We should. Yeah. And what they said was, listen, in some certain circumstances, right, the salespeople can use that pre pre sales people created the demo, right is recorded, they can use that and help us scale, right, because now that pre sales person could be focused on the ones are closing this quarter, or the ones that actually need that personal, they're gonna have a lot of other questions versus that can because I think it's really important. I mean, I never I learned this in high puros. Right, the other business, I started and I was selling to, we had a lot of banks, and I remember going into Pfizer, and I started about if you were a bank, and the guy raised his hand, he goes, Greg, we're not a bank. And I really, I get hit like a ton of bricks, like what, uh, you know what I was right. And, and that's because to your point, I didn't make it. I didn't take the time, I didn't take the effort to make it so that they could visualize themselves you saw because they didn't have an OCC bank problem. They had their regulatory problem, and I and I messed it up. So you know, I think that's what you're getting at. So the idea of let me just talk a little bit about you, you start using the word explanation, right? Just want to get a few more minutes left this like, like, what, what are you talking about there?
James Marland: So a lot of times, in sales, we're bringing a new idea. And it's a new concept. And the only way we can show it is through software, as long as we need to take a step back and say, let me undo some broken about supplier financing. Mistake? Well, let me just explain exactly what that is first. And so. So we start with things like we'd all agree that cash is important in the business, you're trying to get some point of agreement. And then you would say, here's a common problem that we see. And this is what the same situation is now. And once you got your explain what you believe to be this, the situation is, then we can finally show you how this offer addresses. I think we often forget, and we try to explain through the software itself. And that doesn't necessarily work as well, because we really solve the problem. So what's the downside? Well, this is fine. Yeah, but we have a lot of new hires, and they start and he showed me his fancy, you know, requisitioning capabilities that we have inside SAP and looks great. And it's like, Yeah, but in Germany, they still use paper forms for this. Right? So you have to say that first. Otherwise, it looks fine. What's the problem? Okay, so you have to get people to understand that, you know that what is that one of the problem first, explain the situation now, or this the status quo or the state of the art before you come in and say and now we do this, that the other? And sometimes, if you've been in the business a long time as pre sales people typically have, you have your own software and cool stuff. You forget that you got to sell machine milling company in East Germany. And they dont like that. Right, and so you need to remind yourself, and oftentimes, that's where the big market is, right? It's not it's the the rest of the rest of market, baby baby saturation, there's not a lot of potential there. So don't assume that they understand where we're coming from. Gotcha.
Greg Dickinson: Okay. So listen, in closing, right. bestow some wisdom on the audience today, right? You know, they get one thing they can take back, they can think about a little differently, they can they can go read, what what is it that you would recommend to the audience today? You know, based on your on your wealth of experience, just give me one, one or two anecdotes there.
James Marland: Yes, storytime takes on many forms. But really, it's fundamentally about explaining to the customer that somebody else has had this problem, and they've solved it. And with my solution, you could do the same. And so really, that's that's a very, very fundamental but powerful way of selling. And so if you know that to be true, and you have customers stories that can back it up, then your demo, your presentation will run so much more easily, because those proof points, what the customer needs to hear. And so that's that's a very simple way of thinking about the power of storytelling in making an argument.
Greg Dickinson: Love it, man. That's a great explanation. James, I want to thank you for your time today and appreciate it and the audience will love this special nation. So have a great day.
James Marland: Thanks Greg.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai