In this episode, Bruce Scheer talks with enterprise sales veteran Ray Schloss, who spent 17 years at Microsoft leading technical sales enablement for over a thousand sellers, about how to be discovery and demo ready. Ray frames discovery as fundamentally human: buyers react to sellers the way people react to anyone who tries to convince them of something while knowing nothing about them. He argues that AI now lets sellers prepare far more deeply than skimming a quarterly report, but Bruce adds an important caution, verify then trust, since AI outputs can be confidently wrong.
On demos, Ray insists that discovery comes first, captured as one or two clear win statements, so the demonstration can prove value against what the customer actually cares about rather than parading features. He stresses that value metrics must be real and verifiable, and that the deciding factor between similar competitors is often emotional impact and memorability, illustrated with his signature Willy Wonka story about a solution that takes you wherever you want to go. Bruce and Ray close on preparation and rehearsal, sharing war stories about demos that failed for lack of relevance and executive briefings that won because the team did the work up front.
“Customers feel the same way about business transactions as we do about our interpersonal transactions.” – Ray Schloss
“You better find out exactly what the issue is that they’re trying to overcome.” – Ray Schloss
“People aren’t gonna remember what you tell them, but they will remember how you made them feel.” – Ray Schloss
“If you want genuine data, you better have genuine care for your customers.” – Ray Schloss
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Bruce Scheer
“Verify then trust is my big warning, at least right now, before the world totally changes.” – Bruce Scheer
Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. Hi. This is Bruce Scheer, your host. And in this episode, we are talking with Ray Schloss about how to be discovery and demo ready. Ray is an enterprise sales veteran with over 25 years of experience, including 17 years at Microsoft, where he served as the global technical sales technical sales director for Microsoft Business Applications. Ray started an amazing community there where he served as head of enablement over a 1000 sellers at Microsoft. Talk about at scale. Ray is known for his impactful presentations that touch both the heart and mind of his audience.
Bruce Scheer: He brings a wealth of knowledge on how to conduct effective discovery and deliver memorable demos. Whether you're new to sales or a seasoned pro, you're in for some valuable insights on how to stand out in your next customer engagement. Let's dive in. Welcome, everybody. I am so excited about this episode. Here we are with Ray Schloss, and what we'll be talking about today is how to be discovery and demo ready for so thanks for tuning in. And this comes from the context. Ray and I, we know each other from the National Speakers Association, and we've connected.
Bruce Scheer: And we've got so many things in common, especially as it relates to b to b, b to b sales, sales enablement, revenue team enablement, so much in common. But I I shared with Ray, this new framework that we have that we're making available to the world. We wanna help folks, especially revenue teams, be value ready as we move into 2025 and beyond. And, we just think it's imperative. There's so many drivers for this. Buyers are getting smarter. There's you know, everybody's being AI enabled. But how can sellers show up as value professionals being more value ready, able to create value across each critical touch point along the buying journey.
Bruce Scheer: So that's what this framework's all about. And Ray, after talking to him, we really zeroed in on how to be discovery and demo ready as just two key critical components for closing deals both now and and in the future. Selling's probably gonna get even tougher. So, Ray, thanks for being here and just for, illustrating, for us, you know, just why this is so important. And and, yeah, let me just go ahead and kick it over, and let let's start that discussion, Ray. Why is discovery and demo ready so important?
Ray Schloss: Well, you know, Bruce, I think one of the key things about discovery is that it's it's not like how we feel in our own personal lives. Has anyone ever approached you and tried to convince you of something when they know nothing about you? So they may come and be like, I know what's in your best interest, Bruce. Like, have you ever heard of a politician do this? And you're like, you don't know anything about me. Like why should I listen to what you're saying just because you have an agenda and you want me to buy into your agenda? Not going to take you at your own word before I really do some research on who you are and what you represent.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. You made me think about, people people don't care, how much you know until they know how much you care.
Ray Schloss: How much you care. That's right. That's right. And even then it might be dicey. Yeah. But anyways, the thing about discovery is that customers feel the same way about business transactions as we do about our interpersonal transactions. And one of the things that is most repelling to us as people is whenever we come across the insincere. So if you're able to step back and go, you know what that guy doesn't care about me.
Ray Schloss: He just wants me to be an additional component to him achieving his goals and agenda. And I might not want to do that, you know, or that lady is talking a lot of nonsense and somehow she wants me to think that she's actually saying something of value. It's not happening, right? So going to customers, having done proper discovery, which this is one of the things I love just in our personal conversations, Bruce, that you've mentioned, you know, it's discovery used to be you could kind of show up with having some idea about the nature of a business. Oh, you know, we did some nexus research, yeah. We went online, we looked at their quarterly statements. You know, maybe we joined their last quarterly call. We've got some idea of the org chart. Right? But nowadays, as you like to advocate, if you use AI, you can actually use chat gbt or your favorite, you know, large language model and actually do discovery as if you were prepping for the meeting and show up with a completely different level of understanding of what the customer's business needs are to truly go in with a sense of sincerity instead of just being like, hey, Bruce, you know, yeah, I saw you graduated from, you know University of Washington some time ago and you know we're sort of like just having it be more just salesmanship rather than genuine empathy.
Ray Schloss: So now that we're able to become even better educated in our discovery processes, it can really make a difference and hopefully the outcome of then moving to presenting value and securing a customer win.
Bruce Scheer: No. I love it. Gosh. I I've been reading a book recently called the AI Edge, and then we've also built a prompt library, that that's featured on our website off our resources tab at valuepros.io. But I encourage everybody to go get that. We're giving it away for free, and I I use it every day. One big point though on that in doing discovery and leveraging AI, trust or, excuse me, verify then trust versus trust then verify. Is is this the keyword? Alright.
Bruce Scheer: I'll I'll tell you. I I was meeting the guy the other day and go, hey, Peter. Check out. I I I'm playing around with some of my prompts and everything. Look what it produced about you. He goes, Bruce, that's not me. He goes, that's not my title. That's not my focus.
Bruce Scheer: And I'm, like, going, uh-oh. You know? But yeah. So, definitely, I mean, everything's gonna evolve and get better and better and better. A friend of mine, his CEO is creating a cognitive layer over large language models just to get rid of some of that nonsense and make sure there's a judgment layer to make things are sure things are right, and that's AI driven. But, yeah, just, you know, verify then trust is my big warning at least right now before the world totally changes. Wow. Unreal. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: Well, you know, Bruce, I think the other part that comes with this then if we if we move kind of to the next step of it is okay. Well, let's say you've done proper discovery and you have the opportunity to be with a customer and you move to the next step of the sales stage, which is usually would like to see what you're talking about. So some kind of presentation or demonstration. And how do you optimize for success? Well, I like to think of 2 key things, but they both are built off of effective discovery. Right? So if you have gone through the discovery process, you've leveraged what you've learned in your your preparatory time like we've just talked about, And you've identified the win statements, which I think is something that is absolutely critical whenever you're going through discovery is that if you wanna get to an effective demonstration or presentation, you wanna be able to present value. You better find out exactly what the issue is that they're trying to overcome. If if you say, oh, we need a new supply chain, you know, system. Okay.
Ray Schloss: Well, why do you need a new supply chain system? Well, the old the other one's pretty old. Okay. It's pretty old. Is it gonna be sunsetted? Well, it's not gonna be sunsetted, but we think it's kinda clunky. Okay. Well, why do you think it's kinda clunky? Right. And you just keep driving out of the fact of, okay, here's the deal. We're getting a 16% reduction in our HR and, you know, hiring, budget for the next 12 months, and we have to find a way to become more efficient.
Ray Schloss: And each and every one of our customer sales reps needs to be able to close 8% more business within the next fiscal year or we're not going to make budget. Okay. Well now we know exactly what the problem is.
Bruce Scheer: Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: So you've got your win statement. Now how do you present value that our solution is going to give them a 10% increase and you're actually going to come out ahead if you move forward with our solution, right? So now you got to show that. And the important thing of that is I think these two things, Bruce. 1, you've got to demonstrate value which is part of the reason that whenever you and I are becoming friends and, you know, through the National Speakers Association and anybody who is watching this or listening to it that enjoys public speaking or you do it for a living or you're in sales or you just want to expand your ability to be an effective public speaker whether that's virtual or in person on stage or behind the camera whatever it is highly suggest checking out the National Speakers Association and our beloved chapter in the Pacific Northwest if you have here. But they're all over the country. Yeah, VeeChat, yeah, the best one, right? But they're all over the globe and they're all over. But anyways, like you know when we got to know each other and you're like, wow, hey, I've you know, I have this consulting company of thing they called Value Pros and it's all about how do you deliver and present value to our guests. Like wow, man, that is great.
Ray Schloss: I remember of the 17 years I was at Microsoft. We had a gentleman named Bob Urtle come in with our our corporate vice president of sales, Hayden Stafford, and they just absolutely were on a beeline course to getting everyone prepared to be able to do business value selling. And it was a huge shift for us within at the time, it was Microsoft Business Solutions. It's now biz apps and Dynamics and everything. But how much it changed how we went to market because we realized any conversation you're having with a customer and if you're talking about features and you're not tying value to the features, so what? And we used to do these, you know, I'd like these enablement boot camps for all of our incoming technical sales people for our division of Microsoft, and we would have our friends at to win come and we would take them through demo to win and discovery to win and everything. And one of the great things is there would actually be a sign that we would hand out through the through demo to win that just said, so what is a huge demo crime. Because if you're up there going, oh, this is one of my favorite features, Do you know that our invoice matching now gives you the ability to take 3 line items from this and 3 line items from that, isn't that cool? You know, and you're sitting there going and, right? Oh, and by the way, that's gonna reduce your amount of time to do invoice matching by 26%, you know, one after another after another, multiply that for a day, you just save 17 minutes in your workday just by using the solution. Oh, okay, well now I see the value instead of just the feature.
Ray Schloss: So when when you're looking at how you drive value, you are determining whether someone is going to go with you or go with a competitor if they do a better job. So value is absolutely important. I know it's the bread and butter of what you do, but it's coupled with the second thing, which is emotional impact. Right? So my
Bruce Scheer: Can I interrupt you before we talk about the emotional impact? Because I I I think this will go deep into. It's really important. Back up front when you were talking about so what, and then you were even citing, you know, hey. You're gonna be able to do that faster by 26% or, you know, you were using hard metrics. Where did those metrics come from? You know? Yeah. Yeah. I I think there's a stat that 99.5 percent of metrics are made up by sellers, but no bad.
Ray Schloss: Seems like that seems low.
Bruce Scheer: That's a
Ray Schloss: little low,
Bruce Scheer: Bruce. Idea. No. But I I know in a Microsoft context, Microsoft is a light prod for any lawsuits and yeah. They're there. They always double and triple verify. Yeah. How how do you guys have those salient value metrics that that you could point to? Most organizations don't have them. I was just curious. What's different about Microsoft and being able to to cite those those value points?
Ray Schloss: Well, I I love that you yeah. I love that you brought this up. We used to tell people when we were taking them through our technical boot camp training, like, you've got to use metrics but don't you dare use ones that you can't verify because nothing will turn a customer off sooner than if you're unable to cite the source. In fact, we would always try to encourage people cite the source if it's on a slide even if you were in a conversation. If I say to you, hey, Bruce, you know, year over year for 2 fiscal years, 26% improvement in your ability to do three way in voice matching. And by the way I'm sharing that with you because that has been the consensus of 17 of our customers where we've implemented the same system that you are evaluating and that's what they've realized over the last 2 fiscal years. Right. So like then you've got evidence but you don't want to do it without being able to verify it.
Ray Schloss: So we would always caution people it's it's actually better to go a little under on data if it's sketchy. So and because there's a believability factor with it
Bruce Scheer: too.
Ray Schloss: Right? So if I came to you and said, hey Bruce, we're going to give you a 3% improvement in your overall turnover rate. So if we can if we can stop 3% of your workforce leaving, what is the value to you gonna be? And and then if you do the math right and you know that that's a legitimate outcome then you may be able to with that 3% justify the expense of the project that they're considering. Yeah. If you go in there it goes like you know every quarter 12 less people are gonna leave your organization over a year, 48 people, are you kidding me? You know, and you're probably sitting there going, Yeah, you know, I think you are kidding me because that sounds completely unreasonable. Right? So it is I love your, you know, verify the trust.
Bruce Scheer: Verify then trust? Yeah. No. But I like the discipline that Microsoft would have to do those studies and generate those consensus. I just see that lack of discipline, in the product function, sales function, customer success function. And that's so exciting when when that goes well because then you you're building confidence through through your demo as as you highlight these things. That's awesome. Well, hey, sorry.
Ray Schloss: One more thing on that real quick, Bruce. Do you know how you get those stats? Is you've got a great product and a great relationship with your customers. Because if you your product's not great and they're not getting an ROI out of the last implementation and they're not being handled well from a customer success perspective, then whenever, you know, I call you up and I'm like, hey, Bruce, it's Ray from, you know, thriving 247. We really wanna know how that, you know, enablement software is working for you. How's that going? And you're like, Ray, we've been trying to get a hold of you, because the implementation is still not complete. We are 3 months out of, you know, range and and and a $100,000 over budget. And are you calling me because you want a reference from, like, how like, you know, so Yeah. If you want to if you want genuine data, you better have genuine care for your customers.
Ray Schloss: Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: I'd say genuine care. And, Ray, over to our framework here, one, of the final steps of of making the initial sale, what we preach about, in the buying journey is being impact ready. And, what you're doing with your customer at that point is talking about, hey. How how do you win? What are those metrics? Just like what you were talking about in the, in your in your demo and and making those value points and and how it's gonna move the dial. If that's something the customer cares about, that particular metric, you know, staff turnover, productivity, or whatever it might be, and and they have some specific goals. In terms of being impact ready, you could talk about, hey. How do we measure success? You know, that you know, because I wanna get you promoted. Of course, I want a return trip ticket so we can create more value together.
Bruce Scheer: Yep. You know, how, how do we, you know, set that up? We can't measure everything, but what would be practical to measure so we make sure we achieve what what we both wanted to achieve? And then just just get that set up a little bit before you get into deployment, etcetera. So so you can do a swing back, and and you've already kinda thought that through a little bit. How how were we going to measure and make it easy to to get that data? Yeah. Versus on the back end where where you're really contingent on having a great relationship as you speak. I think it's both and. How do you set it up right, and then how do you deliver the value, making sure your client's happy and, giving you the right to, you know, reference that, you know, that that success and and build those metrics. Well, hey.
Bruce Scheer: Back to, this story line, we talked about, you know, the so what and getting into the kind of the tangible financial types of metrics, but you were turning the corner to talk about the emotional contribution, which I just think is huge and probably the number one thing. But, yeah, tell us what what what have you learned there? What advisement would
Ray Schloss: you give us? Yeah. Absolutely. And this is something that, I was in I was in mainly technical presales for over 25 years. Right? And it was something that very early on I was like, oh, if you do this then your outcome is better and if you don't do it then your outcomes are not so great. And that was being able to contact and connect with your audience's heart as much as the head. Right? So it was always striving to find a way to make a hard connection with people. This really comes down to are you having an emotional impact. Right? So you can prove value and that will speak to people's logical processing of why your solution might be a good one.
Ray Schloss: But if you do something memorable that is going to help them choose you because of the emotional difference between you and one of your competitors. So, I was always encouraging people as we were taking them through sales boot camp and everything, you know, try to find a way to have impact and make a connection with people. Now let's go back to, you know, your guidance on AI driven discovery, which I love, and our opportunity to find out more things. Now it's a little scary. Yeah. Yeah. You find out a lot of sport because, hey, chat, g p t. Tell me all about Bruce Scheer. Well, Bruce Bruce
Bruce Scheer: really likes it only says good things. Yeah. It's safe. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: You know what? I don't want
Bruce Scheer: to look at mine back.
Ray Schloss: I'm just like, you know, something. Just bring your thumb
Bruce Scheer: one story and I'm just going to stop right there.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. I was like, don't ever ask a question you don't really want to know the answer to, right? So anyways, yeah. And, you know, Maya Angelou said that, yeah, people are, you know, aren't gonna remember what you tell them, but they will remember how you made them feel. And if you if you think back to I mean, how many umpteen video conference calls have we been on, webinars, in person demonstrations over the years, I mean, 100 and 100. I mean, I know you and I are still in our youth, Bruce. But over the years that we've done this, how many times can you point to an event, either online or in person, where you can remember what happened. And how many are just like, oh, God, did we go to that customer and talk about that 6 years ago? I guess we did because apparently, you know, I still have the slide deck from it. Well, what happened in that meeting? I couldn't tell you what happened in that meeting.
Ray Schloss: Right? Versus the times when someone said or did something that was so memorable, you were able to pull an emotional outcome from it. And so this is really what can make the difference because let's go back to three way invoice matching. Right? So the majority of the time that I was at Microsoft of those 17 plus years a lot of it was supporting, you know, like financial services and and a technical sales consultant for our supply chain and everything. So we'll go back, you know, three way invoice matching. If you have a scripted demo where Oracle was in 2 weeks ago and SAP was in the week before you and here comes Microsoft and you have to go through 3 days of script by script, step by step, show us how you, you know, depreciate this fixed asset, show us how you take the derivative and add it into an invoice. Like, I mean, all these things that for most of us would literally be the cures for insomnia, right? And you have to find a way to differentiate your company, your solution because week 4, after they've seen 3 different companies come in and present how they do invoice matching for 3 days, who's really gonna go, oh, god. You know what? That one screen from Microsoft, I loved just loved how the amount of the total number of lines on that invoice just populated right down there at the bottom right of the screen. Right? Nobody is gonna say that.
Ray Schloss: But if they come in and say, oh my gosh, you know, the story that that sales consultant told about how the woman who was able to use the system was able to leave work 20 minutes early every day and she actually clocked her time and shared that with them at a user's group. And on one of those 20 minutes saved days, she was able to help someone who was hit by a car because you know x y z went into this whole story. You know now you're gonna remember it. Yeah. Back to the thing is don't make it up. It's got to be got to be real, but if he can find an emotional tie, who's gonna remember that better than, oh, yeah, that one little, you know, line at the bottom right of the screen had a great way to sum up that.
Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yeah. Making it real storytelling so so critical. Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: So Well, good stuff. Well, Ray, just, you know, maybe, you know, what would be some of the key steps that you'd recommend? You know, just to be demo and discovery ready or excuse me. Let me flip those. Discovery and demo ready. What would be some steps? You know, just, senior or junior, sellers, what would you recommend? Steps to take just to up your game.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. The very first thing would be, you know, if you wanna think about it is do what the others as you would have them do it to you, but put yourself in the customer's seat. What would you want to hear from a company coming to sell you a solution, whether that's a multimillion dollar enterprise implementation or something as easy as, you know, we're gonna have a new grammar checking solution you can layer on top of whatever you're using for document. Right? So, and just think, what would you wanna hear? And come at it from that perspective. So that's gonna give you a a customer centric view instead of, oh my gosh, if I don't land another $150,000 within the next 2 weeks, I'm not gonna make my quarter. Right? Because everyone can sniff out desperation on the part who's a salesperson. So go at it from the customer's perspective. And if you keep that in mind, then when you go into discovery, all the great things that we talked about regarding, like, now how much more robust that can be because of AI and how much more information you can accumulate.
Ray Schloss: Prepare yourself. Be prepared. I think I, you know, have shared with you before once that one of the the worst scenarios I can remember from Microsoft days was that we had a situation where there was a medical device manufacturer in New Zealand and they created artificial hip joints and knee joints and things. So it was us against a, you know, major competitor that had some experience in that vertical. And our like, Microsoft always goes to market with customer I'm sorry, with partners. So we went in with a partner, and the partner used the default demo dataset that came with Microsoft Enterprise solution demo environments, which was a bike shop. Okay. So I go into this, you know, medical device manufacturer and, like, I wasn't there in person, but I had to help remediate the situation.
Ray Schloss: Like, a third of the way into the demo, the customer just said stop. Done. Leave. They they closed shut it down for the day. The, you know, the decision committee leader contacted the Microsoft rep and said, come in with a different partner and make it relevant to our business or don't ever call us again. So thankfully we were able to, you know, recover. I don't actually remember what the outcome of that was, but they did go with a different partner who realized maybe we ought to make this data and everything relevant to the customer and really make it customer centric and customer specific. So if you don't do that, you're really gonna be hurting.
Ray Schloss: And that discovery process that we talked about, identifying win statements, right? Even just like the story that you shared, that was absolutely you've got to go in and find out what is the measure of success. And if we can't prove that measure of success, if we don't know what it is and we can't prove the value around us doing it, we're not gonna get it. So getting your team ready, I would always like to say, let's get we need 1, maybe 2 win statements and just everybody get that. And that's the mantra. We can present value on these very specific items of success that we know that if, if we knock this out of the park and can prove value around those 2 success statements, your question really is why would you not choose us? You know, like, so. And you're identifying
Bruce Scheer: those success statements, what the customer values through that discovery process. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Move the dial through the demonstration process.
Ray Schloss: Exactly. Mhmm.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. I think I had mentioned to you, Ray, one of my old clients. He, oh, a business value guy by DNA, but he, was selling helping the team sell WebSphere. And they actually created another application that mimicked WebSphere, but that they could truly customize for each target prospect's environment, you know, put their logo on it, but even more, really tailor the look and feel of the demo for them so the customer could see themselves using it was their their ultimate goal. Of course, WebSphere was too complex to do that in advance of every demo, so they literally built a separate application that that would mimic WebSphere, the look and feel of it, so they could tailor it and customize it.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: When I think and when we
Bruce Scheer: talk about the the actual
Ray Schloss: demo too, and that that was a perfect segue, You know, how prepared are you with the solution to make it customer centric whenever you actually give the presentation? And which it sounds like that was an ideal example of someone who really put the time and energy into making sure that they were. So and dry runs are fantastic, especially if you have a team where there's going to be 2 or 3 or even 4 speakers. You wanna be able to make sure that the handoffs and the segues are managed correctly. The timing in the agenda is accurate. Does everyone have the amount of time that they need without being too verbose about it? So just doing that preparation step can really make the difference too because if you go into the the presentation or the demonstration and you're you're not really prepared and you don't have your ducks in a row, again, it will be visible if one of your competitors do. So you wanna make sure that you're setting the high bar, you go in with professionalism, and doing dry runs is a great way to help prep for that.
Bruce Scheer: Gosh, Ray. I I I haven't told you this story, but have you ever heard of the frontline partnership between HP and Microsoft?
Ray Schloss: I have. I I have heard of it. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. I helped, HP the the HP side of that equation win a marketing circle of the Year award by Hewlett Packard. But you talked about preparation. My team, we worked between Microsoft and HP. We identified 8 solutions where we wanted to do executive briefings around each solution. And so we asked the sales organization to identify a prospective client for a particular solution. Sellers would nominate that. And, if we thought, hey.
Bruce Scheer: It met the criteria, we would just go all in on it. And, we would do so much preparation, to your point on preparation, where I mandated as part of the process, if there's gonna be an executive briefing and client side executives are gonna be there, we've really gotta knock it out of the park. So, we'd we'd do the all the preparation in advance, getting everything ready and rehearsing and going for the executive briefing session. And one of the big reasons we won an award rate is our connect rate. If we did an executive briefing for the client, over 50% bought that solution. And, at that time, that was in the 1,000,000. So, yeah, it it really worked well. I can't stress enough.
Bruce Scheer: The preparation, the rehearsal, making sure you got great hand off, just everything's smooth. It works so well.
Ray Schloss: Wow. That's a great win rate, Bruce.
Bruce Scheer: Oh, yeah. Oh, wow, man. Literally huge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: You know I think with that too is you want to make sure which it sounds like that's a great example of when it works is that you want to make sure that your your sales person or team is working with your demonstration product, technical sales team. I don't know if you were in the situation. I've been in the situation before where the salesperson in the middle of the demo just stops us, you know, hey, hey, Bruce. Can you show that thing that we went over last week? That was really cool. You know, it was that well, I'm you know, how did you how did you do that ingredient list for the bill of materials or whatever that was? I bet they'd love to see that.
Bruce Scheer: What was it this rate or was it that or you know, let me let me fumble around a little bit and try to figure
Ray Schloss: it out. I didn't prep for that. Might I didn't build this into my data, you know, damn my so how am I gonna demo it?
Bruce Scheer: You know? Hold your breath for 5 minutes. I'll be right back.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. So and I mean, and that was one of the things too. I think about just the importance of discovery is we used to say, you know, no discovery, no demo Because a salesperson, obviously, they're under a little bit of a different pressure than we were on the presale side of having to prep the presentations and the demos and lead discovery and everything. So if they thought they had a hot tip, you know, the number of times you get a call from an account executive or a sales specialist and they'd be like, Bruce, look, man. This is the biggest deal we're gonna get in the pipeline this fiscal half. I really need you to do a demo for me on Thursday. And you're like, well, Ray, it's Tuesday. No.
Ray Schloss: I know, man. But here's the thing. And you're like, well, Ray, it's Tuesday. No, I know, man. But here's the thing. Can't you just do the demo that you did last week for me? Because you knocked it out of the park, buddy. I know you can do this. Well, we don't know anything about the I mean, who's the customer or whatever. I'll I'll send you their website, check it out and then, you know, like, no, that's not gonna work. Right? So the preparation and taking that into the demonstration is absolutely critical if you really get
Bruce Scheer: a You may have criteria then, Ray, or, you know, was there a a framework or guideline for how sellers could, you know, brief you guys and get you ready? Or
Ray Schloss: there's we definitely had a like, Microsoft was really big on sales methodology and frameworks. Yeah. But let me I'll say this, like, almost like what? No what is it? No battle plan, you know, survives the first contact with the enemy, right? That likewise really great sellers usually don't depend at all on sales methodologies and generally they despise them because if they've gotten to a point in their career where they're an effective salesperson for a, you know, a global major corporation, they already know the the things to do because they wouldn't have gotten to that level in the first place. So, you know, someone in the product marketing side or the enablement side coming and saying, Bruce, I'm gonna tell you how to sell. And you're like, hey, person who's put this together, how much time have you spent in the field in front of customers? Well, that's not my job, I'm strategy, I do this. Yeah. Well, I've been out there, you know, for the last decade and I kinda think I know what I'm doing, especially because I've made I've made quota, you know, 8 out of the last 10 years. How about you just leave me alone?
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: So we would definitely run into that. So but great salespeople, they have their own ways of doing it. And usually they recognize the value of being prepared, doing proper discovery, presenting value, having emotional impact, or they wouldn't have gotten to the level that they are. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect.
Bruce Scheer: Hey, Ray. One of the times we were talking, you told me a story, and I don't wanna give it away. I don't know if you could remember it. We we won't fumble around, though. I I know you know it. Kitchen. One of the central characters name's Charlie.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. Charlie. So this was when going back to, like, you know, over 25 years ago or whatever where I really was getting the understanding of the value of emotional impact and how you bring that into the sales cycle. And I actually I heard someone mention something to the effect of, oh, there's a great metaphor in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory about the Wonka Bator because it can go in any direction. Boy, that's a cool way to think about how a really great enterprise business solution could work. And I just took that and I was like it was one of those light bulb moments Bruce and I was like, wow, is there something there? Okay. I can work with this. Right? So I developed this whole story around it and it had to do with for those of us who have seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, there's, you know, the whole story about, you know, Grandpa Joe and you know how Charlie was going to be excluded at the very end as the last contestant because he kept the everlasting Gobstopper.
Ray Schloss: So they go into Willy Wonka's office and, you know, there's only half of a clock ticking and half of a, you know, bus that he's got his hat on and half at the desk and and he's just, you know, Mr. Wonka's just scribbling away and he's obviously very upset. And he tells Charlie to leave and grandpa Joe is irate and like, you're a fraud, you're a cheat, how could you break a boy's, you know hopes and dreams everything and Willy Wonka dressed her eyes like, you know, no, you so fizzy lifting drinks, you did this, you know, and all the rules that they had violated through the course of it And he stole an everlasting Gobstopper, which was the setup from Sledsworth. Was every kid gonna keep that and take it and sell it? And so you know, he turns out, good day, sir. You know, he turns around back to his desk and you're just in this emotional state of like, oh my gosh. What's gonna happen? Right? So we would in the course of telling this, I would have just set up how our solution that was allowing you to take any data field on any form and had a hyperlink that would dig into an an endless array of how you could get to a different solution. So if you had an invoice and there's a company and you wanted to find out, how many invoices has this company, you know, been through in the last month? Click on that link and it takes you somewhere else and you can just keep digging and digging really endlessly through the whole database. And so I would have set that up and then come back to mister Wonka.
Ray Schloss: So Charlie reaches into his pocket, right, and he pulls out the everlasting Gobstopper and he sets it on Willy Wonka's desk. And he's like, I'm sorry, mister Wonka. And grandpa Joe and Charlie turn with their heads hung low to, you know, leave. And Willy Wonka turns around and is like, Charlie, you won. You won. And and they're like, what? And he goes, I knew you could do it, Charlie. I knew you could do it. I knew you weren't gonna give in to Slugworth.
Ray Schloss: And, you know, like, Mr. Slugworth. And then, you know, the door opens. There's Slugworth. Oh, he works for me. You know, we were just I had to see what was in the heart of whoever I would turn over my factory to. Right? And Charlie, you did it. So he said, come on.
Ray Schloss: I gotta show you the rest of the factory. So Charlie and grandpa Joe and Willy Wonka, you know, leave his office. There's going to be explaining to him, Charlie, I wanna show you the wonk evader. And grandpa Joe's like, the wonk evader. And he's like, yeah, the wonk evader. What was that like an elevator? And he goes, no. Look, an elevator just goes up and down. But a wonk evader, it goes frontwards and backwards and sideways and backwards in every way.
Ray Schloss: And every you know what? And, Charlie, there's one button I've never pushed. But I want you to push it, Charlie. And it's gonna take you wherever you wanna go. And that's what we can do with our solution at Microsoft. Right? And so it was it was, you know, the whole tee up of that. And I actually did it likewise for a company before Microsoft And, because we had a database thing that allowed us to do this journaling feature as well. And a woman came to tears one time. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: Well, Bruce Yeah. Yeah. Like that was a that was a very rusty version of it. But whenever I used to do it 2 or 3 times a week, I had it, you know, it was it was on point, man. But yeah, just, you know, the benefit of as as we know from, you know, National Speakers Association storytelling. But whenever you're able to take the value, I mean the value of that story was you're not going to have to go through a bunch of different screens to get answers to your solutions. You can be on one screen and click on a piece of data and it's going to properly route you to find out the information you get. Yeah. Yeah. And it would take your forget it.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. It's gonna take you where you wanna go. You know, that that's the big point. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. That's also copywritten now, so nobody can take it. Yeah.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Schloss: Yeah. Anybody who's listening, like, oh, hey. I got Ray Schloss's story about The Walk of Vader.
Bruce Scheer: Yeah. That's that's a total zinger. Well, Ray, I you know, this has been a great,
Ray Schloss: conversation. Anything else you wanna leave us with? Yeah. You know, I would say for for being memorable, kind of what we talked about, you know, Bruce, like, be willing to go the extra mile to almost be foolish. And there's a fine line there. Right? But to be memorable, something has to have impact above and beyond all the other noise around it. So whether you're touching someone's heart because it's a story of redemption or someone overcoming a great challenge or in this case something that is fun and exciting like, you know, oh, Charlie got to go anywhere you wanted to go. Right? And we're going to 2 with a solution. Be dramatic to the to the point that someone's gonna remember.
Ray Schloss: I know who Bruce Scheer is because, wow, when he gave us that presentation on three way invoice matching, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was fantastic. Right? And Yeah. That is is a big difference is are you willing to do something to be memorable?
Bruce Scheer: You know, I love it. Well, that's a great note to end on. So darn important, especially in this competitive sphere and also emotionally getting that customer to wanna take action.
Ray Schloss: So Absolutely. Perfect. Perfect, Ray.
Bruce Scheer: Well, thanks so much for being on the show.
Ray Schloss: Hey, Brett.
Bruce Scheer: Appreciate everything you had to offer here. I know it's gonna benefit a lot of people.
Ray Schloss: My pleasure, Bruce. Always love talking to you, buddy, and I appreciate the opportunity.
Bruce Scheer: Alright, man. Thanks. Alright. See you. And that wraps up our conversation with Ray Schloss on how to be discovery and demo ready. Remember, the key takeaways are prioritize discovery, become an effective listener, prepare thoroughly, and don't forget to make your presentations memorable and fun. Ray's story about Willy Wonka and the drill around feature is a perfect example of how to leave a lasting impression on your audience. If you found this episode helpful, please don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your colleagues.
Bruce Scheer: For more resources on value based selling, visit valuepros.io. You'll be able to check out also our value ready assessment. It's under our resources tab. It's free, and it'll help you not only up your, you know, discovery ready and demo ready capabilities, you can focus on other aspects to up your game for 2025. This is Bruce Scheer signing off. Until next time, Keep focusing on value in every customer interaction.
