As founder of The Second Derivative, focused on helping software companies improve their sales and marketing results. Peter Cohan and his team provide demo skills training to presales, sales, and marketing organizations around the world based on his Great Demo! methodology. Peter offers advice that is advantageous to all sales people - from novice to veterans in the presales world.
During this episode of The Convenience Economy, Peter expounds on two things that are vital in achieving, "The Great Demo!". One is awareness. Often times, vendors have capabilities that the prospects have never heard of, or don't even know exist. The second is context, which can be determined with strong discovery skills. In the absence of sufficient discovery, it is impossible to perform terrific demos. So it's often discovery skills that are the fundamental skill set that needs to be improved for a successful demo.
Paul points out that discovery has been changing over the past 10 years - from simply asking questions and collecting facts to guiding the conversation to help the prospect think about what is possible.
So how can you achieve proper discovery? Through questions. Specifically, here are Peter's three steps in discovery:
20 years ago it was unheard of for companies to develop their employees in presales. Instead, they were put into sales methodology training with the sales folks, and that was it. Now, people realize that there are skill sets having to do with discovery and The Second Derivative - The Great Demo! is able to help you accomplish that.
Greg Dickinson: Well, hello, everyone, Greg Dickens here, the convenience factor podcast today, I'm excited to talk to someone I've known for a long time and really deep in the demo world has written a couple books and owns that his name is Peter Cohen, Peter and I are gonna talk about an interesting topic that that we wrote about two or three weeks ago, and just in a casual conversation, and it came out. So before we get into the topic of the day, Peter, introduce yourself to the audience and tell us what you're up to these days.
Peter Cohan: Sure. So I'm Peter Cohan. And let me introduce myself in the form of a question, Greg, have you ever seen a bad software demonstration? Never. So you so you in the podcast universe can't see him, but he's cracking up right now. So this is the typical answer. People smile, laugh, cry, or say something like I've probably delivered hundreds, well, my purpose in life and the team's purpose is to fix that problem. We provide demo skills training based on the great demo methodology to pre sales, sales and marketing organizations around the world. That's what we do.
Greg Dickinson: Listen, so for those that know me, I was I started my career in enterprise sales with a Ariba in 1997 in the pre sales world, and I always say, once pre sales, always pre sales. And, you know, the demo is the you know, the art of the deal, right? It really is the heartbeat of of people don't buy, you know, software without understanding the proxying the product, and I think a good pre sales person, right can make or break, right, a transaction. So I think you're, you're probably staying pretty busy, because it looks easy when a good pre sales solution engineer, so this consultant gives a demo, but man, it can look really, really awful. When when we've not done it, Listen, I've done it, I've done it, I've done I've done, I've walked out of meetings and said, Gosh, Greg, that wasn't your best day.
Peter Cohan: Actually, this, this raises, we're going sideways already here. But this raises a very interesting point. Because many of the people who are the season police sales, veterans of the very same who who very feel very, very comfortable delivering their demos are actually the people that are at the most risk, because they believe in many cases, they'll never articulate this, but they believe that they are at the top of their game, which means they don't believe they have anything new they could learn. Now, they'll dismiss that they'll disagree. But in their minds, if you if you if you tapped into their thinking, as they're preparing for a demo, they're thinking, I've got this wired, when what they should be thinking is what can I be doing to make this better? Or do it differently? Yeah, so anyway, that's a topic for another podcast.
Greg Dickinson: But you know, listen, it's all about the fact that the you know, the world has changed, right? Like I said, Ariba if 1997 right, that was 20 some odd years ago. And you know, that those that think that the demo should be exactly as it was given in 1997. Right are flawed, right? Even if I thought hey, I was at my a game at one time, things have changed, the buyer has changed, their the buying team size has changed. All those dynamics come into consideration that, you know, listen, there were some great golfers that were good in the 90s it wouldn't be very good today. Right? If they didn't update their game, forget age for a second, just the fact that that this, you know, the the tools, even the tools are available today. Heck I was consider myself to be a good demo. If I had all the hardware working during a demo. Right? All the information on the projector that was that was actually considered current good criteria, right? today. It's no brainer, right stuff just works a lot better. So I see. I think that that point is well taken. So let's move into the topic here. And what you and I were talking about, is the fact that, you know, there's a statement made by everyone out there that the buyers journey, right is 40% 50% 60% 70%. I don't care about the number, but the point is the buying journey takes place, quote unquote, before they engage with sales, and I think Forrester talks about the fact that you know, 70% of the quote, unquote, buying decisions aren't even made when they talk to the salesperson and, you know, Peter had a profound statement. So that's all well and good, but that's the uninformed buyer. Peter, what do you mean by that?
Peter Cohan: So this is this is a fun topic. And by uninformed buyer, I mean, the buyers know what they know, but they don't know what they don't know. It's the what is it called the Kruger Dunning effect. And what that what that really means is their world and their assessment of what they know about any particular offering or family of offerings is limited to their information gathering and often limited to their singular or very limited number of experiences versus vendors that have the experiences of dozens or sometimes hundreds of customers to draw from. I give you a give you a sort of a funny example. If your shop and I don't want to use cars as a real analogy because cars are fairly concrete, but I had rented a car recently and My wife and I were driving. And I don't want to admit that I was doing this. But I had apparently exceeded the 35 mile per hour zone limit. And the car verbally said very, very loudly, it said, You're going 37 and a 35 mile per hour zone. And and two things happen. Of course, one is I slowed down immediately because I was surprised. But the second was, I looked to see, how do I turn this thing off? Because the last thing I want is to ensure that every single time I exceeded the speed limit, it yelled at me and my wife, and I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out, you know, is there a setting? Is there any place I could turn this off? Well, I never, I never found it. But here's the point. Even though we know that through commercials and so forth, that cars now have all kinds of guidance available radar to keep you back from people parking assistance, so forth. This was a capability I had never encountered before and didn't even know it existed. This is the point the vendor often has capabilities that the prospects have never heard of, or don't even know exist. Yeah.
Greg Dickinson: Right is the fact that that you know, that if they're doing some of that work on their own, we're all human, right, we go look at within the, within the knowledge set of Look, I don't care if you're buying a car and appliance or software, right, your your, your your thinking is, Hey, does it do these six things? Because those are the six things I know it does. Right, or I wanted to do. Right. And, and I think that, that we're conditioned that way. I think your car example is a great one, right? If you're you know, if you're if you're, you know, looking at that as an example, right, you said, Hey, does it have cruise control? Right, okay. Yeah, it does. But But adaptive cruise control? What does that mean? How does that work? Well, you didn't ask you didn't ask that. Because you don't even know what that is. And I think what we you and I talked about is the you know, from a solutions consultant pre sales, you know, perspective, right? Your job is to is to is to kind of help them, you know, introduce that extra capability and then being able to tie it back to why was that feature of the speed alarm or the speed warning? valuable? right to your your problem solving? And listen, you Peter turned it off. But if I were wanted to? If I was a pre sales engineer, I'd say yeah, but if I have a young child, right, 16 years old, that's a great feature. I didn't know you had it. That's pretty cool. The suits consultant could turn that around and said, Yeah, yeah, annoying for you. You're an adult. You've been driving for 40 years. I'm going to age Peter a little bit. But But Heck, no, my 16 year old, great feature, right. And that's the difference. And that's what you and I were talking about was that idea, right?
Peter Cohan: It's context. It's absolute. So there's two things. One is awareness. And second is context, in discovery skills. I recently did a an article and a webinar where I talked about the seven levels of discovery skills. And part of what I call level six is vision, reengineering, vision reengineering. So a customer prospect says, I need, I need some way to alert me when a threshold is exceeded. Right. That's the capability that the prospect is looking for. And the let's say the typical sales team would say, Hey, we have that capability. So check mark in your box. But the more astute sales team would say, you know, there's another capability you might want to contemplate, and this is the vision reengineering process, you go through a little bit of many other customers in similar situations, what you've described for us so far found that the ability to set a, an alert based on let's say, movement towards a threshold, versus simply exceeding the threshold, enable these other customers to avoid crises. And in fact, we've heard from some of our customers as they've been able to save, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, dollars or time as a result of this, if you will, you know, accelerometer based type of threshold. Is this something that might also be interesting or useful in your practice? So this is what's known as vision reengineering, introduced in the form of what is known as a bias question. Yeah. Moral. Yeah.
Greg Dickinson: But it's there. Right. I mean, that's the, you know, kind of, kind of We both are aware that there is there's, you know, more than there were five years ago 10 years ago, but there's demo automation tools are out there right I mean, does it there's other other other tools in the industry and you know, and and often here while you're you know, Greg, you started off as a pre sales person you're trying to replace you're trying to do away with I'm like, No, because what I'm saying is that there are certain aspects of the of the demo that can be automated and can allow that that that time to come back to the pre sales engineer those hate to see the word but show up and throw up the comment demo Dolly. But yet vision engineering comes in, hey, after they've experienced our software or someone else's right they've experienced a profit in it. In a video format in a automated demo format, your job is to take that data, take it understanding and now help them understand that there perhaps are more than one way to skin that cat vision engineering. Right, Peter? I mean, you're, it's not a replacement, it's be able to actually I think you can make the job better, because now the solution consultant can engage with that prospect with a little bit of of knowledge and help expand the sale. Because that's what engineering is, right? It's saying, hey, you like that capability? You asked our reporting? Let me tell you about analytics. Why should we weren't thinking about analytics? Well, a good right discovery process, and a good meeting can lead to them thinking and considering right other, perhaps modules or bigger package that
Peter Cohan: Yeah, absolutely. And that the pod sphere couldn't see. But I was nodding my head vigorously in agreement, as Greg was going through this simple example. Somebody is using Excel to track or manage some system or some process or whatsoever, and therefore their vision is limited to what they've been using Excel. Generally speaking, they may be aware of some other dashboards out there and so forth. But Greg, your comment about, let's say, analytics, or, and predictive analytics, or prescriptive analytics, as being options that's so far away from Excel that it requires a conversation to take place, although I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to challenge the future here a little bit, because I could easily see Omedym, going one step beyond. So if my understanding today, of course, is Omedym, if you ask it a question, it'll say, Yeah, I can find that capability for you and takes takes you to that part of the demo, if you will, and shows it to you. Wouldn't it be cool if oma dime, here's a question and overtime says, aha, what they're really looking for is the ability to do X, Y, or Z beyond this, so that they could actually do that stretching in an AI or automated process. I think that would be pretty exciting.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, and we see that a lot with with the data that we collect in our customers today. Because you know, as you know, right, the buying team has gotten a lot bigger right and and and, and every one of the buying team has a set of criteria that they want the quest their their, their their questions answered, and the software helps do that. Especially if it's a Hey, I'm a compliance buyer it on you to know as these three things right? Is it this is dated, encrypted at rest? How do you do that? How do you do this? They not really looking at it from the business perspective of how it's going to add value or automated division. They, they need to check that box. So I think that that allows for, you know, that help in that area? And yeah, there's no, you know, this isn't an Omedym, kind of, you know, podcast, I mean, advertising, but yeah, those are the areas that we see, you know, being able to anticipate, if you asked about reporting, let me begin to talk to you about analytics. If you asked about analytics, let me talk about predictive analytics, right, and prescriptive analytics. But but that's, you know, the software. But I think, I think fundamentally, right, this this concept that you and I talked about briefly, and we want to do this podcast about was the fact that this vision, you know, engineering, this ability for, you know, that that buyer that's gone down that journey, the last thing you want to do is repeat all that right, you want to start off at Ground Zero. And so let me start you off at the 50,000 foot view of our software, because they kind of know a lot about your company, they've spent some time on your own, we all do it as buyers. But now what you're saying is, Hey, now that you've got him engaged, expand their horizon, get them to think maybe a little bit differently. But maybe there's some other problems. And I think maybe that was a pretty, you know, profound, you know, kind of statement you made, how do you help your customers to think this way, right? Because I think in selling you sell to pre sales organizations, heck, there is us and others out there that are automating some of that process. So now you have maybe a little different pre sales engagement, right? It's not the first meeting, it's not every meeting, it's they've come in a certain meeting. Peter, how are you helping that professional, pre sales consultant, pre sales engineer, to adapt right to be more cognitive of these changes?
Peter Cohan: So this is these are elements of discovery. These are critical elements discovery and who certainly agree, discovery has been changing over the past 10 years from simply asking questions and collecting facts, to, well, this really hasn't changed that much regard, but to guiding the conversation and directions that the prospect is unaware are possible. And so you know, the first step in discovery is to is to understand the problem space. But the second step in discovery, which has been taught to a small degree is to understand the prospects current vision of a solution. And then the third step that we need to teach and we need to help people understand how to do is then how to probe that vision of the solution, the prospects vision, and expand it and rework it or as I was saying, re engineer it with a bias towards the capabilities that are competitively advantageous for you and your offering. And related. And it's done through questions. The answer is it's done through questions. Right, if the Think of a concrete example. Sure. So, a number of years ago when Gong and chorus and related were just appearing, and were new technologies for organizations, if you ask the question, do you guys record your calls? The answer was most typically No. And, and they didn't even realize that that might be a possibility. And so you could actually bring it up and say, you know, there are tools out there today that would enable you to record your team's calls so that you can go back then and actually coach their behaviors to improve and prospects and say, Well, I didn't realize that was really possible. I knew I could record demos, but I didn't realize I could actually record calls and coach to that. So this is the beginning of how you could actually go through that process.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. And it's this night, in the book I wrote was probably been about a year ago, b2b sales in the digital world, that convenience factor, one of things I talked about is the fact that how, you know, pre sales, and this this, this, this discover you're talking about, you know, in the example I use in the book is, you know, a couple, right, I don't care what they are talking to a car lot right to buy a car, and, you know, their salesperson makes an assumption based on that and says, oh, Greg, let me talk to you about zero to 60 in the handling. And he or she didn't bother to understand that we just had a child, and they're really interested in his, you know, safety. Oh, and by the way, we're on a tight budget. So we want to know about MPG, they, they didn't pro they didn't ask the discovery questions. They didn't get the context of why we're buying a car, they assumed and jumped in. And I think, you know, fundamentally, I think that's one of the biggest, you know, and I guilty of this charge, but pre sales engineers or consultants make is they assume that Peter came to the demo with the following six things on his mind that he wants to learn about, and let me show them to you. And I think the good, the good pre sales engineers will take the time to understand your your context. And that's what you're so even though you're talking about it as vision, or engineering, I think it's also just plain old, right skill sets your teaching of how to make sure that the demo aligns with and then also, right, those bias questions you're talking about.
Peter Cohan: Yeah, this is this is a really interesting topic, because most of our customers will reach out to us and say, Hey, you know, we need to improve our demonstration skills. And we say, terrific, let's set up time we'll learn about your team's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we go through the process, and we deliver great demo training. And what the next thing that happens is the prospect says now a customer, the customer says, oh, okay, our demos are much better. But I guess what we really needed was to learn how to do discovery, at which point I'm nodding my head deeply, because that's really the core the core challenge in the absence of sufficient discovery, you really cannot do terrific demos, you can't do a great demo or any other kind of a demo. So it's often discovery skills that are the the fundamental skill set that needs to be improved. I give you an example. When I asked prospects or asked my customers, how do you know when you've done enough discovery, I get two sets of answers. The first is, I don't know, which is really the indicative one, frankly. And the second is, oh, well, when we've done when we've done BANT, or some similar, very short acronym, I will then we know we've got a qualified suspect or qualified prospect I should say. And my response to that is, well, both cases are insufficient. You have you just don't know what you need to know. And you know, the definition I'd love to give for for how do you know when you've done a disk, enough discovery is two parameters or two metrics have been met. The first is that you have asked sufficient questions and gathered enough information to be able to propose a pipe or excuse me a precise solution to the customer's problem set. And the second is that the prospect feels you have also asked sufficient questions, so you have a sufficient understanding of the prospects lose situation to be able to propose that solution. Now that actually defines you can actually map that out to specific questions or specific elements of information you need to capture. But this is something that's largely unknown in the customer space today. I mean, our customers face pre sales and sales.
Greg Dickinson: And that's why we you know, we kind of see with with those of you that the 10s of 1000s of prospects that have engaged in an Omedym we call it a buyer portal is where they ask their own questions, or they look at topics they type in a question like a Google search, and that the sales person, that precise question now knows what Peter's interested in and then when they have the meeting, I don't need to go back and talk to you about reporting. You've spent 30 minutes on reporting now we've talked about something else right and, and continue that discovery. I I would even say that discovery can the answer could have been See never done right? Because it because because if you if we watch our prospects in an automated format, when they're when they're able to do what they want to do they ask a question, they watch something. And when they're watching, it leads them to ask the next question. And the next question, the next question and, and why? Well, that's how we all learn, right? You peel back the onion, you hear you search, you never search for something you're not interested in, but you begin to search, and you peel back. And that in itself can be discovery that a good, you know, Sue's consulting can then take that and say, Peter, now that we're engaged face to face, let me let me spend some time on this area here. Right and continue to do why. Right? Why did you ask that? Why are you interested in that? How does that help your business? You know, when other people in the business may need help that and, and that just makes it a conversation? And then the software becomes a tour guide to how does that right demo satisfy those needs? And I think you know, it just interesting to you that you teach it from that perspective of Hey, the better you're better, you know, you started your conversation off of the buyers don't know what they don't know. And I think you just also said pre sales doesn't know they don't know, right? Definitely. Right, right. We've got the blind leading the blind here. And Well, listen, that works for a great demo. That's exactly correct. How does that tie that all back? Hey, just I want to cover two more things real quick. And that is that pre sales, consultants, etc, right? And call on that? What, what what changes have you seen in the in the in the makeup of them or the skill set? Or I personally, I'm biased, I think there's a reason why there's I've lost my check 43,000 job openings on LinkedIn for pre sales engineers, because I think the product is more critical than ever, the experience of the product is more critical than it's ever been because of a lot of people have disappointed about their SAS purchases in the early 2000s. And now they actually want almost a trial, if you will, they want to spend time going into Prague, which is putting, you know, more constraint on pre sales resources, making the sales cycles longer. But fundamentally, have you seen a change a shift, you deal with a heck of a lot more pre sales consultants than I do.
Peter Cohan: So it's this is a really interesting topic in in the, in the for the actual practitioners, pre sales practitioners, the skill sets haven't really changed, the skill set requirements haven't really changed. There's the technology angle, there's a situational fluency angle of the, if you will, the industry, there's the knowledge of the product, there's the skills associated with sales and pre sales. What has changed, I think are two things. The first is an awareness that these skill sets are required. And as such companies now are reaching out to try to actually develop their employees in pre sales. Whereas 20 years ago, that was largely unheard of pre sales, let's put them into sales methodology training with the sales folks, and then they're done. That was, you know, check, we're done. Now, people realize that, well, there are skill sets having to do with discovery, with demos with managing POCs with the pre sales pieces of, of RFPs. And related. The second area has to do with tools. And this is not a plug for Greg and over time, it's just this is the reality. Excuse me, over the past, I would say just about two to two and a half to three years, there has been a an explosion in tools, becoming available in the pre sales community, and a range of tools from managing pre sales operations, or enabling, let's say, pre sales operations, to supporting demos to supporting POCs, to supporting RFPs. And on and on. And I think that's exciting. Whereas literally 35 years ago, and I'm not gonna say that that's when I was first in my first pre sales roles, but you can do the math. Actually a little bit longer than that. You know, we used Excel or we used anybody remembers multiplayer.
Greg Dickinson: You know, I think that's part of the change. Right? is, you know, when I got into enterprise sales, right? The salesperson, in the eyes of the company, in the eyes, everything was 90% of the process. And Greg right was the guy that gave the demo right and and but I you know, I wasn't held to quote unquote, responsible for the transaction, the salesperson was and I think what you've seen in that is a shift now that the salesperson still important, but now pre sales as a more prominent, important role. Therefore, training, I never I went through a training, never I got my job, gave a couple demos, I said, Greg, go out and learn the software. That was my training, go learn our software. If you have any questions call corporate. That was the training right? never had any training. So a you're giving training, why? Because it's an if you don't train people, if that are not important, that are not critical to the sale. That's why you train salespeople. Now pre sales is getting training. And then yeah, there was no tools before why well just show up and give the demo for heaven's sakes, right what what what do you mean you how to do a good RFP? What do you mean, a good proof of concept? What does it mean? What does that look like? How do you do that? important, so I think that's what you're hitting on in a roundabout way. is the fact that there has been some change. And now, because that change, there's training organizations like yours that do a great job and helping, you know, there's there's just I think it's a tough role, right? You got to be a jack of all trades to be a good pre sales engineer. And I think it's, we're seeing that and that's why the investment in helping them do their job better, like anyone else.
Peter Cohan: I'm in violent agreement. It's interesting, it is highly dependent on the, let's say, the nature of the vendor, the organization. Yep, the awareness and investment in the pre sales organization. But today, the big difference is that the awareness is much, much broader. And the tools that are becoming available or are available, I should say, rather, are now numerous. And that's a very, very exciting change that that's those are the two biggest changes, I think, have taken place. All right.
Greg Dickinson: I finished one thing, few people listening to this today, they're gonna go back to their office or at their office listening, you give them some advice, a book, you've read a book they should read, or something they should concretely think about it and try to make an a good change in their, in their career, what would it be?
Peter Cohan: So I think the guidance, the overarching guidance is very simple, never stopped learning. And it could be books, it's podcast, it's, it's, you know, reach out and embrace a new a new topic. There is one book that I really like, and it's not particularly new anymore. It's called brain rules by john Medina. And I think it should be required reading for anybody in sales or pre sales. It's really a little bit of an operating manual for your brain. And it teaches it explains how people learn and and how, for example, how something goes from short term memory into long term memory and understanding these concepts can have a huge influence on the impact and success of your demos, your sales motions and so forth.
Greg Dickinson: Beautiful, great advice. Great advice. I've never heard of that book. I will pick that up myself. I'm I'm a consummate, my I have I have an unlimited account at Amazon because I just you know, I skim through a read, write non stop. So, Peter, I think we twist out about three other topics that we can get to down the road. We'll do what invite you back for another podcast that I think we hit a couple topics that we could spend more time and peel back the onion on but great topic. great insight. From your perspective. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. And it was it was great to talk to you again.
Peter Cohan: My pleasure. Great, quick question. What book would you recommend?
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, right now I'm actually looking at the effortless experience. The people and the second one, is that the the Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. coming, it's coming. Yeah, it's coming. The The, the changing customer, it was the same guys that wrote the chart, the challenge customer, phenomenal, phenomenal book, it's the same group that Brent Adamson is and Dixon and his group that wrote the challenger sale, they've now come back and looked at and examined in detail what a buying team looks like, and what really is holding up your transaction, interviewing 1000s of buyers, 1000s of buying teams. And it's amazing to understand that this notion of finding the key decision maker, that was a 90s term, it's it's more of a team buying effort, and you need to get that help your coaches, help them to get others on board. And I think the demo plays a big part of that. And that's why I'm studying it right now to understand how Omedym can help, obviously, you know, accelerate that and accelerate sales cycles. So that's the one. I've read it once and I always do that. I read it once and if it's good, I go back and then learn. Right takes down. I'm not as fast as you I got three things to watch. need to be good. Thanks so much. Cheers. Bye now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai