Hey guys, this is Steli Efti with Close.io. Today I want to share a simple technique,
a simple tactic with you for how to take catastrophe in your sales pitch and turn it into cash.
We’re going to focus on the “demo fail”, when you demonstrate your product, when you
give people a product demo and everything that could go wrong goes wrong. You have been
in those situations before. We’re going to talk about how to master these situations,
turn them around into something that actually connects more – creates more connection
with you and your prospect and ultimately turns them around, makes you stand out and
has them wanting to buy your product at the end of the day although something went wrong
with it. I’ve talked about this before, about the
concept of taking a challenge or a crisis and turning it into opportunity specifically
in sales. I think we talked about it in the past. I’m going to link up to this, how
we had a really horrible day at Close.io where our call in functionality went down for all
our customers, and how we actually decided to go about the challenge of communicating
with all our customers, turning the service around, actually fixing the issue really,
really quickly. Then not just doing there or stopping there but actually calling every
single customer if they were affected by it or not, apologizing in person. Then taking
a chance to actually talk to them and figure out if they were happy with the service. If
they were, we turned it around and we closed a ton of these customers from month to month,
subscription customers to one year annual contracts.
I’ll link up to that post and share step by step with you that post and that video,
what we did and how we did it. Today, I want to talk about the “demo fail” in specific.
What happens when you’re demonstrating your product and something breaks? Especially in
the worst way possible when something breaks with your product, where you’re getting
an error or something doesn’t work or functionality breaks down. I’ve seen this way too many
times. Sales people giving a demo and something goes wrong, because let’s face it, sooner
or later everything will go wrong in one way or another. Everything that can go wrong will
go wrong. Then getting totally out of their groove and just creating this stress, anxiety,
lack of clarity just because something went wrong in their demo.
We’ve all been in this, somebody shows the product and says – let’s say it’s a
tech product, it’s an online application or website, something like that. They click
around there and say, “Let me now show you how to do this and this in our product.”
They click and nothing happens. They go, “It just takes a minute here and we wait, and
we click again.” They click again, nothing happens. “Let me see, let me try to go back
and actually try it again.” They go back, they go, “No, still not loading. Let me
actually log in and log out.” They log out and it sucks, and as a customer, actually
not just do you feel bad because it’s wasting your time but you actually feel … you’re
not just feeling like, “This thing is not working,” but you actually feel bad. You
actually start feeling stressed because that’s the emotion and the state that the sales person
that’s talking to you is creating. Then will all their ‘uhs and ums and uh,
um, uh, uh’… what they do is they communicate to you, “I’m in distress. This is a stressful
situation,” and it puts you in a similar mood or mindset and state . That’s really
not what you want your prospects and leads and potential customers to be in. Anyways,
so you see the guy and then it just continues. It goes worse and worse and worse. Eventually
they go, “Let me just reboot my computer. Then they log in and then they click. Instead
of not working, now it crashes. They get some red bar and it says, “Alert, crash error.”
They go, “Oh, I don’t know what’s happened. This has never happened to me before.” Don’t
you hate it when people say that? “This has never happened before, I don’t know,
maybe ah...” What is this all about? Has this really never happened before?
Maybe that particular issue hasn’t happened before, but have you never had a demo where
something didn’t go your way, where you lost your internet connection, there was a
bug, some error message, something, your computer crashed, something. You never, ever had a
demo where something went wrong. I don’t believe it, because I’ve given thousands
of demos myself. I’ve seen thousands and tens of thousands of product demos over the
last 10, 15 years myself and most of the sales guys, most of the sales people and myself
– when you demo something, things go wrong actually quite frequently. Maybe not every
single time but with every fifth time, every tenth time, something will go wrong. It’s
just the way it is, it’s technology, it’s real life. Things go wrong, live with it.
How do you take an error message, a bug, something your … a bug, your product explodes? Instead
of having your head explode next, how do you actually turn that into an opportunity to
connect with the prospect? I’ll guide you through a step-by-step situation that I went
through just recently. I hope and think that … no, I don’t think and hope. I actually
know that you can actually do the exact same thing and create the same result. Here is
the scenario. I actually do a demo with somebody, it’s quite important. Somebody that I’ve
been following for a long time, somebody that I actually am looking up to, so I’m all
excited. I’m slightly nervous to demo that person a product and I hope that I’m going
to be able to close the deal. I’m going through a product demo. I’m
showing them just the simplest things in the product, focus on the core three ideas that
I want to share with that person. Then just as I’m getting into the groove of things,
I get a red bar error message, something went wrong. Here is what I’d say, I go, “See,
this is the most important part of the demo. Here is where I’m going to show you what
to do when things go wrong.” Our app has been up most of the time. It’s pretty reliable.
We have over 300,000 sales calls being done every single month on Close.io with millions
of sales emails being sent and received on our platform. We’re globally distributed.
We have customers around the world. We’re growing dramatically. We’re operating at
scale here. Thousands and thousands of sales people rely every single day on using our
software, not just for 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, no, for eight, nine hours every single
day, five, six days a week. We’re a crucial and critical piece of software.
We deliver on that promise but we’re also realistic in the expectation that once a while
something might go wrong. Here, I’m going to show you in the demo, something just went
wrong. I’m going to go through with you, step by step, what to do when things go wrong
if you ever encounter an error message. Here is what I’m going to do next. In the product
if you click this area that says, “Help”. You see a little pop up window. It’s going
to show you all the ways that you can actually get help and connect with us. If something
goes wrong and it’s not quite critical, if you have a very generic question, you click
on this, support@close.io email. You can just send us a quick email. Typically within two
to three hours we’ll have somebody address your issue, respond to you and take care of
it, depending what time of day you are sending us an email.
But if it’s something more critical like this where you have a real error message show
up, you’ll actually go in here. This is our 24/7 live support chat. In that chat room,
you’re not connected to some random support center somewhere around the world. You’re
actually opening a window right into our engineering room. The people that are in our support chat
are our engineers. The people that are building the product, our most expensive, most expensive,
most precious resource, the people that are best paid in the company. You’re going to
be able to talk to our engineers and actually get immediate help. These are the guys and
girls that really know what’s up, that know what the issues are and how to fix them, and
they can fix them for you. They know how to answer all your questions. They give you zero
bullshit. Those are our engineers, not sales guys, not support people, real product people,
real engineers. Let’s go into the chat and actually find
out, discover real quickly if this is an issue we can fix immediately or what this is about
because I’ve honestly never seen this before. I’d go into the live chat and actually go,
“Hey Phil, I’m having a live demo with Mr. Mysterious that I don’t want to name
here. We’re having this specific issue. Can you help us out?” then I would write
in. I would tell the guy, “Hey Phil, this guy that I’m chatting with, that’s actually
the guy that’s responsible for this part of the application that I want to demo you
to. If he’s not able to help us in the next 30 minutes he’s out of the job.” I would
write that into chat, “Hey Phil, we’re live-streaming this right now. I’m streaming
my desktop. If you’re not able to help us real quick, you have to pack your stuff at
the end of the day.” Phil would reply to that, “Oh no,” smiley
face, sad face. We’d go back and forth and actually make this a little fun. In this specific
case we’re able to fix the issue within a minute. I still stopped and was like, “This
is not about me fixing the issue. This was about me demonstrating to you how to do it.
Honestly, this was not premeditated. I didn’t know that we would get an error, but I wanted
to show you that not only what to do when things go wrong, but I wanted to show you
how serious we are about taking care of you and fixing issues. Show you in real time how
we’re going to fix any problem you have an encounter. We’re going to give you complete
access to us: email, live chat, phone. You’re going to be able to access and communicate
with us immediately. We’re going to get our best people to actually take care of you.
See how I took something that was negative like an error message in the demo and we turned
it into a real human moment, something that was authentic and honest, something that allowed
us to build connection, but more importantly we made it in the spirit of the demo, something
that demonstrated to them how to deal with challenges if something goes wrong in the
product. I actually taught something. But not only where to click and what email or
chat window to chat with but more importantly I demonstrated to them how we take care of
our customers, how we fix issues, how we give support. That customer obviously at the end
of the day decided to buy our product. He didn’t go, “I’m never going to buy
something that eventually might have an error message or something doesn’t work.” No,
the guy knows what’s up. He’s a realist. He knows that things go wrong, but what he
saw was, “Wow, these guys take care of their customers. These guys give real amazing support.”
You know what else, just because I was confident, in the way that I reacted to that situation,
that alone turned him comfortable in giving us his business and his money and putting
his company, his sales team in our hand, because he knew these guys seem comfortable and confident
in situations where things go wrong. Which means this is the kind of partner I want to
work with because I know in good, as well as in bad times, these guys are going to be
level headed. They’re going to have clarity. They’re going to be able to actually fix
our issues and help us out. Take a step back. Take three minutes right
now, right after this video. Ask yourself, “When was the last time that something in
our sales process; pitching to people, demonstrating to them, things went wrong. How did we react
and how could we actually turn it around and turn into a special moment, and turn crisis
into cash, turn failure into real opportunity for our business?” Then move forward. These
are really the situations that are going to empower you to stand out from the crowd. Every
other sales person, every other team, every other company gets all crazy and all insecure
when things go wrong. Let that be your opportunity to shine and show confidence and clarity and
real connection with your prospect and customers. It’s going to make a massive difference to
your business and your bottom line.