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Startup Selling: Talking Sales with Scott Sambucci

Over the past twenty years, I’ve led three Silicon Valley startups to their first customers and revenue, and sold everything from financial data, enterprise software, and vaporware to cabinet doors, amusement park daily programs, and “would you like fries with that…?” My customers have included the largest financial institutions in the world, top US Universities, cabinet door makers and people that eat at Applebees and go to amusement parks... I’ve learned a lot, and made a few, ahem, well… a lot, of mistakes. Here in The Sales Podcast with Scott Sambucci, I share the lessons learned from my past two decades of selling. In each episode, I discuss a specific topic in selling and sales strategy like how to find new prospective customers, how to manage leads, how to run an effective sales meeting, uncovering customer needs, and developing pricing strategies. Episodes are a mix of guest interviews, observations from the field, and sales techniques that I’m using every single day. And people that care about such things, I’ve written two books, been a TEDx Speaker, been featured on CNBC, The Financial Times and NPR. Oh… I’m also a husband, a dad, and a three-time Ironman triathlete. Build your sales process so that you can have the company you imagine. The Sales Podcast with Scott Sambucci will help you get there.
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Startup Selling: Talking Sales with Scott Sambucci
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Now displaying: April, 2016
Apr 4, 2016

This episode is brought to you by SalesQualia. If you’re a startup looking to Find Customers, Grow Revenue and Build Your Sales Process, check out the Startup Selling Program.

In this episode, I interview Peter Cohan, most known for his “GREAT DEMO!” system and training – teaching software companies the RIGHT way to demo their products.

Key areas we cover are:

  • The importance of “teaching demos.”
  • Why you only have once chance at a product demo, and how to do it right the first time.
  • That’s there no such thing as standard demos, and how to discover the “Critical Business Issue” of your target accounts in preparing for your product demos.
  • “The the curse of knowledge” and how answering your prospect’s questions before they ask can KILL your demo.
  • How to demo your software product in three slides or less.

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We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!

Podcast Notes

01:55 – How did Peter get into teaching demos.

04:30 – How to assemble data on a when a sale happens.

07:35 – Doing it right the first time your demo’s going to be much shorter and you might only have to do one of those and get you to the finish line.

09:00 – No such thing as a standard customer/demo.

15:00 – Doing discovery, ask sufficient questions to be able to design a demo that fits the customer’s need.

23:18 – The curse of knowledge, when you have seen it all before and you forget that every customer is unique. Put the knowledge you think you have behind your back and ask the right questions.

26:05 – Pre answering questions before they are asked takes away the role of the audience. Takes away the ability to interact.

28:47 – How to address having new people in the meeting that you haven’t had a chance to do needs assessment with.

33:46 – Always start a demo that has people you haven’t interacted with before with three questions; what’s your name, job title and what would they like to take away from the demo.

41:18 – Turning the demo from being all about the vendor, to being all about the customer.

46:33 – Have the fewest number of steps to complete any particular task.

50:27 – Manage your infrastructure. Expect your hard disk will crash! Be ready for anything.

57:17 – Do the last thing first, don’t teach people how things work but show them what good things you’re offering to help them solve their problems.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast

Key words: startup selling, sales, product demos, scott sambucci, salesqualia, startups, enterprise sales

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