Your product demo is done. You know you nailed the whole thing, start to finish, and the prospect was blown away by your product.
Now, it’s time to sit back, relax, and wait for the money to arrive.
Or is it?
You can ace the entire sales demo process, but if you skip talking about your next steps, you’re looking at a 71 percent decrease in close rate. Research shows that successful sales reps spend 12.7 percent more time talking about the next steps at the end of the demo.
The next steps in your sales demo are just as important (if not more important) than the demo content itself.
Want to learn more about these SaaS sales demo best practices? Keep reading:
How to Progress Your Deals Post-Demo in 7 Steps
You’ve finished your demo on a high. Keeping that momentum through the final stages of the sales process is key to closing the deal. So, here’s your step-by-step process to keep deals moving forward and to shorten your sales cycle after the discovery call and sales demo:
1. Listen Back to Your Recorded Call
It’s so easy to finish a call and assume you heard everything. But there are so many times when you were too focused on taking notes or too excited about sharing product features … and you missed things.
Listening back to your sales demos may not seem like an immediate priority, but this is a key method for ensuring that you’re truly aligned with your prospect and everything they said during the call.
Want to speed up this process? Use conversation intelligence tools with AI functionality, like Gong or Jiminny, that provide insights into your calls.
Looking to jazz up your discovery meetings and make them engaging? Read our article "Sales Discovery Meeting Blueprint: 7 Steps to Enhance Client Relationships" for some fresh ideas.
2. Send a Demo Follow-Up Email
This may seem obvious, but not all demo follow-up emails are created equal.
If you’re sending the slide deck, case studies, links to blogs, Calendly, and other documents all at once, that does not help anyone. That’s information overload. And while automation can help you send more of these emails at scale, remember that personalization is essential.
Use your follow-up email to summarize key points, including:
- How your product can solve the prospect’s challenges
- Why this is a fit for their team
- A recap of pricing
- Clear next steps that were discussed on the call
Here’s a script I use, either at the end of the call or in that follow-up email:
“I’m penciling in 15 minutes in a week, so that we can go through what I’ve shared.”
Don’t ask, go for it. Have confidence that this is something beneficial to both parties.
3. Align Early on Their Procurement Process
If you’re still speaking to only one internal champion at this point, you need to ask yourself, “Do I know who else will be involved in making this deal happen?”
When setting up the next steps, five people may need to do 20 different things to close this deal. Decision-makers and stakeholders need to be brought on board. You also probably need to navigate the Legal, Procurement, and Security teams, each with its own requirements and needs.
Don’t assume that because one person is excited, they will make this deal happen. Many buyers are unsure of how exactly their own company’s procurement process works.
How can you fix this? Preempt the roadblocks in this process by asking the right questions early on.
Here are some simple scripts we use to nail down this process and get the right people involved:
4. Create a Mutual Action Plan
You need to close the deal, and your prospect needs to solve a pain point. So, rather than simply drawing up a templated proposal, talk about how this will happen.
Creating a mutual action plan is a great way to simplify your next steps and clear the purchase path.
Lay out what each party needs to do next. What’s the timeline? What are the steps involved? What do you expect your prospect to do so you can keep moving the deal forward?
After asking them about their company’s procurement process, you should have a better idea of what needs to be done and who should be involved in it.
When you highlight clear next steps for your prospect, it creates accountability and removes friction in reaching a closed deal.
5. Bring Success into the Conversation Early
You have expectations for your potential customers—now, what can they expect from you in return?
At this stage, it’s important to start introducing the people who will help onboard and train the new customer, including your Success team, account managers, an onboarding specialist, a support engineer, etc.
This shows commitment from your side. You’re telling your prospects that you will continue to support them on their journey toward solving the pain point.
6. Be Transparent With Comparisons
Due diligence is usually an essential part of any B2B purchase. By the time you start a demo call, your prospect has probably done 80% of their research. And they’re probably still looking at other solutions.
So, invite the elephant into the room.
Here’s a template of how it can go:
Don’t avoid this conversation. Embrace it, and you’ll get ahead of those objections.
7. Give Buyers the Right Information at the Right Time
Sequencing out the information your prospects need is always better than sending an email with 20 attachments and a GIF directly after your demo.
Think about the buyer: They just got off a 30-minute call and are pretty tired. Throw 20 documents at them; they’ll probably push it to next week.
Instead, feed those necessary items into the journey as it progresses.
If you’ve already booked a follow-up meeting (and you should have), you can move on to the Ts and Cs, the legal, procurement, security, and all of that.
Close More Deals with Your SaaS Product Demos
Setting up a post-demo workflow can take time for an account executive. And, of course, it will be slightly different for each new customer.
But with a strong routine for aligning with their buying process, providing support and transparency, and giving them the right info at the right time, you’ll have a more solid, clear path to the finish line for each new deal.
The right tools will help you do that.
The premise of Trumpet is to centralize buyer journeys and link everything you need in one place. It creates a central space that sellers can refer back to, while equipping buyers with something they can share internally.
And when tracking touchpoints and executing outreach to buyers, there is no better tool than Close.
Curious about Trumpet? Check us out here.
