Modern buyers appreciate customized solutions that address their specific concerns. According to a recent Salesforce report, the pandemic profoundly changed B2B sales dynamics, indicating that buyers now require an enhanced understanding and demonstration of their needs. And 89% of them are more likely to make a purchase when they feel understood by sellers.
As the leading conversion tool, tailored product demos build trust and confidence by engaging, educating, and enabling prospects to make informed purchase decisions that are aligned with their pain points. In fact, surveys conducted by TrustRadius reveal that product demos have consistently ranked number one on the top five list of trusted resources B2B buyers rely on when deciding to buy. Moreover, 95% of buyers said it’s extremely or somewhat important that demos be customized to their use case.
How might you create, tweak or transform your product demos into buyer-centric superpowers to close more deals while fortifying your reputation as a problem solver and solutions expert in commercial print production?
While personally pondering this question, I came up with an agile buyer-centric D3 (Discover, Deliver, Delight) framework that helped shift mindsets and behaviors around optimizing the value of Konica Minolta’s Client Experience Center to improve the experience, impact and outcomes of our product demos. Here are some highlights that may be helpful in considering how you might reimagine your product demo strategy.
Discover
We can’t effectively demonstrate how our latest and greatest print production products will help prospective buyers solve their problems if we don’t know what they are, their root causes and how they are affecting business performance. Without this important discovery, your demo is nothing more than a huge feature/benefit dump of all the shiny bells and whistles that we love so much about our products but deprives them of their conversion impact. They shine much brighter when it’s their time. No more spraying and praying.
It’s all about seeing your product through the lens of your target audience and their pain points, then mapping relevant product features that exactly solve for those problems. Discovery drives the demo by focusing only on features and benefits relative to your buyer’s needs.
Use an open source intelligence approach across teams, technologies and channels to capture, incorporate and operationalize meaningful Voice of the Customer (VoC) data and information. Valuable sources of information for this deeper understanding of your buyers include:
Sharing actionable intelligence from this collective research across functions helps to unify messaging, positioning and competitive differentiation.
Deliver
Here is where all the effort placed into harnessing the power of knowledge gained during your Discovery process really sets you apart. 72% of B2B buyer respondents to a 2022 Bain and Google survey said vendors they ultimately chose outperformed the rest in demos.
Think of your demo as an engaging reveal of your recommended solution to your buyer’s most pressing challenges. Remember, you’re not selling a product, you’re offering a solution to a specific problem. You want them to feel heard, excited about the business outcomes, inspired to make the purchase and dream about how much easier their lives – and their customers’ lives – will be.
Delight
Delight your prospective buyers by translating relevant product features and functions into desired business benefits in the competitively differentiated value story that is your demo. Guide them through their personalized experience and stay laser-focused on where they want to go and the path you’re taking them. Make sure it’s a story filled with memorable moments, possibilities and brighter futures. That’s what you’re selling – not your product.
And they will be thrilled to tell others all about it.
The driving force behind closed deals
Buyer-centric product demos that reflect well-researched, personalized and empathetic sales strategies create an urgency to purchase. To seal more deals, make sure yours is hyper-relevant, compelling and outcomes-focused not only for your prospective buyers business but for their customers as well.
Learn more about Konica Minolta’s 18,500 square-foot Client Engagement Center, where visitors are engaged by product demos, meet with Konica Minolta personnel, and receive sales and service training. And for more information about the digital transformation possibilities through our production printing equipment, please visit us online.
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