- At the heart of every SaaS sales process,
whether you run a self service SaaS business,
or a sales driven one, is your product demo.
Now giving a proper SaaS product demo
is almost like a black art.
I'm convinced it's a black art.
Because you wanna highlight the features
but at the same time, you don't wanna overwhelm the buyer.
You wanna hit the right points.
You wanna hit the different constituents
that are part of the buying process.
So how do you do that?
In this episode, I'm gonna give you
my four golden principles for giving
an unstoppable product demo intro.
(dramatic music)
What's up everybody, welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, and on this channel, I help SaaS founders
like you accelerate your path to the next stage of growth
with an unstoppable strategy.
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be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
so that you get notified every single time
I drop an episode every Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday
with the TK energy.
And if you're already part
of my SaaS Go To Market coaching program.
If you're part of this community, welcome back,
it's really great to see you here.
Now having grown ToutApp
from zero to seven million. (inaudible)
Having been part of Marketo's executive team,
where we did a two year transformation
and sold it to Adobe for $4.75 billion.
Across that entire journey of running SaaS businesses,
I've been part of thousands of SaaS product demos.
Whether it was to build a product demo
for a multimillion dollar deal.
Whether it was building a product demo for our video
and our self service side,
or whether it was building a product demo
for a keynote in front of 5,000 people,
I found these four golden principles that you had to hit
for a great SaaS product demo.
So I'm gonna walk you through that right here.
If you're excited to dig in,
go ahead and smash that like button,
and let's get right into it.
Now, here's the number one thing,
when you're giving a product demo,
this is like after the intro and all that other stuff,
what you wanna do, principle number one,
is you wanna go right into the action shot.
Now, a lot of times in demos, you may wanna set the stage.
You may wanna say,
"Oh, we, this is our account.
Lemme log in."
Your best demo is gonna kinda be like a Joe Rogan podcast.
You know how in a Joe Rogan podcast,
they just jumped right into it.
He's in mid-conversation almost mid-sentence,
the middle of the action, and you're like,
"Oh my God, what's happening," and you're digging in.
That's how you want it to be.
You wanna jump right into the action shot.
You wanna zoom in to the part of the product
as the core product loop, right.
There's a certain core product loop that exists
for every SaaS business, and we talk about this
in this channel quite often.
This core product loop is for your primary user
and as primary user uses your software every single day
and they log in and then do this one thing,
that's your core product loop.
And what you wanna do is you would just wanna
zoom into just that part where they're like,
"Okay, here's a user," and identify the user.
"Here's the primary user on a given day
when they're using our product,
here's how they're gonna do X."
And X is the big workflow that they're running.
You wanna jump right into that action shot.
Why?
The reason for this is people want to see what the result
of the software is.
They don't care about your colors.
They don't care about your fancy log in screens.
They don't care about your integrations.
What they really care about is the result
they're gonna get, and the workflow, and experience
that that person's gonna have.
So you wanna zoom in right into that action shot,
right in the beginning and say,
"Look, here's our core product loop.
Here's how it works.
When it came to ToutApp, our big core product loop
was sending an email.
I was a salesperson, I need to follow up on a deal,
I need to send this email.
So that's where we would start off that action shot.
We would just jump right in and say,
"Hey, look, we're in Gmail.
We integrate in Gmail, here's ToutApp.
I just need to follow up on a deal, here's how it works."
And I just walked through those steps.
And what you wanna do is zoom into your, essentially,
your core product loop and get right into that action shot.
That's principle number one for the primary user.
The second thing you need to do
is once that core product loop is kinda done.
What you wanna highlight is how the software
actually does things for you automatically
for the primary user, because your SaaS product.
This is what I call essentially the no hands play.
The no hands plays is a thing,
is a thing where when a user actually hits
the submit button or the send button,
a whole bunch of amazing things probably gets done
by your SaaS software behind the scenes.
This could include the fact that
it's sinking the data to other systems.
This could include that it's calculating things.
This could include that it's triggering
other workflows, right.
Whatever it may be once that core workflow kinda
gets done, that core product loop,
your software goes to work for that user.
And what you wanna highlight in this next part
is this no hands mode.
It's a no hands mom part, where you're saying,
"Look for the primary user, it wants to do their workflow.
The software goes to work behind the scenes
and does all of these things on their behalf."
In the case of ToutApp, once you sent an email,
we would track that email.
We would update Salesforce.
We would monitor what would happen on that email,
and then trigger back to you when someone opened that email
or clicked on that link.
We do a lot more than that,
but that was one of our core workflows.
And we showed that in that,
"Hey, you don't have to do anything anymore.
The primary user doesn't have to do anything.
You just need to kinda sit with no hands
and let the software do the work."
So that's kinda the first two pieces of your product demo.
You don't wanna mess around with any of the setup.
You don't wanna mess up, mess around
with any of the login or any of that stuff.
You just wanna show here's the core product loop
and once you, once I get done with the core product,
what you're gonna do over and over and over,
here's all the work the software does behind the scenes.
Are you guys starting to get this.
Now, before I go into three and four,
lemme just pause here for a second.
If your starting to see how you would
already change your product demo.
How you would tighten it.
How you'd focus in on the action shot and the no hands mode,
lemme just get a yes in the chat below,
and also smash up that like button while you're at it
for the YouTube algorithm.
Alright.
Now, once you've done with the core product loop
and the no hands mode, this is primarily serving
the primary user, right.
Your demo so far is talking about the primary user.
And you're saying, look, here's essentially
who the primary user is.
And here's what they're getting out of the platform.
Next you actually wanna make sure your product demo
caters to two other groups of people.
One group is the manager and the other is the buyer.
Let's talk about the manager first.
The third principle that you need to incorporate
into your unstoppable demo is the fact that
ultimately there's gonna be this primary user,
but then there's also gonna be this manager.
Someone that manages that employee,
that's using your SaaS software
over and over and over, right.
And what you wanna show is how because the work flow
is now gonna be running on your SaaS platform,
and they're gonna be running
this core product loop every day,
and it's gonna be doing all these things automatically.
There are some benefits in terms of the manager.
Now this comes in two ways, right.
The first way it really comes is through visibility.
A manager cares about visibility.
They wanna know what their employees are doing
if they're doing it right, and if they're doing it
in the right way.
The other thing that comes are controls, right.
Controls are audit controls, security controls,
limitations, governance,
all of these things are valuable in SaaS products.
So what you essentially wanna show to the manager
is a part of your software that says,
"Okay, while your employees are doing all these things,
our software is doing all this for them
to make them more productive
and make sure they do the right things,
and we're gonna streamline everything.
At the same time, and behind the scenes,
we're gonna ensure you get visibility and controls
in terms of the overall workflow that we're delivering
as part of this SaaS offering."
Now, this comes in a few different ways, right.
You might be asking,
well, what do I show for visibility and controls?
One way could just be the insights, right?
A lot of great SaaS products generates insights
from all the data that it collects,
from the workflow, from the sink.
Since you have so much data,
you're in the middle of everything,
you can essentially show insights.
Under another one, and this can come
in the form of a dashboard.
Another thing you can do is detailed reports.
You can actually extract out detailed reports, audit logs,
all kinds of things the manager really cares about
because your compensated on it and they can dig,
they can dig more into it as well.
Those are just two of the things that you can show
in terms of how a manager can actually get
visibility and control.
And obviously there's stuff around security audit.
All these kinda things can come in over here as well
that you can show as part of the demo.
They all kinda goes under like,
"Hey look, manager, we get you too.
Because your employees are gonna be on this platform
because it's all centralized.
You also get benefits from this as well."
And that way, the second part
of the decision making process, which is the manager
beyond the primary users also have something in them, right.
So for example, for Marketo, we would show
how the demand gen person would actually
be able to do all these fancy things,
and this really cool things,
but we would also have the CMO dashboard.
We would show what this, what's in it for the CMO,
the kind of insights they would get,
the type of attribution that they would get.
And that was super powerful in winning those bigger deals
because we were able to show,
this is not just value for the demand gen team,
it's actually value for the entire marketing organization.
So this part of the demo is super, super important.
Okay.
So by now you've actually shown why
you're bad-ass with the primary user.
How you gonna make their lives 10 times better,
10 times more efficient.
Then you've got the manager drooling over to the platform
because they want this visibility.
They want this control, it's gonna make their job easier.
Who's left the person?
The person that's left is the buyer.
Now the buyer is typically not so much the person
that maybe using the platform
or benefiting from the platform.
I mean, they may benefit from it from a macro scale,
but it's coming out of their budget.
Ultimately, they're the ones
that are writing the check, right.
So for example, for ToutApp, we used to sell to sales teams,
but it wasn't always the case
of the VPs sales use the platform.
It was the sales operations person,
the head of sales development, maybe even marketing,
but it still came out of the VPs sales budget.
So we also had to show what is,
what is in it for the buyer.
And at this point of the product demo,
it really actually blurs the line from the product demo
to actually the overall sales process.
Which is you wanna bring it back and show
how the product as part of the product demo
is actually impacting their bottom line.
Ultimately, people buy software for one of three reasons.
Number one, they actually wanna save money.
The other is they wanna make more money.
And the third one is they wanna reduce risk.
So, while you're in this mode of showing the product
and the demo, you wanna just bring it back
real quick, and like,
"And by the way, because your able to run this workflow,
all these things get automated ,and you get these insights
you're essentially gonna make more money,
or are you gonna save money
or are you gonna reduce risk around this overall process
of this SaaS platform is gonna be owning."
So that's my four principles
on how to have an unstoppable demo for your SaaS product.
Number one, get it for the, get in to the action shot.
What is the core product loop?
Number two, do the no hands mode.
What does the software do on its own for the primary user?
Number three, what's in it for the manager.
That's your visibility and controls.
And number four, I should actually give this a name.
It's essentially go back to the enterprise value.
What is the value to the enterprise
that they're gonna get.
Are gonna make more money, save money, and reduce risk.
Those are the three things that matter the most
and tie that in, in terms of your core benefit.
That's everything I have for you in terms of building
an unstoppable product demos.
Now, if you're building out your SaaS business
and you're actually growing your SaaS business,
I have one free resource for you.
I put together a five point startup growth strategy guide
specifically for SaaS business.
It codifies everything that I know
in terms of growing SaaS businesses into this one guide.
It'll give you exactly all the steps you need to follow
to create your one page strategy for growth.
And it pulls together all the core principles
that I teach in this channel,
all into this one page strategy
that you can create for yourself.
So if you want access to that,
go to getunstoppable.com/strategy,
or also just follow the link below, either one works.
And you'll get free access to the guide,
which will go much more deeper
into how to grow your SaaS business.
If you got value from this feature, smash that like button.
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I hope you got value from this video.
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You would mean the world to me and my team.
And remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life
and their business.
But when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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