When I started my first sales role at Klaus in 2018, I had never done a demo or a discovery call. I was thrown straight into the deep end, and over the past 3 years, have made a fair few mistakes.

Here are a few things I wish I had have known before I started:

You don’t need to show everything in the first call
My early demos (of a very simple product) would last around 45 minutes, and I soon started to notice that people were losing focus and doing other things whilst I was talking. My mistake was that I would go too deep into details and try to show every feature and setting rather than focusing on core features that would solve problems for the customer I was talking to.

You should be listening rather than talking
In my early demos, I would be the person talking the most during the call. It should be the other way around. You should be asking the questions and getting as much information from the prospect as possible. This will help you to diagnose the pain and prescribe a solution to it using your product.

A person’s time is valuable
First calls should be concise. Buyers will often have a lot of demos booked, and they don’t want to spend hours learning every little detail about each product.

There should be a flow
I try to present our product with a natural flow, showing the prospect how the tool works... (More)