“Clearly You Weren’t Listening

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I’ve come across an affliction that, untreated, can cause serious chronic trauma to sales teams and forecasts: Ignoremucitis. This terrible disease manifests with the following symptoms:

1. Sales team does a great job in qualification and discovery, asking many excellent and thoughtful questions.

2. Sales team then presents a demo that essentially ignores everything that was learned.

3. Customer chooses to purchase from a competitor or does nothing.

Additional collateral damage can include loss of sales team credibility, negative buzz from customers to other customers, and an ever-increasing spiral of trying to increase the sales “funnel” with more leads and more unproductive demos…

This horrible disease is curable. For individuals, a single application of the Great Demo! book (applied topically, not to be ingested) has shown remarkable efficacy in studies done by the FDA (Famous Demonstrators Association). For team-sized epidemics, the FDA recommends an initial dose of Great Demo! Workshops, followed periodically by refreshers to maintain desired antibody levels against future outbreaks.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Peter Cohan
Have you ever seen a bad software demonstration? Peter Cohan is the founder and principal of Great Demo!, focused on helping software organizations improve the success rates of their demos. He authored Great Demo! - how to prepare and deliver surprisingly compelling software demonstrations. Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manager and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.

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