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The Power of Sales Discovery Demos for SAAS: How to run an engaging discovery session to gather deep insights?

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Sales discovery is crucial to any successful sales pitch, yet it is often overlooked or handled poorly. For SaaS businesses, showcasing software to potential customers requires a thorough understanding of their needs and pain points in order to showcase the benefits of the tool they are selling.. With the right approach, a sales discovery demo can be a powerful tool that engages buyers and helps them verbalize their pain points.

Communication is always an issue, qualification is always an issue, discovery is always an issue. These problems must be addressed before even starting the conversation about creating a sales product demo.

Jan-Erik Jank
Jan-Erik Jank Presales Leader

A sales discovery demo is not your average product demo. Above all the purpose of the sales discovery demo is not to sell, or at least not advertently. Sales discovery demo is just a discussion starter. It creates an opportunity to understand potential customers' needs and pain points. Sales discovery demo can be the solution to the key issue of traditional discovery sessions, which are frequently a turnoff for the buyers, who don't want to be interrogated by an over-eager salesperson, and would much prefer to see the product in action right off the bat. 

By presenting buyers with a selection of case studies that showcase the various benefits of your software in a menu-like format, you can prompt a thoughtful conversation that leads to a deeper understanding of what the client truly needs. This blog post will explore the key components of a successful sales discovery demo. We'll also discuss how to balance asking questions and showing the product so buyers don't feel like they're being interrogated.

How To Understand Your Prospects?

Without understanding the needs and pain points of your customers, you cannot showcase your software and demonstrate how it can solve their problems. Here’s how you can better understand your potential customers:

1. Profile Your Prospect

The first step in understanding your potential customers is identifying your buyer.. How will they most likely benefit from your software? Who in the organization might need it the most? Thoroughly research the prospect and their industry, familiarize yourself with their challenges, and identify potential areas where your product or service can provide value. Approach the meeting with a genuine curiosity and a desire to build a meaningful relationship.

2. Identify Their Needs And Pain Point

Once you have profiled your prospect, the next step is to conduct the discovery meeting and identify their needs and pain points. This involves delving deep into their needs, challenges, and aspirations to tailor a solution that meets their unique requirements. A discovery meeting, also known as a needs analysis or fact-finding session, serves as an opportunity to gather valuable insights about the prospect's pain points and goals. It's a dedicated space to listen, ask thoughtful questions, and truly understand their world. Running this meeting effectively requires finesse, empathy, and a strategic approach.

3. Expand Your prospects field of vision

When it comes to deeply understanding your prospect, it's crucial to expand their field of vision and introduce them to possibilities they might not have considered. Prospects often find themselves trapped in a paradox of not knowing what they don't know. This is where discovery meetings play a vital role, offering an opportunity to verbalize their known needs while also shedding light on potential blind spots they may have overlooked.By drawing attention to these potential blind spots, the sales professional acts as a trusted advisor, helping prospects envision the possibilities and uncover new avenues for growth. Through compelling examples and success stories, the salesperson can demonstrate how their tool will deliver value to the buyer. 

The Key Elements Of A Successful Discovery Demo

A successful sales discovery demo is essential in the early stages of a sale process as it lays a foundation for building a strong relationship with the buyer. Sometimes, buyers enter the sales process believing they have a particular issue that needs solving, but they may have other blindspots or areas of improvement they haven't addressed. 

To bridge this gap, a sales discovery demo helps sales teams connect better with buyers. Here are the top elements you should incorporate to convert your discovery demos into a valuable tool for selling your product.

1. Effective Desk Research and Qualification Questions

The first step towards a successful sales discovery demo is conducting detailed desk research and qualification questions. This can help select relevant case studies that talk about probable issues and the benefits that potential buyers might be interested in. By understanding the specific needs of the buyer, the sales team can better tailor their demo to address the buyer's needs and offer a personalized solution.

2. Creating Compelling Case Study Demos

The case study demos are the heart of the sales discovery demo. They need to be compelling and relevant to the buyer's needs. The most important use cases should be highlighted, and each feature should be presented in a way that clearly shows the benefits that organizations similar to them derived from the solution. 

The demos should be carefully crafted to appeal to buyers who might otherwise have blind spots about what they need. By offering a range of solution options, the sales team can help buyers to understand their problems and make informed decisions about how to solve them.

3. Organizing the Playlist

Once the most relevant case studies have been identified and selected, the next step is to organize them into a playlist. The playlist could be a screen with links to different demos, but it is important to label the benefits that the buyer could derive from each specific demo. This approach helps the buyer to easily see what they could gain from the solution rather than being asked a series of questions.

4. Preparing for Common Objections

It's important to anticipate potential objections that the buyer may have and to prepare persuasive responses in advance. The vendor should be prepared to demonstrate their expertise and understanding of the customer's business challenges and industry trends. 

This helps the sales team to be more confident and well-prepared during the demo. By understanding the common objections and how to overcome them, the sales team can address the buyer's concerns and keep the demo focused on the value the solution provides.

Tips For Delivering An Effective Discovery Demo

 The discovery demo aims to stimulate conversation, help the prospects verbalize their problems, and expand their vision. Here are some tips for delivering an effective discovery demo.

1. Customer-Centric Approach

The primary objective of a discovery demo is to understand the challenges and pain points of the potential buyers. Therefore, focusing on the customer's needs is essential rather than just promoting your product. The discovery demo should be all about the buyers' requirements, and the product features should only highlight the benefits that will address their pain points. Being customer-centric helps in building rapport and helps establish you as a partner in solving their problems.

2. Do Your Homework

Before delivering the discovery demo, it is crucial to do desk research about the industry and the target persona that you will be presenting to. The research will help you understand the common challenges your target audience faces. This information will help you better tailor the presentation to address specific pain points.

3. Encourage Interaction

The discovery demo is an interactive session that should facilitate knowledge transfer between you and your prospect. Therefore, while delivering the demo, it is important to encourage the prospect to interact with you. By asking open-ended questions, you can lead the buyer into an active conversation where they verbalize their challenges and needs. Active interaction helps you better understand the buyers' needs, and this knowledge helps you tailor your solutions to their specific problems and pains.

4. Focus on Brief Case Studies

The case study demo approach focuses on highlighting the benefits, clients, and outcomes of your solutions rather than quibbling over the features. The demo presentation should be succinct and discuss how your solutions have previously solved similar problems. Focusing on the client's positive outcome makes it easier for the prospect to envision how your solutions will help them. By showcasing the benefits, the prospect is more likely to experience that "aha" moment, noting how your solution is an answer to their problems or pain points.

Why is Demoboost your Perfect Discovery Demos Partner?

Demoboost is the perfect discovery demos partner for any business looking to make a lasting impression on prospective clients. Among its key features are: 

1. Easy Creation of Demos

Demoboost provides an easy way for users to create demos without dealing with any complex processes. This feature eliminates the need for technical skills and enables users to create demos on the go quickly. The process involves a simple drag-and-drop feature where users can select pre-built templates and insert their content, images, and multimedia files.

2. Easy Personalization

Customization is fundamental when creating demos, and Demoboost offers robust customization tools. Sales teams can personalize their demos by adding brand logos, adapting the language to the buyer, their scale and industry This helps to create seamless and immersive demos that reflect the company's culture and values.

3. Building of Ready-to-Use Demo Galleries

Once demos are created and saved, they can be easily stored as a repository of demos. This feature helps to build an extensive gallery of demos that the entire team can access. It eliminates the need for re-creating demos from scratch and saves time and resources. This also provides consistency of demos throughout the organization, ensuring all team members work with the same high-quality demos.

4. Live Demo Support

The live demo support of Demoboost provides helps the sales team nail every live demo, every time, while providing valuable information about the effectiveness of each live session. It tracks which demos were used the most frequently and for how long each demo was played. The insights gained through this feature enable users to fine-tune their demos, making them more engaging and informative. Additionally, it helps to identify areas where customers may be struggling, providing an opportunity to improve the demo in that area.

Discover the power of hassle-free demo creation and personalization with Demoboost. Book a demo

today and supercharge your discovery demos.

Global Software Sales Process Survey 2024

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author
Pawel Jaszczurowski
CEO at Demoboost | EX - Salesforce | Forbes 30U30 Polska

Pawel is a Software Sales Expert and frontline practitioner with extensive experience in selling Salesforce solutions. Drawing on years of firsthand experience, Pawel has dedicated 100% of his focus to addressing the pain points encountered in software demoing to clients.

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