13: Running A Great Sales Demo

Helpful links from the episode:

• Zoom
• Pipedrive
• Copper
• Typeform

FULL SHOW NOTES:

[intro music]

00:02 Aaron Weiche: Episode 13: Running a Great Sales Demo.

00:06 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:32 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

00:36 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:37 AW: And this week, we are gonna dive into what goes in to running a great sales demo. How do you demo your SaaS product and break down a number of aspects regarding that. A very important piece really, I view it as kind of the absolute cornerstone and the biggest value prop within the sales process. And we'll break that down but first, Darren, let's play a little bit of catchup. What have you been up to lately?

01:08 DS: What have I been up to? Well, lately, I've done a couple auto dealer conferences, I had one in beautiful Banff, Alberta so right in the Rocky Mountains there. That was fantastic.

01:19 AW: That place, I have not physically been there but every time I have a friend go there, and they post their photos to Facebook, I'm like, "That place cannot be real."

01:27 DS: It's insane, it's so beautiful and it is like... The conference was held at the Banff Springs Hotel, which is basically this amazing castle in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It's so beautiful. So yeah, it was wonderful, I brought the family, we drove down and spent a few days there, the conference was easy, I spoke to a bunch of auto dealers about getting the most out of Google My Business, and it's been nice 'cause I have this run. So I did the one in Banff and I just got back from Montreal, also a fantastic Canadian city. I did another auto dealer conference in Montreal for a brand called Kijiji. They have this thing, Kijiji Autos. And then I go tomorrow to fly to Vegas for DrivingSales Executive Summit, which is another auto dealer conference. I'm now officially the new Greg Gifford of local search.

[laughter]

02:25 AW: And Vegas, Vegas baby!

02:27 DS: Yeah, that's right. All I'm doing is auto dealer conferences, it's just been like this string of three in a row, but it's nice 'cause then you can use the same deck, right? So that's fantastic.

02:36 AW: Yeah. Well, when we go to promote this podcast, I'm definitely gonna put out a tweet that says there's a new Greg Gifford of the auto industry, and that will quickly catch his attention. That's awesome.

02:45 DS: Definitely. Yeah. So I've been dealing with that and that's over and I'll have a lot of free time not doing any more conference speaking probably until January, February, so that'll be nice to have this really good break where I can just be in the office focused on the business. We're building an API for our rank tracking software so a lot of people wanna just pull that data into their own systems or into Google Data Studio, so we're working on that. That should be done right away here, where we're putting the finishing touches.

We are also working on a revision of our Local Citation Finder software, it hasn't been updated in a long time. We've had new designs, actually a whole new system built on staging. It's been sitting for months while the team has been distracted with other things. And so once this API is out the door, we're shifting to get that thing done. So I'm excited about launching that.

03:41 DS: Another thing that we've been really working on is some customer service things. We've been reviewing our template reports. So if someone asks about this or that, we have these like, "Oh, well, here's some information on that," and then we often end it with like, "Well, please let us know if you have any more questions." And it's like, we really need to do a better job of being like, "When can I set up a demo?" That's a good question. "Can we jump on a call next week?" Being more proactive with encouraging that next step with a customer 'cause so many of our customer support requests that are coming in are actually sales leads, these are people that are like, "I'm interested in that service or product you have, I want some more information on pricing, or whatever." They give them the information, they're like, "High five. Good luck to you. Hopefully one day you become our customer." Rather than hoping for it, we're working on our language and especially how we're closing all those emails to move it to the next stage of the sales process. So I'm excited about that, too.

04:46 AW: Yeah, that singular question is actually just a buying signal that you need to capitalize on that like, "Yeah, here's the answer for that, but let's jump on a demo and take a look at things as a whole, as well as dive into your specific question."

05:00 DS: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. How about you? What's up?

05:02 AW: Oh, man, I have been wearing out runways around the country. I'm on the end of seven different conferences in six weeks. So yeah, between all those. I just got home yesterday from Philly. I was at a client's conference where I gave three talks in one day there, that was at least nice and concise, and I was only gone from home three days this week. Next week, I'm gone all week, Monday through Friday with three more talks.

It's one of those, it's like when I said yes to these, it's like one asked me in January, so I said yes to it in September, and then one asked me in March and so I said yes to it, and then a couple other things, a client travel sprinkles in and then a new conference pops in, it's like, "Oh, that'd be really great exposure." I have over-committed massively and I'm not gonna do this again, I've survived it and there's been a number of great things that come out of it, but when you are spending so much time creating different decks and customizing them and all those things, just way too much at once, I really made it hard on myself.

06:13 DS: Yeah, wow, that's a busy schedule. Packed it on. And then it's tough to manage all of the other stuff that's coming up in the business when you're traveling so much. I was like...

06:22 AW: Yep.

06:22 DS: I was feeling stressed for the last week just because like, "Ahh." You wanna be at the conference and talking to people, but your emails are piling up at the same time. You got all these employees that have questions for you and customers that have questions, so yeah, there's just a lot to deal with.

06:37 AW: Well, and the life balance with it, too. It's like, I have four kids, and so, I'm gone Monday through Friday. My wife, that's the real CEO in my house. She's getting everyone to their sports, all kinds of other things, whatever else. And then, when I'm getting home on the weekend, I'm so behind that I'm going into the office for full days on Saturday and Sunday, if not more. And so, I'm not getting quality times with the kids, I'm not helping my wife out. Yeah, so it's just one of those... Luckily, we have a couple of family getaways that I've promised I will be offline, I will be trying to make up... Let my kids remember they have a dad, and get caught up in that side of life. But it's a lot to balance, and I really... I gotta learn to say no. It's great to have those opportunities and to take advantage of them, but I do need to balance it out.

07:28 DS: So, are you working from home at all? Or are you mostly are in the office?

07:32 AW: I have an office that's all of 5 mi...