Most product demos are forgettable. 

The sales rep is going through the same boring demo routine. The prospect is checking their phone or email throughout the presentation.

There's a better way to show your prospects what your product can do. You have to put on a show. Make your product demo unforgettable.

Let me tell you a story about how selling Crispy Duck taught me the key to giving great product demos.

‍Going from Worst to First

My freshman year of college, I worked as a server at a fast-casual restaurant in Baton Rouge. I joined as part of the first batch of hires before the restaurant opened.

They trained us for two weeks on everything about the restaurant. How to clear a table. How to slice the lemons. How to carry a heavy tray. Never stack your dirty plates. Always keep the drinks full. And on and on.

I suppose this was my first time going through any sort of professional training for a job. This place was professional. Everything was measured. 

The restaurant opened on my 19th birthday and quickly found success. There was a line out the door every Thursday - Saturday night, and the servers were jockeying for position to get the best sections for dinner service. 

Priority went to serves with the highest tip share (calculated as a percentage of total food sold).

About two months into the job, I felt like I was making good money but I couldn’t help myself wondering why I never got the “good” sections.

Then one day my manager pulled me into the office before the shift started and had a conversation with me that I will never forget…‍

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Manager: “Martin, do you like working here?

Me: “Yeah, I like it. The food is great and the people are nice. The money is good too.”

Manager: “Do you think you are doing a good job?”

Me: “Yeah, I think I’m doing pretty good. I’m a good talker and I get along with the customers. I don’t get in the weeds too often. Why do you ask?”

Manager: “Well I can see that you have the right attitude and that you could be great at this, which is why I’m confused…”

Me: “What are you confused about?”

Manager: “When I look at the weekly sales, and I look at the tip % of all the servers, your name is last on the list at 14.7%.”

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I was floored. I thought I was good at this!

I’m like-able enough, right?. I like talking with people. What can be so hard about waiting tables? And to see my name at the bottom of the list! 

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Me: “Wow. I had no idea I was doing that poorly. What do I have to do to get my tips to increase?”

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And that’s when the manager took me under her arm and taught me how to really wait tables. Or to put it more directly, she taught me how to sell food.

Like everything in life, waiting tables is a form of sales. Customers come to the restaurant for an experience. They want to buy food. Most importantly, they want to buy good food. That’s the job of the server, to get the customer what they want.

Here’s how my manager taught me to sell more food:

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Manager: “Here’s what I want you to do. Pick your favorite thing on the menu, a dish you like so much that you want other people to try it. Every time you go to take an order at your table, recommend that dish.”

‍Me: “Should I pick the most expensive dish on the menu?”

Manager: “Don’t pick the most expensive dish, that’s too obvious. In fact, it doesn’t matter how much the dish costs. When you recommend something that you really enjoy, you open up a conversation with the customers. They trust you and they ask you more questions about the menu. That is how you get customers to buy more food. That’s also how you get your tip percentage to go up.”

Me: “OK, I’ve got it.”

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I picked up the menu and found the dish: Twice-Cooked Crispy Duck.

From that day forward, I was recommending the Crispy Duck to every single table that sat in my section. 

My line: “You have to try the Crispy Duck before you leave, it’s my absolute favorite on the menu.”

This opened up the dialogue with the customers and established a mini-relationship for the next hour or so that they were dining with me. I was putting on a show.

Within two months, I catapulted from the worst server on the team to the #1 server in total sales AND tip percentage. I became a shift captain, I helped with scheduling servers, and I even helped train new hires.

All of this from learning how to sell Crispy Duck

‍What’s the Crispy Duck of your product demo?

Selling software is like selling anything else. The prospects who show up are there for a reason. They want to be educated. They want to be entertained. Give them a show!

Too many salespeople run their product demos like it's product training. They go through the entire workflow, step-by-step, and show the prospect exactly how the product works.

This is a painfully boring way to showcase the value of the product. It’s also ineffective at converting prospects to customers.

Your product demo is a sales pitch, sell them something!

Remember that your customer doesn’t care about you or your product, they only care about what your product can do for them and for their business. Structure your presentation in a way that helps the prospect understand what they are going to get out of the product.

Pick one feature of your product to highlight, the key feature that shows exactly how to make an impact on the prospect's business. Start your product demos with this feature, make it the bright spot of the entire conversation.

‍Fighting the Forgetting Curve

When we sell, we are competing against 100 other things fighting for our prospects’ attention. Think about how often your prospect checks their phone or email while they are on a Zoom meeting with you. We are all inundated with distractions, alerts, and co-workers competing for our attention.

What makes this worse is that people forget things even when they are paying attention!

Within an hour of receiving training, people have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information presented, and within 24 hours they have forgotten an average of 70 percent (source).

This is true of product demos. Your prospect forgets most of what you tell them. It’s critical that you control which parts of your presentation they should remember, and it’s fairly easy to do.‍

Here’s how you get people to remember the most important parts of your product:‍

Your product demonstration should start with a recap of your prospect’s current challenges and desired outcomes. If you want to learn more, I’ve written before about how to run great product demos here: Why Your Demos Don’t Convert.

When it’s time to demo the product, start by putting a “big neon sign” over the most important feature that makes an impact for the prospect. This is the crispy duck. 

Change the tone of your voice to draw their attention in. Wave your hands in the air and sit up in your seat. Make it clear to the prospect that they need to pay attention for this one part of the demo. Tell them it’s the most important thing

I like to tell the prospect: “If you don’t remember anything else from our conversation today, I want you to remember this…”

Then show them how the product solves their problem. Keep it short, less than 5 minutes. Ask them how they would use this part of the product if they had it implemented today. Get a conversation started and build a relationship.

This tactic works well in enterprise sales to convert prospects into Champions. You will likely follow up your first demo with more technical product evaluation, but your first product demo sets the tone for what your prospect remembers.

‍Put on a show

There’s no excuse for running poor product demos. This is your time to put on a show for the prospect. They want to learn, they want to be entertained, they want to solve their problems.

Pick the one feature of your product that you are confident delivers value to the customer and begin your product demos by highlighting that feature. I mean really highlighting it so that the prospect doesn’t forget.

Make it fun and exciting for the prospect. Get them engaged by encouraging them to explain how the product solved their problems.

Once you get the prospect bought in on the most important feature of the product. The rest of the important details fall into place.