It might be that providing software demos to customers are a waste of time.
Research by Peter Cohan, author of Great Demo! suggests that nearly half of all software demonstrations given during the sales process are “wasted” because they are premature.
“Software vendors often attempt to use an ‘overview’ demo to start a dialog with a customer – and may try to use these to do Discovery along the way. If you ask presales managers how many of these ‘overview’ demos actually lead to a qualified prospect, the answer can be painfully low”, said Cohan.
Cohan’s comments are backed by researchers at Gartner Group which says that providing demonstrations at scale can become an expensive, time-intensive challenge for many providers.
Gartner Senior Director Analyst Michele Buckle said: “Scalable, automated and interactive demos provide an important cost- and time-effective way to satisfy customer interest regardless of the qualification or status of a lead or opportunity.”
To help sales teams recognise how they are over burdening the sales engineers, Consensus has begun preaching the idea of a Demo Qualified Lead, or DQL.
Garin Hess, Consensus Founder and CEO said that sales teams too often request precious resources from the presales team without qualifying the prospect effectively.
“We hear about marketing qualified leads, and sales accepted leads, but what about the gate to the presales team? There should be a Demo Qualified Lead stage. In other words, when the buyer is truly ready to engage with presales.”
One sales team at Oracle refuses to request a presales resource until the prospect has engaged with an automated demo and shared it with at least one other person.
“If the prospect won’t even open it or share it, how real is that meeting going to be?” said one Oracle sales leader. “Send her a Consensus demo and let’s see how real she is.”
