When you are selling an enterprise solution, can you afford to demonstrate a solution, which is very generalized? It is important to give a tailored demo to every prospective customer. A subset of the features offered by your solution may be good enough for him, or some features that he needs may be missing from your solution. A customer-focused demo is the first step in your success story with every customer.

Selling a high-value solution to an enterprise customer is not as simple as selling a standard product like Microsoft Office. However technologically advanced your solution may be; it will not be interesting to anyone if you highlight all features to all the prospective customers. A different set of features will appeal to different customers. The solution may have to take on a different avatar for every master it serves.

How to build different bodies over a standard skeleton is where your skills will be tested. People talk about best business practices but that is like a set of special clothes, which one wears only on special occasions. The best practices talk is saved for occasions like board meetings and not when it comes to selecting and implementing an enterprise solution.

Make your demos meaningful
Many vendors of enterprise solutions look at demonstrations and presentations as an exercise to hone their Power Point skills. A demo built by people with lack of communication skills, with no sense of purpose and proper planning of the presentation, can create a negative impression rather than add value to the sales effort.

It would be a better idea to try and build a bridge to close the mental gap between how your potential users perform their job today and how they'll perform it with your solution in place. This is anytime better than flooding the customer with industry jargon and boring him to death with technical details.

Your prospective customers perform their jobs everyday using existing methods, procedures and software. They have been a successful company and grown over the years with their own business practices, best or not! If they were not a successful company, they wouldn't have the budget to buy your solution. Moreover, the inertia that has developed through the use of existing methods is very powerful.

Making a smooth transition
Change management before and after a solution is implemented is very important. Recently a Chennai-based company was very successful in implementing SAP in the organization and achieving a very good ROI. It is known to have gone through the process of bringing about change in the company culture and business practices over a long period of almost five months. This was before they called in the SAP implementation team to start their work.

Your customer has an inner voice that says, "Change can be risky, I don't want to change." Even though they called you for giving a demo, he is not sure that he wants to change from the legacy system to a high tech solution so soon. He is scared of the disruption the new solution may bring to his routine functioning.

It is also possible that the change is being forced on your future users by their top management. No one will tell you openly about these things. It's your job to identify what is there at the back of their minds. If you go on with your sales efforts without recognizing the inner workings of the organization on the other side, you will keep missing the target. The demo must be tailored based on this deeper understanding of the customer psyche.

Though it is important to stop when the meetings and demos are leading you nowhere, this decision has to be based on business intelligence, rather than a mathematical calculation of how much money you have spent on a particular sales lead over what period of time. There is no formula that will work here.

I have seen vendors who keep track of how much money they have effectively spent on each sales lead in demos and meetings and suddenly stop their follow-up process at a certain trigger point without realizing how close they were to closing the deal! I have seen them doing this mathematically without any business intelligence backing the decisions.

Demo should clear doubts
Some vendors will spend Rs 50,000 on flying their people from Chennai to Mumbai to meet a customer's vendor evaluation team and end up wasting that money and time by giving a demo, which doesn't do its job. Add up all this money spent on unproductive meetings and prematurely abandoned sales leads with the meager amounts and little effort invested in developing a really effective demo and you will see the point I am trying to stress on.

If your demo leaves too many questions unanswered, consider it to be a failure. The worst thing a presenter can do is to repeat this excuse again and again - "I have to talk to my functional consultant. I will get back to you on this!" as an answer to many of the questions raised during the demo. Your customers want to know what benefit they will realize as a result of using your solution. You can't take the chance of leaving it to your customers to figure this out on their own.

If you are sending a junior salesperson to give the demo, make sure he understands every slide and take him through an in-house rehearsal before sending him out to a prospective customer. A presenter who thinks he is an expert on the subject and exhibits his knowledge by making the customer feel very inferior, is a big business threat. No one wants to work with an arrogant partner.

A real life example – "If our product was not good, 60% of the market share wouldn't have come to us!" Demonstrating the features of your solution that are useful to the particular customer is important and it is equally important to do it in his frame of reference. How much market share you have and how much you love your company and your solution is not important to the customer. He already knows how much market share you have and probably that's why he called you to demonstrate your solution in the first place.

The author is an independent consultant. He can be reached at dongre@usa.net

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