How to Deliver GREAT SaaS Demos
Published: 2020-09-30 08:44:33

Demos in General

This is topic that we surely need to be able to deliver when you start most technology careers as Account Manager, Sales and Developer as I am today and with the growth in technology and SaaS in 2020 more than even before.
But how do we plan to impact and show value existing in a CRM or SaaS Demos?

I will try with this post share my perspective and experiences when building CRM specific interactive demonstration sessions in past.
Hope this is helpful to some of you 😁.
What is CRM? 🖥

It may seem as trivial question for us working in CRM or in any level with technology, Marketing and Sales but you would be surprised how many times the definition of what a CRM platform is and how it sits within a company has to be clarified during demos.
Given that information, in other words we need to be 100% sure to cover the basics and its values for your targeted audience.

There is an element of customisation depending on who you have taking part in your demo session but in may cases if not most, you are not sure even who will be joining a webinar or larger group in house for example. So without a doubt breaking down what CRM or any Solution is crucial to start things off with as much clarity as possible.

Another aspect of the complexity of CRM system has rapidly increased from single solutions to large ecosystems and its variety of functions within organisations also grew with it.
Many organisations already have had implementation done and currently use them in some level but a common scenario is the renaming or repurposing of CRM within a workforce or teams, there are times where the Solution is mostly used for one of 
the below and know for that use only:

* Marketing Blasting Tool

* Sales Order Creation

* Ticketing System

It is curious how this happens but it is surprisingly common to have a customer or attendee saying we do not have any CRM but in reality they already have Salesforce + Marketing Cloud in place but it is internally know for the email dispatches only, of course this also highlights that potentially the CRM/XRM is being under utilised within that particular organisation but I digress as this is topic for another post maybe.

But in conclusion, YES do make sure CRM is defined and briefly explained at the START.

**Have Audience’s Context in Mind**

This is another crucial scenario where we CRM implementation professionals need to keep in mind that not all scenarios are relevant to all Customers and this is or I like to think common sense to anyone doing a demo about anything really.
However, a small preparation or research internally with colleagues ahead of demos content being outlined would allow the topics to be more relevant and the features demonstrated within more context and by doing so allowing those small triggers of imagination to fire 🔥 within customer’s minds 🧠 who will be then envisioning the solutions alongside their own daily operations solving a particular issues we as presenters may not and likely are not even aware of.

**What about webinar you say I don’t know my audience?**

Good point, depending on the upfront work and how the webinar has been arranged there are scenario that we do know the audience signing up from marketing lists and work carried out when promoting it and resulting in awareness on their particular operations and align interesting topics to trigger that 🧠imagination we discussed above.
In case of not knowing the audience at all, one exercise I like to carry out and this is maybe unique to CRM or SaaS demos is to see what publicly available features are shown in let’s say Salesforce.com, Dynamics 365 or SugarCRM websites and note them down.

**A good example would be:**

Saleforce.com has in their home page Lead Capturing and Management, automatically the initial behaviour would be to have this demonstrated an showing leads in Salesforce and how they as listed and how to access them etc.. as much as this is crucial and should be in your demo a key exercise is to close/expand that journey for customers or attendees.
What I mean by that is to not only show the leads in Salesforce but maybe have a sample Web to Case form setup in demo website and show some tracking of source, language automated emails replies automated from that website form submission for example, this allows people to see again as mentioned above the possibilities in this and solving their known issues.

So the in general terms I would recommend for sure to pick features publicly available in simplified form and enhance them and show them in realistic business processes being tackled.

Customers, Partners and attendees in general have vast amount of information freely available as much as you and can access that information on their own, in fact a good stakeholder managing a CRM or SaaS Implementation Project for company would have done so already.

In summary, to not make you stellar feature seem monotonous and boring enhance it , go step further and let business problem be solved in front of their eyes and boost further that wow factor and potential on your platform.

**Clean & Relevant Data**

Crucial and very often overlooked but having clean and relevant data in your demos is super important to show customers a real scenario as well as the time and detail taking into consideration ahead of that demo.
Salesforce does a great job different than most platforms on allowing multiple orgs or environments which are “owned” by admins or developers and even though they are mostly setup for training and certifications preparations as many of you may be aware this can be useful, let see what I mean.
What these environments do allows us is to reuse automations and data in particular modules we would like to demonstrate and have all its configurations including data clean and ready for a purpose or module we are demonstrating, for example:

* Marketing Automation configured Org/Environment
* Sales Operations Configured Org/Environment
* Support Operations Configured Org/Environment
* etc..

This will not only save you time when reusing these demos environments for different demos but keeping relevant data for each dedicated end goal, being that Sales Opportunities with real competitors or Marketing Campaigns matching customer’s industry.

I thinkI have kept you long enough and will not make this post too long but hope this was helpful and in some way helps anyone making a CRM or any SaaS demo great and set you up for success when impressing attendees and customers.

Thanks for reading this far and have wonderful day.

I will soon enough dump more ideas here and hope to be of use to some of your guys.

You can find me:

🤓Twitter: @diogoppedro
💼LinkedIn: Diogo Pacheco Pedro
📷 Instagram: @Diogo_codes
📹 YouTube: Diogo Codes

Be safe and thank you ever so much for readings this far. ❤️❤️