How to be Demonstration Ready with Bruce Scheer and Mike Wilkinson

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. Hi. I'm your host, Bruce Scheer. In this episode, we're joined again by value selling expert, Mike Wilkinson, one of ValuePro's affiliates, to discuss another critical skill for sales professionals, how to be demonstration ready. This is one of 10 crucial dimensions in our value ready framework. As a best selling author and international speaker known as the price getter, Mike helps sales teams maximize their effectiveness through value based selling. We'll unpack why effective demonstrations are so important, how to connect your solution to the customer's specific needs, and provide practical tips for more impactful demos. Whether you're new to sales or a seasoned pro, you won't wanna miss Mike's insights on this key skill.

Bruce Scheer: And don't forget to check out our other episodes covering the remaining dimensions of the value ready framework. Let's dive in. Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for coming back to the ValuePros Show. And on this episode, we're talking about why be demonstration ready. Take it away, Mike. I just love to hear your perspective. I loved your books on this topic and where you go a little bit deeper on this.

Bruce Scheer: Of course, you do in your training. But if you could hit for us in this episode, just some of the high points and what you do so beautifully well, some of the simple principles and practices to follow to be demonstration ready. I want our audience to hear this. So take it away. I think your audience are gonna be pleased to discover that this

Mike Wilkinson: is gonna be briefer than the previous session. We will look you value discovery ready because part of the answer to being demonstration ready is having done your value discovery properly. More important, knowing that your customer understands that you really do understand their business, their challenges, what they're trying to achieve, what the cost of doing nothing is to them, what the potential value to them of coming up with a solution could be. So the key part for me of being value demonstration I should get being demonstration ready is having completed a really first class value discovery process. And at the end of that value discovery process, if you like, summarizing back to the customer your understanding of what their issues are, what the impacts of not addressing them are going to be, and getting the customer to say, yes. You have got it. That is absolutely right. Because once they've done that, then demonstration should be the simplest thing of all.

Mike Wilkinson: Mike, could you tell us just a little bit just hit some of

Bruce Scheer: the high points of what great discovery is? And then also for the audience, you can go back to the previous episode. But would you just mind hitting a couple of the high points? I'd love it.

Mike Wilkinson: When it comes to discovery, we mentioned last time around of having a thought in our minds of the potential generic issues that we're going to find and how we actually move those from being generic into being absolutely specific from the customer's point of view. But somehow or another, I need to understand what are the real challenges that the customer is facing. And more important, I want to, through my conversation, get them to recognize the challenges that I believe, in the back of my mind, I believe I can actually help them to address are challenges that they consider to be a priority. So how do I drive up the things that I can do to be seen as a priority for the customer? And, certainly, that's something that I do and cover when we actually get together because I think that's really important. Every business has challenges. Most of them have 100 and 100 and 100 of them, but they can't deal with all of them. So how can we make sure that the ones that they want to deal with are the ones that we can do something about? And for me, that's really important. And it is about the quality of questions that we ask and the value journey that we take them on.

Mike Wilkinson: And you may recall last time, I said that for me, it's all about trying to think about these conversations as a lot less formal than sometimes we think of them, that they are a chat. They are an opportunity to work together, to explore together. The less they see you as a seller and the more they see you as someone who genuinely wants to sit side by side with them and go on this value journey together, the better. Because if they do that and they see that you are genuinely interested in helping them to make the best decisions for them and their business, they're gonna be much more likely to want to work with you. I think it's all of it is about creating an impression, isn't it? It's creating a feeling that they can think, yeah, that was really a great conversation I had with that person. I could really imagine working with them because it's not where we wanna get to.

Bruce Scheer: I would say absolutely. It's a partnering conversation. It's a collaborative conversation. Just having that, it's not vendor customer, it's partners. And I love how you frame. Let's go on the value discovery journey to figure this out together, and that's beautiful. That's the mindset on both parties to figure this out.

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. What I like to do is to work with people to think about the sort of clusters of questions that we can ask a client, a customer, as we go on that value journey together. But I just think about what are we trying to achieve? We're trying to understand what their big issues are, what the impact on their business is right now of actually having those issues or failing to take advantage of opportunities, and then just getting them to commit to recognizing that they need to do something about it. Because I think but what tends to happen, Bruce, is that I find a lot of people spend a lot of time doing demonstrations or assuming that they are demonstration ready with clients who actually have absolutely no intention of doing anything at all. And we're with clients who it costs a lot of money for them to put demonstrations together. A lot of money. And it's it's wasted. You know? It's just somebody taking them on a fool's errand, if you like.

Mike Wilkinson: So it's getting that buy in. This is why I said to you, the selling's done in value discovery. You're not gonna be selling anything at the demonstration stage. All you're going to do is to be confirming to them that you can do the things that they assume you can do because you've done such a bloody good job of understanding what their challenges are. This is the easy part.

Bruce Scheer: You kinda bring up a story for me, an old story that I was working with one of the former business value engineers for IBM, and he was a client of mine, but we were working on the the WebSphere platform and competing with SharePoint and this and that. And, of course, they would do great value discovery. But on the value demonstration side of things, in terms of winning deals there, they would tailor not just what they showed, the features, the functions, and associated value with that, but they literally made a mock instant of that customer, their brand, back to the point of investing money. But funny enough, they didn't do it in WebSphere. They actually built another software platform just to do the demos so they could customize them. And it it looked like WebSphere, but it wasn't actually WebSphere. But it it wasn't lying to the customer either. It just made it fast and easy for them to make a highly tailored custom instance of what looked like WebSphere, but really wasn't.

Bruce Scheer: It was just as the skin of that. No. That's fine. But helping the client connect those value dots to what they explore during discovery.

Mike Wilkinson: I think that you use this phrase value dots, and this is what demonstration is all about. It is finally connecting the dots of what you can do to your absolute understanding of what it is they want or need done. So, yeah, connecting the value dots is really important. But before we move further, I think we really do need to recognize that there is one thing we have got to do, and that is to recognize that our solution is the answer to a problem. And if you don't understand the problem, in other words, your value discovery has not been thorough enough, If you don't understand the problem, then you don't have a solution. All you have is something chasing a problem that as yet is ill defined. And I know I heard you quoted before, Bruce, and I quote it all the time, which is the the Tony Alessandra thing, which is prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. And I have to tell you, I hear salespeople doing that all the time, and I think there are a lot of salespeople who deserve to be struck off.

Bruce Scheer: Oh my god. Malpate.

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. So if you don't understand the problem, you don't have a really detailed understanding of what it is you're trying to solve, then you don't have a solution at this point, and you need to go back. Yeah. Don't just go charging forward and hope for the best. You do need to be sure that you've got it really, really buttoned down. So when I was thinking about this session, Bruce, rather than going through absolutely everything that I'm gonna go through anyway, should we get together? I just thought about some of the reasons that might be going through or some of the questions that are going through the buyer's mind because I think we talked about being customer centric right the way through our conversations. And I don't think we should stop now. Just because we're demonstrating our capability, we need to bear in mind some of the questions that our customers will be asking themselves.

Mike Wilkinson: So for example, why do they need to change at all rather than just doing what they're doing right now? Now you could argue that the answer to that question is because we've done a really good value discovery conversation, so we know that the answer to that, and we should. And the key here is if you don't know the answer to that question, you don't know why they should change rather than just carrying on, then perhaps we're not as prepared for the demonstration as we should be. Why would they choose us rather than another option? I don't know whether it's happened to you, but the number of times you sit down and you do the demonstration, you explain how you're gonna do things, and somebody on the buying team will sit back in their chair and say, well, thank you very much indeed for that. That was really interesting. But could you just sum up for us, why should we choose you? And I say, when I do deal reviews with clients, that's one of the questions I will always ask a seller. Why should this client choose you? Because if you don't have a really good answer to that question while we're sitting in a meeting room together discussing it, then what on earth are you gonna say when the customer asks it? And the customer may not physically ask it, but you could be absolutely sure that is what's going on in their mind. Why should we choose this solution rather than another option?

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Mike, we often advise sellers to not even just wait till the customer asks, but even lead with some of that. If it's germane to the value that the client's trying to solve for, and if there's a real case for change that includes what we call differentiated value, how do we help them achieve a value point with our differentiated capability? So back to your question of why they choose us rather than any other option. As part of a great value demonstration, you can even lead with that, that capability and how it drives differentiated value, and even let the prospect know that, hey, you're not gonna find this in some of the other platforms out there. This is unique for now, right now, in the market. So if you can make that case, which you need to, obviously, in many organizations, we defined those points of differentiated value and emphasized them. Again, bringing those points up during discovery, asking the right questions, making sure the client would care about that differentiated value. But that's what you can do.

Bruce Scheer: You can push into that in this demonstration phase.

Mike Wilkinson: I absolutely agree, and I do exactly the same. I know that people call it different things. I do call it the value proposition. And very often, you're right. At the at a demonstration meeting, if you have a formal presentation to a buying, one of the things I would recommend you do is open with your value proposition. The question you're probably asking yourselves is why should you choose us? Well, the primary reason is value proposition. And what I'd like to do is now demonstrate exactly how we're gonna deliver against that. And then you go through that.

Mike Wilkinson: And then I would do the value proposition again. And if they don't ask why they should choose us, you tell them again because I I want to remind them over and over again why should they choose us. And you talk about differentiated value. For me, if you don't have any differentiation, you don't have any potential value that you can talk about because you're just a commodity. You're like everybody else. So that search for differentiation starts with the quality and depth of understanding that you have of the customer because that is where the opportunities lie in our ability to really understand the customer and uncover the things that are important to them, which kinda goes on to the next question a bit, which is why should they act now rather than later? Well, you should know the answer to that. You remember we talked about this concept of the cost of inaction when we were talking a little bit earlier on. And for me, the cost of inaction is what generates the urgency.

Mike Wilkinson: The return on investment is the promise of goods of pleasures in the future. The the cost of inaction is the need to do something now. So, again, we would spend a lot of time thinking about that. And then, ultimately, why should they trust you to ensure they achieve their expected business outcomes? And this goes back to one of the other things that we talked about earlier on, Bruce, which is that 78% of salespeople show up to meetings without any really quality case studies. Because one of the reasons they should trust you is because you have a track record of delivering value to your clients and your customers. For me, it's all about your ability to substantiate the fact that you can deliver the value that you are promising. And the question is, how do you do that? And there are various ways. Case studies is 1.

Mike Wilkinson: Inviting them to your premises, showing them somewhere. There are loads of different ways of helping to actually achieve. Mike, this is so simple and so eloquent how you've laid this out, just

Bruce Scheer: these fundamental questions. I also like the order of the questions and just answering the question, why change for from that buyer perspective. And, again, discovery allows you to do that and do that well in this demonstration phase. And then secondly, why should they choose you versus competitive alternatives, making sure that's very clear that they're getting differentiated value by the fact that they're going with your solution to their problem versus competitive alternatives. It might not be hitting the problem in just the same way or in the way that's gonna drive differentiated value. So really making that connection. And then why act now? That one's kind of funny for me versus later. That's driving urgency.

Bruce Scheer: And, Mike, one of my favorite stories is a woman gave me a call, a seller out of Korea saying, hey, Bruce. CEO of a Korean airline, he won't return my calls. He's not responding to my emails. He's not doing anything. I flew my executives in. We had a wonderful meeting with him, and he smiled and was courteous and everything was nice, but now he won't return the call. Bruce, do you have anything I can do? Send to him to to get him to return my call. And I'm, like, just going, man, I'm so sorry.

Bruce Scheer: I'm out of silver bullets. I just don't have it. But what I'm guessing is you did not establish your 3 questions. Why change with us? And then what's driving the urgency? And, fundamentally, did you even agree with him what the fundamental problems were in the first place? And the answer, no, no, no, obviously, and that's why the person's not responding. Yeah. That you've gotta nail these fundamental questions. And then, yeah, I love your last question as well, Mike, just reminding the audience, why should they trust you versus other competitive alternatives? Where's the treatment of proof and the evidence that you're gonna deliver on that value promise?

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. You make a good point. And I think, actually, if you go back to the first one, change, the thing about change is that any change introduces risk. So you have to head that off early doors. If they see the change as being greater in terms of risk compared with the reward they perceive they're going to get, then we have a problem. But I think in terms of those buyer wise, you're not demonstration ready until you can answer certainly the first three and have a very good argument to support the 4th. So if if you're looking at going out and doing a demonstration now and you cannot answer those three questions, those first three questions, then you have a problem. Yep.

Mike Wilkinson: Yep.

Bruce Scheer: That's a no go forward problem, or you're probably wasting everybody's time. More of your sales cycle, but not anchoring on the value too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. So if we move on from there, because the one thing the word again that we've been using throughout all of this has been around value. So I just wanted to have a a quick word about how we communicate our value and why people still get bogged down in feature based selling. And I just want to sort of share the thought that what we're trying to do is to move from features to value. Sales 101 for all of us was about the difference between features and benefits. Features being all about you, the characteristics of the product or service that you provide, and you still see it all the time. You see it in publicity material. You see it on the side, the packaging.

Mike Wilkinson: You and it's feature laden. And the question that we were all taught to ask is, so what? Feature, so what? And the so what helps you to think about then the benefit. And it is customer focused or at least that's the idea. The problem with that is that it's customer oriented rather than customer focused. Because if you haven't actually done great value discovery, then what you're doing is you're making a generic assumption as to what the benefit is to this customer rather than truly knowing. But let's assume that we truly know. Now for me, features and benefits are great, but they're not persuasive. These days, people want a much more sophisticated answer to why they should choose you.

Mike Wilkinson: And that level of sophistication comes with a recognition of the financial and the emotional benefits that they will get, the real value that they will get out of it. And that means that we need to understand the customer's value drivers. The things that are really important from their point of view, both an economic and an emotional perspective. And I think about the concept that we introduced to something called the value triad. And you may remember going back to the previous episode for those of you who've been fortunate enough to see it, and we talked about value being a mystery. And the key for me is to recognize that we need some sort of structure around which to think about value. Knowing it's a mystery, knowing that we need to solve it, knowing that it's defined by the customer is really important, but we need to have some sort of structure to think about value. And for that, we developed this concept called the value triad.

Mike Wilkinson: Value triad looks at the, instead of 3 cornerstones. You can't really have cornerstones, can you, in a value triad? But there are 3 key elements of value. 1 is revenue gain, and that is how does your product or service help them to improve their revenue? One is cost reduction. How can your product or service help them to reduce their cost? And the third component is the emotional component, which often is forgotten about. And the more technically orientated salespeople are, the less they seem to think about the emotional bit. They think that as long as we can put together a really what I would describe as a no brainer logical argument as to why somebody should choose you, then you're gonna be home and dry. But I'm guessing that most of you can think about those occasions where you had an absolute no brainer. There is no way the customer can turn this down only to discover that they do.

Mike Wilkinson: And it could well be that we fail to head off the emotional element of that. But again, that that, Bruce, is something that we would discuss in some considerable detail when we get together. Understanding the value drivers is really important. The final bit is then turning those value drivers into monetary value because, as they say, money talks. So how do we actually put real dollars, pounds, Deutsche ma well, say Deutsche ma'am, euros, whatever it is, on the value of the solution to the customer. So this is about our ability to measure value in economic terms because it is much more persuasive for somebody to hear, we can help you to improve your revenue by $25,000 a month by doing this, then it is just to say, well, we can help you to improve your revenue. They wouldn't because most buyers want to know that's fine, but they wanna know how much and by when. Those are the key measures from their point of view.

Mike Wilkinson: But the last point that I would make once again at the bottom is that the value is not necessarily just about money. Value is about much more than money. Think about why you personally make some of the buying decisions that you make. And I guarantee that it's not just driven by money. It's about how you feel about the place you go to, the people you deal with, the help that you get, the support you get, the environment you find yourself in, how easy they are to do business with. So there are a whole host of things that we should be thinking about outside of just how can we help them improve their revenue, how can we help them to reduce their costs. So I think being demonstration ready for me is having all of those in place, answering the buyer why questions in advance so you're well prepared, and just making sure that you bear in mind each of the things that you discovered during value discovery so that you can take your customer not on a value journey this time so much as a demonstration journey where you show them how you are going to deliver the value that they are looking for step by step. So there you have it.

Mike Wilkinson: It's that demonstration. There's a mountain more, obviously, a

Bruce Scheer: mountain more to it, but I think in embryonic terms, I hope that's done a job. Excellent. Thank you, Mike. Now this has been a great episode so far and just laying all this out for us. It's funny. I'd like to just talk about a story. We had a major initiative for Hewlett Packard Asia Pacific, and I was given the honor to be selling to the head of the server division for HP Asia Pacific on how they were gonna go to market, their roots to market, and some of their strategies there. And I'll I'll never forget this.

Bruce Scheer: We were laying out the benefits of change back to the buyer questions that you talked about, why change, why us? We were laying all that out, but we also really pushed into the urgency dimension, the cost of inaction. And this is kinda funny because it's rational and emotional, but we highlighted to this executive, if you don't change and you keep things the way they are, the status quo, everything's going the way it's going right now, this whole system, and now you're going to market, You technically are costing Hewlett Packard $1,000,000 a month and then just silence, and we were hoping to see him squirm. And funny enough, he put a little smile on his face, and he is like, just, k, got me, guys. But he can't unhear that. And we did the quantification around that, so we had the rational underpinning. Emotionally, he had a little smirk. He was, like, going, okay. We've gotta do this.

Bruce Scheer: You know? So we led with the problem and that cost of inaction really to drive that urgency and change. Of course, we had other episodes along the way getting other stakeholders on the bus. Yeah. But for him, the leader, man, that cost of inaction and driving urgency there as part of the demonstration phase was very, very powerful.

Mike Wilkinson: I think this whole cost of inaction thing is perhaps one of the most powerful ways of getting momentum, moving the wholesale forward. You still win it thinking about ROI, but because ROI is a promise of something that's gonna happen in the future, the urgency to do something about it today is just not as great. And for most of us, we talked about reducing sales cycle times and did by 25% or whatever it was. This is one great way of doing that, really understanding what the cost of inaction is to the customer. But you will only do that

Bruce Scheer: if you understand the Understanding all that. And then, like, what you've done here, just linking your solution to their problem, but very specifically tying features to that, benefits to that, identifying those value drivers, and then monetizing that, showing them the rational, here's how we increase your revenues, here's how we reduce your costs, and the emotional contribution that you talk about, Mike, so eloquently pushing into all that that's really gonna showcase how the cost of inaction, how the cost will go away. But, also, what's the upside is the picture that you're painting here in in such a beautiful way, tying that back to the solution at hand as part of this demonstration phase?

Mike Wilkinson: Yeah. It does go back all the way to our friend, Tony Alexandre. If you get the diagnosis right, then the prescription can be absolutely bang on.

Bruce Scheer: Yep. Absolutely. And so for everybody on the diagnosis, make sure to catch the being discovery ready episode with Mike. It's fantastic. And thanks for hanging in on this one for being demonstration ready. This is gonna help you a ton as well. Mike, anything else you want the audience to know about or any other resources? As part of the last episode, I said, hey. Definitely follow Mike on LinkedIn.

Bruce Scheer: He produces often, and it's gold. And the beauty in Mike is I've never seen anybody do this well in this space, being a value professional and communicating, quantifying differentiated value. Mike breaks this down in simple ways that are applicable so you can up your game today, and that's Mike's gift. But, Mike, any other advisement that you give people before we break for this episode?

Mike Wilkinson: I don't know that there is particularly. The one thing I will pick up on that yet, please link with me on my 10. It'd be brilliant to see you. Sign up for the newsletter when you're on there. I have put together a series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Silly tongue in cheek, but I have Sherlock Holmes solving some value mysteries on a number of my newsletters and posts, which, I hope you'll enjoy. Absolutely.

Bruce Scheer: Well, Mike, thanks so much. It's been a great episode.

Mike Wilkinson: Brilliant. Great to be with you, Bruce. Thank you very much.

Bruce Scheer: Well, that wraps up our conversation on being demonstration ready with Mike Wilkinson. We've covered the importance of understanding the buyer's perspective, connecting your solution to their specific needs, and techniques for demonstrating real value. Remember, as Mike emphasized, great demonstrations build on thorough discovery. They show how you'll deliver the value the customer is seeking. This episode is just one piece of our comprehensive value ready framework. I encourage you to watch our related episodes to gain insights into all 10 critical dimensions of being value ready. To assess your own skills across these dimensions, visit valuepros.io and take our value ready assessment, and you'll find it off the resources tab. It's a great way to identify areas for improvement in your value based selling approach.

Bruce Scheer: If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the ValuePros Show and connect with Mike and me on LinkedIn for more insights. Until next time, keep demonstrating value and striving to be value ready.