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Congratulations. You’ve succeeded in getting through an increasingly narrow doorway of postsecondary decision-maker attention. You have an hour of dedicated time with your potential university client to demo your solution, technology, product or service.
The WebEx invitations have been sent. The Join.me room has been set-up. Your Zoom.us webinar has been arranged. Everyone is in the BlueJeans room. Adobe Connect has been fired up. The phone bridge is set to go.
Now what?
How do you - vice president of Client Engagement and director of sales and EVP of University Partnerships, structure the hour that you have? The introductory webinar is the golden hour of edtech sales. Fail to take full advantage of the hour, and all your sales/marketing/outreach efforts will come to nothing.
First, a little feedback from those of us on the receiving end of the edtech vendor sales webinar. They stink. Mostly, they are just terrible.
This is actually good news because the bar is set low. Your company can differentiate itself by adhering to a few simple best practices. But most won’t.
The secret to a good vendor demo for for a single client is to think in thirds. Break the demo up into three equally timed segments. If you have an hour, that's three 20-minute segments. An hour and half, that's three 30-minute segments.
Let’s unpack each third:
1. Listen. You are going to ask what challenges, problems or goals the university is hoping to solve. What is the job to be done? The less you talk -- and the more the potential clients talk -- the better. Listen hard to the what you are hearing, and then try to synthesize what you are hearing.
2. Share. This is your chance to share how your product/service/solution will solve the problem/challenge/goal laid out in the first third of the demo. Wow, this is hard. Canned presentations and fancy decks will not work. Your presentation needs to be practiced, flexible and adaptable to adjust on the fly to specifically address what you just heard. This requires focusing your remarks on addressing the needs of your potential customer. You can’t share everything that your platform does and every service that you provide. Rather, only highlight the big ways that your product/service/platform fulfills the needs of your potential customer.
3. Ask. This is the conversation phase of the demo. Ideally, during this phase, the people in the room will ask you about your product and for examples from other institutions. All your answers should focus on the needs and requirements of the university or college. You will be able to tell if the discussion went well if the people have lots of questions about your platform.
This third-third-third method sounds simple, but it is very hard to pull-off. It requires a good deal of prep work before the meeting. The more research you do on the institution, and the more that you can find out about why the demo was scheduled, the better prepared you will be for the sharing stage.
This method also requires the discipline to say less. And it is almost impossible to limit what you share about all the great things that your platform or service can do. It also is hard to transition between stages.
But the listen-share-ask method produces big results -- for institutions and companies. Colleges and universities get products/services/solutions that best fit their needs, and the companies stand out from their competitors.
