If you’ve ever been on a cybersecurity sales call before, you’ve probably had the following experience. Everyone joins the call, introductions are made, and then the Account Executive immediately hands off the call to their Pre-Sales peer because they are “the technical expert”.

The problem with this approach is that it immediately creates a perception in the buyer’s head; the AE is only here to move things forward and doesn’t know anything about the product, while the SE knows everything about the product but probably not my business. Not an ideal way to begin a relationship with a potential customer.

So what if we flipped this narrative? Instead of splitting the responsibilities of the sales team in the buyer’s mind, let’s paint a picture of tight collaboration.

Demos Start with Discovery

Before you walk into a demo meeting, best practices (and common sense) say you should prepare ahead of time for the demo. Yes, some cybersecurity products are complex, but not all of them. In a first meeting though, you don’t usually need to deep dive into the product because you haven’t had a chance yet to do discovery! During your meeting preparation, some account research should provide a high level of what challenges your buyer is currently facing (either from the news, industry specific challenges, or similar). Creating a map of those challenges to use cases within your solution is the first step in being able to show a demo at a business level, not a technical level.

When a demo is structured in this way, anyone on the sales team should be able to deliver it. This isn’t a deep dive into the product, but rather a demo of how your solution can help overcome common challenges and pain points. Having this business level conversation allows both members of the sales team to collaborate in the delivery of the demo and begin to map out what a successful technical demo (or POV in some cases) will look like. The key goal at this step is to use your account research to personalize this initial demo based on vertical, role, etc.

Discovery Starts with a Demo

In some cases, sales teams won’t even give a demo if a deep discovery session hasn’t been completed. This would obviously require the pre-sales professional to deep dive into deployment models, pain points, challenges with current solutions, etc. While this is important information to collect along the way, buyers also don’t want to be interrogated just to be able to see a demo of the product.

Instead, sprinkle in a few key questions up front that allow you to get a micro buy-in. This will let you know that the few use cases you are about to demo (at a business level) align with the challenges your buyer is currently facing. If you don’t get the micro buy-in, then you know that a deeper dive is in fact required. The key goal at this step is to uncover as much as you can about how painful of a problem this is for them and what solving it would look like.

Demos Should be Unified

You hopefully have noticed a theme leading up to this point. At no point during the initial demo or the initial discovery process is anyone on the sales team required to be a product expert. In fact, it’s more powerful for everyone on the sales team to be more intimately familiar with the problem area than the product. Telling the story of how you’ve helped others solve this problem and what their journey looks like allows your buyer to imagine you helping them as well.

If you are aligning on the problem with the buyer, being able to demo the required use cases becomes simple. In fact, it becomes even more repeatable when you build out a demo library around the problem area that anyone in the company should be able to deliver; from sales to marketing and beyond.

Armed with the story of the problem area and a demo library to visually support your story, anyone in the company is now able to give a demo which means…this myth is officially busted!