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I ❤️ sales!
I have both sold software and had software sold to me. Nothing, and I mean nothing, annoys me more than showing up to a call to try to buy software and having the salesperson grill me for 30 minutes without ever showing me the product.
I led sales at Textio off and on for years. Many years. As a matter of fact, as recently as 2024. No, really. When I stepped down from the CEO role in January 2024, I quietly led Textio sales for another several months to help set the team up for success in the transition. I built my career in product and engineering, but I legit love sales.
In my time at Textio, no issue was more divisive within the sales team than the question of how much discovery to do up front and when to move to a demo. What makes the optimal customer experience?
Oh y'all know what's coming: a data story!
Your Gong recordings make a great data set
Before working on this story, I talked to Kim Thompson, Textio's VP of Sales. I was like, "Hey Kim, what if we used Textio sales calls and conversion data to figure out exactly when the team should demo?" Kim said, "Wow, I'd love to have that insight!" and here we are.
For this analysis, I looked at the last 100 Textio sales opportunities that have closed. We won some and we lost some. For each opportunity, I looked at two things:
1/ How soon in our conversation with the potential customer do we actually demo the product? I mean literally, in terms of minutes. How many minutes do we spend conversing, on one call or several, before showing our product for the first time?
2/ During our demo, how much does the salesperson talk and how much does the customer talk? Is the demo more like a presentation or more like a conversation?
I wanted to see whether there were differences between the deals we won and the deals we lost.
tl;dr There were big differences. Grilling customers is boring. Monologues are boring. Demos rock, especially demos where you have a real conversation throughout vs. just yammering away on your own.
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No one likes your interrogation or your monologue
If you don't work in sales, discovery refers to the process where the salesperson tries to learn about their potential customer: what problem they're trying to solve, what's important to them, how they'll make a buying decision. The goal is to figure out whether a partnership makes sense, and if so, how to expedite it.
When discovery is done well, the customer feels like the salesperson is genuinely curious about whether their solution can help. Done poorly (and it is usually done poorly) the customer feels like the seller is interrogating them with purely self-serving commercial intent.
Conventional wisdom among sellers is that demos typically go better when you've done tons of discovery beforehand. In fact, some sellers prefer to have entire meetings for discovery before ever sharing their screen.
The data shows that those sellers are wrong.
We get to the demo 33 minutes sooner in the deals we win.
For the deals we won, we started our first demo just 14 minutes in to conversations with the potential customer. For the deals we lost, we started our first demo 47 minutes in. That's a big difference.
Since most initial meetings are 30 minutes, this means that we win when we demo on our first call, and we lose when we don't.
The longer it takes us to get to the demo, the lower our win rate is.
It takes a few minutes to set context, so if you jump in too soon to demo, that undermines you too. But once you've done that, it's best to dive right in.
Unsurprisingly, there's more here than meets the eye. Read on!
When the customer talks more, we win more.
On average, in the deals we lost, the salesperson does 93% of the talking during the demo. In the deals we won, the conversation is a lot more balanced; the salesperson talks a little more than the customer, but the split is closer to 50/50.
In other words, great salespeople give the customer what they want and get to the demo fast. Then they use the demo itself as a vehicle for doing great discovery.
The bottom line: No one wants your interrogation and no one wants your monologue. This isn't just true in sales, btw. In every professional interaction, set context, get to the point, and listen.
What do you think?
Kieran
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