- You can go and generate
all the leads that you want, but if you can't deliver
an amazing product demo, whether it's as part of a demo video in your product led motion or as a real product demo you're
delivering on a sales call, you're not gonna close any deals. Here's the big question though. What makes for an
unstoppable product demo? On this episode, having given over a thousand product demos across multiple winning products, having helped over 250 SaaS companies with their product demos, I'm gonna walk you through
the seven principles, the seven key elements of what I call an unstoppable product demo. And when you follow these
key elements and principles, you will be able to deliver
an unstoppable product demo and accelerate your path to
that next stage of growth intro. (upbeat music) What's our buddy? Welcome to Unstoppable, I'm TK and on this channel I hope
SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now if you're new to
this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how
to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business. So if you're new, be sure to hit that subscribe
button and that bell icon, that way you'll get notified every single time I drop an
episode with the TK Energy. And if you're already
part of this community, if you're part of my SaaS
go-to-market coaching programs, my people welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. No matter how great your go-to-market is, no matter how great your marketing
is or your sales team is, if you cannot deliver a really
great product demonstration, if you cannot demonstrate
how great your product is in those conversations or on
a demo video on your website, none of that pipeline,
none of those leads, none of those people
are gonna buy from you. That's the real truth. And for all the things that
I talk about in this channel in terms of go-to-market and
going after a target market product is just as important. I'll tell you this one thing, selling a really great product
that you can demonstrate in a really great way is 10 times easier to do go-to-market for, to actually build out
the target market for. All those things become a lot easier if you have a great product. Now there's a caveat here. If you don't yet know if
you have a great product, the longer you wait to
actually go to market, the riskier it gets in terms of that you might be
building the wrong product, which is why I always say you wanna do all three
of these things together, but man, when you
actually nail the product, when you actually have a
really great product demo, the entire thing feels magical. And to be honest, as passionate as I am about
go-to market, about sales and marketing, the reason I do it, the reason I do go to market is so that I can build great product and get it into people's hands. Like that's truly what drives me. As an engineer, I used
to build great products, but I didn't know why
people wouldn't like it or wouldn't get into it. And that's why I had to
learn sales and marketing as an engineer. And now that I know sales and marketing and go-to-market and product,
at the end of the day, while marketing is great
and sales is great, really nailing that product, really getting that product
to where you're like, "Oh my God, this is real good." And then giving that demo or
when like prospects look at it or they go watch the demo
video and they're like, "Oh my god, I gotta have it." That's magical. That's what drives me. Like that's really what
makes me come alive when it comes to SaaS businesses. And so having built multiple
successful products, right now in addition to coaching, I'm also running two software companies that way I'm in the trenches. These are right now kind of
secret software companies that folks that I coach are using to get unfair advantages and go to market. But I've had to recreate product
demos for these products. I've had to get in there
and really figure out what that product's gonna be. And so while I've done a
product demo video in the past based on everything that I've learned over the last few years in coaching over 250 SaaS companies, in building my own products and given over a thousand
product demos just myself, I'm gonna walk you through
the seven key elements of a insanely great product demo. And when you follow these principles, you're gonna figure out exactly how to rejigger your products so you can really tell that story and convert more of the
pipeline you're generating, convert more of the
leads you're generating into real revenue. And also the bonus of this is when you actually think
about your product demo in this way, you'll also
be able to figure out how to improve your product,
your product roadmap. And that's really important as well. So if you're excited to
dig in, go ahead and smash that like button for
the YouTube algorithm. And let's go into principle number one. By the way, the YouTube algorithm really likes it when you do that, so please smash that like button. So principle number one
is one of the things I like to remind everyone
that ever watches this channel that I coach and even myself when I'm building software companies. Great SaaS businesses
have three core pillars. So it's kind of like this Venn
diagram that comes together. The first great pillar is your market. This is your ideal customer profile. This is the target
market you're going into that has an urgent and important problem that your product can solve. The second great pillar is your product. And the third pillar, which is important and you
shouldn't put off till later, you should get into it
as early as possible, is your go-to market, which is the specific
motions that you go through to bring your product
to the target market. It's really that those
are the three things. When you focus on these three things at the center of this is
the wealth, the money, the growth, the revenues, all the things that we use as metrics to figure out is this thing any good or not? So it's really easy to over-index on any one of these things. I coach a lot of founders
that over-index on product. I coach a lot of founders that over-index on sales and marketing
but have a shady product. I coach a lot of founders that are trying to bring
these three pieces together, but they don't quite know
what the key components are to focus on. That's where the magic is. That's what I think I talk about in terms of a go-to-market
strategy, a market strategy, a product strategy. And it's important for you to know that when you are thinking
about delivering a product demo, when you're demonstrating your product, it's not about the features, it's really about these core pillars you're demonstrating to
your ideal customers. What the urgent important problem is, what happens if they
don't use your software, if they use your software, what the transformation looks like and how you can communicate
that in a really compelling way. These are the things we
talk about in this channel and I work with founders
on when I'm coaching them. And so principle number one for you is it can be very easy to get over-index on all the little
features in your product, but really when you're giving
a product demonstration, you're telling this story
that's a combination of these three key things that comes from the underlying
strategy of your company. And that's why you want to be optimizing for all three of these things because that's where the money is. That's when people are like, "Oh my God, I gotta get this product." So that's principle number one. In the next six principles, I'm gonna break down how
to give a product demo and break down the six core elements that are the most important. But the first unlock for
you is to think about, it's not just about the
features in your product, it's about this overall jigsaw puzzle that you're solving for for
a successful SaaS business. Now let's get into what
the core components are. The first component, which
is principle number two, is once you kind of understand, all right, here's the overall pillar in the business. It's very easy to start going all over the place in your product. Your product demo should absolutely start with what I call the action shot. The action shot is the core product loop that your software has. So you don't start with like, "Oh, I'm gonna log into the product. Or I'm gonna go set this up. Or Hey, here's a giant report." You wanna get right into the people that are going to be using
the product day in, day out every single day a day
in the life of that user, what the action shot looks like. It's kinda like, you know those clips that are really popular on
TikTok and even YouTube Shorts where it just like jumps
right into the middle of it, middle of the action and
you quickly figure out what's going on and you're like, "Oh my god, I'm really engaged, I wanna know where this is going." That's how you great demos start. If you start off a great
demo where you're like, "Oh, well thank you for being here, let me just log into the product. Here's like where we sit."
People are gonna be bored. You're already going to lose them. And so you really wanna get
right in the action shot of like, "Hey, your
software is for salespeople, this is Gmail, they just had a sales call. Here's how our product helps
follow up on that deal." It goes right into the action shot. And that's super important. The core part of your
demo where you start off is focused on your core product loop, the thing that's gonna be
used day in and day out. And you should figure out
what your core product loop is because that determines a
lot of the pieces around how you tell the story around your product and the transformation around your product and the problem that it solves. And so you wanna get just right into what is the action shot. That's principle number two. Once you've shown the action shot, the next thing you wanna highlight is what I call the no hands mode. The no hands mode is the
piece of the software that goes to work for you,
once the core loop completes. Meaning user goes in, they use
the core part of the product, some sort of a loop that
they use every single day, great SaaS products are built on that. Then you highlight, look, because the salespeople like this is the example for ToutApp, we used to give all the time. ToutApp was sales engagement software. So our action shot was like,
"Hey, they just got off call, they just moved the deal over
and they need to follow up." Here's the exact set
of things that happened and we show them how they
could do so much more with as few clicks as possible. Similarly, in Mountain Lead comes in, they need to do seven touches. Here's how you queue it up, or here's a target outbound lead. They add 'em to the
sequence or the campaign, whatever you call it, and then
it's gonna follow up for you. The action shot is where
the user takes the action and uses the software day in and day out and they kind of visualize, "Oh, I can see how this is gonna 10x whatever our people are doing right now." The no hands mode is
what the software does after that core product loop. Most SaaS software does a bunch
of work behind the scenes. In the case of ToutApp,
when you sent an email, it would update the CRM, it would figure out
what the next steps are, it would sequence a number of activities, it would start tracking these things and showing what happens. All this work happens
without using any hands, without the user having to do anything. It automated a bunch of things for you and that's what you want to go into next in the product demonstration, you're almost guiding them
through this experience and day the life off saying, "Look, your users are gonna
get in and just use this and this is how they're gonna do their jobs in the software." Once that happens, once that's done, a bunch of other things
are gonna come into play where the software works
on your user's behalf, on your team's behalf and on your behalf. And that's the power of the software. And this is an easy way to highlight all the automations that
happen in your software, the AI that's there, the smarts that are there, the
integrations that are there. You can say like, "Look, all this stuff happens
behind the scenes for you and you never have to worry about it because of the software is so great." And that's element number three that you wanna highlight as you're going through this product demo. Once you've gotten into the mindset, look, I can't just talk
about the features, I'm talking about this whole jigsaw puzzle I'm solving for and the transformation I'm bringing to this customer. And then you get into action shot and then you show them the no hands mode, then you get into element number four. Now, before I go to element number four, let me just pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? Are you starting to see the power where a product now was not
just about a list of features that your product does or the features that you
think you care about? It's really about tying it to what is the story we're
telling in the market in our go-to-market motions? What's the urgent important
problem in our market and what does our product
do to solve that problem? And how do we get into action shot to show how it solves that problem? That's how you're leading them in. And then once you show that, you say, "Okay, once that's done, here's all the amazing things
it does behind the scenes for your team and for your users." Are you already starting to see the power if you structure your
product demos in this way? How for the buyer, they can start to get
really excited about like, "Oh my God, this is
gonna completely change how we do our business
or how our team works or how I do my work?" And that's where the purchases happen, that's where the revenue comes. If you're starting to
see the power of this, can I just get yes in the comments below, also smash out like button
for the YouTube algorithm. It really loves it when you do that. Oh, if you're in the stage
revamping your product, that was just one core component to driving growth for your SaaS business. There are other components
that come into this. So I have have a five point
SaaS growth strategy guide. It's completely free,
I'll link to it below. You don't have to go anywhere right now. And it goes into other key components that you should look into to drive growth for your SaaS business, product demos being just
one of those things. Okay, so now let's go
into element number four. Okay, so element number four, once you've shown the
action shot for the users, the no hands mode, what's
happening behind the scenes, you really wanna go
into the manager's view. The manager's view, covers
what are the benefits? Remember, not necessarily features, but the benefits that the manager or the decision makers in the
organization or the people that are kind of looking over
the users of your product are gonna get when they buy your software. It's very easy to combine the two, but you want to think
about who are the users who's gonna be using it every day? That's your action shot
and your core product loop. And then who are the beneficiaries of those users using the software? That's usually the managers. Maybe the managers will
use some of the features, but really they're in it
usually to get the overall view of how their team is performing. That's the most SaaS software. So you wanna highlight what
benefits the manager gets. Typically this is your analytics, this is visibility into
what the team is doing. This is also different controls
that exist in the software that they can kind of turn
the knobs and dials on to make sure that their people
are doing the right jobs. This is also insights where the software does a bunch of works behind the scenes based on all the data
and the no hands mode and then bubbles up key
insight to next steps for the manager or the users to consider. All of these things
essentially bring together the true benefit of your SaaS platform. So you wanna start with
the core product loop, then you wanna highlight all the work that it does behind the scenes, and then you wanna show
the benefits of that because it's running the
workflow, it's crunching the data, it's pulling in the data,
it's doing the integrations, it's able to give them
this higher level view on what's going on in the business. And that's element number four of the demo where you give like the manager mode, the god mode of the view like look, when you use this and your team uses this and all these things are
happening behind the scenes, here's how it all comes together
and that's super powerful. In ToutApp's case we were able to show
visibility into their pipeline, we were able to show the
effectiveness of their messaging, we were able to show the
activity levels for their reps, all these things the manager
was able to get view into so that they can actually make
decisions on what to do next and get insights on what to double down on and who to talk to. And that was super powerful in the demo. Okay, so once you've highlighted
the core product loop, you've got the no hands mode showing, you've got the manager's view, then you wanna up level
just a little bit even more. You were at the manager level, then you want to go back and
highlight the business ROI. Now sometimes people think like, "Well, is this really part of the demo or is this part of the discovery
car or the sales process? The reality is, when you are giving a
product demonstration, you have a very captive audience. People pay way more attention when you're giving a compelling demo than when you're just asking
a bunch of discovery questions or you're just on a sales call. They really wanna like, "Okay,
how does this thing work? How is this gonna change my business?" So you have a captive audience. So if you can use your
software to reiterate the business ROI they're going to get by making the decision
to buy your software, then you want to take that advantage. In this moment where you're
showing the action shot, you're showing the no hands
mode, you're showing like, "Look, when when all your people are on it and they're getting these things, we do all this work and then
we give you this manager's view and the next steps are better. And when you do these things, here's the impact to the business and this is where you
wanna highlight the ROI. Ultimately, people are really buying for one of three reasons. They either make more money, they save money or they reduce risk. And so if you can sneak in a way to show a certain benefit of the product, some aspect of the product
where you can reiterate like, and by the way, when you do this, you're able to generate more pipeline or when you do this, you're
able to generate more leads. Or when you do this, you're able to reduce the
risk of being sued for GDPR. Or when you do this, put
blank, you're the core benefit. And you can show that in
the product and remind them what the business ROI is gonna be for them to say yes, "At end of this conversation or in the next meeting, then you're really getting
to an unstoppable demo." The next element you want to do, and this is something where you can keep the demo up and running and I've started to
incorporate more of this and I've realized that okay, this is super important to bubble up as part of the product demo. As you're showing around, maybe
they'll have some questions, you can answer some of those questions and maybe be like, "Oh, can I
see that part of the product?" Again, you wanna find
and take an opportunity to actually highlight what
happens if they don't buy. So you wanna highlight what are the business
risks with the status quo. This is super powerful because right now you just showed 'em like your team members will log into a product and this is the loop they're gonna follow. Behind the scenes, we're
gonna crunch all this data. In the front, you're
gonna get these insights and these views and when you do this, you're gonna make more money, you're gonna generate more pipeline, whatever your value proposition is, and you can start to see these little things you're mentioning comes from the work you do
on the go-to market side on the market side, they're all connected. You wanna highlight while you're in there and saying like, "By the way, if you don't put your
users on this platform, if you don't actually get these insights, if this background action isn't happening, not only will you not make more money, but you're also gonna fall behind." You wanna highlight what the risk is if they don't go with the software. This is super powerful and almost like this
is one of those things that really moves the
needle in the sales process because while you're
demonstrating the product and showing them all the
things they could have, you're also highlighting all the things that are gonna happen or not happen if they don't do this, which
is a real possibility, right? And so while you're in the product, while you're answering questions, while you're handling these things, maybe they're like, "I wanna
see a little bit more of this." You wanna highlight by the way, like if you guys don't
use a software like this, if you don't use a sales engagement tool or you don't use a platform like this, then your team members will not get access to this kind of data and this is a game changer for you guys and you wanna highlight the business risks if they stick to the status quo. And what you're doing
essentially is kind of pegging the two extremes. All the amazing things that
happen if they go for it and all the things that happen
if they don't go for it. And you're starting to see
the difference of a demo that just goes through, here's feature A and here's feature B versus a demo that's like, all right, your team is on the platform, here's what their day
in the life looks like. Behind the scenes all this is happening, for you, the manager, you're
gonna start to see this and when you do these things, here's what happens to the business. And if you don't do this, here's the status quo that
you're gonna be stuck with. You start to see the difference in how you're gonna approach this. Then, can you start to see why, this is why I get so
excited about product? Because when product is
created in the right way and then you think about the
market and the go-to market and you have that strategic narrative, you can tell a story like this. When you tell a story like this and you demonstrate it with the product, people are gonna lean in. You'll notice the difference right away. You'll notice the difference
when you give the demo. 'Cause people are gonna lean into like, "Oh my God, I want that." And one of the things,
one of the benchmarks I've always had with software, every software I've ever
created, users of the software, customers of the software
would say, "I love blank." They would say, "I love
the Sona software." I've had countless people
tell me even today like, "Man, I love ToutApp." When I was working at
Marketo as VP strategy, we sold ToutApp to Marketo. I worked there for two years
as part of the executive team. When I worked over there, you
would see people were like, it was a religion. People loved Marketo. Love is a weird word to use for software, but it's a real word that users that use really great software use, this is the power in this. It's not just coming from the features, it's the story you're
telling about your product, that strategic narrative that you design. And one of the things
I've noticed over and over is when founders work with me
on their strategic narrative, on their ICP, on the go-to-market pieces, that thinking elevates how they think about the transformation they're bringing in their customers lives. And while that helps go
to market over and over, I've heard from founders
like, "You know what? Our product roadmap got clarified by doing this go-to-market work." Because they were rethinking
how to tell the story and the transformation, the
movement they were creating, they were getting out
of the feature mindset, they were thinking about the benefits and that allowed them to
actually build better product. And that's how when you
think about these things, that's how you get to products that people say like, "I love this. Like I legit love it." And that's when you know
it's gonna be awesome. The last piece that you
want to finish up on this is kinda like the bow on top. As you've shown, you've
shown the action shot, you've shown the no hands mode, you've shown em the manager's view, you've shown 'em the business ROI. You've told 'em like,
"Hey, if you don't do this, here's the status quo." The last piece you the little
bow on top you wanna do. And this is not so much a product thing, but it like brings it together. You wanna highlight the transformation. Great software companies bring transformation into
their customers lives. They're not just selling a feature. They're not just selling this widget. They're selling bringing transformations. Like here's a different way to do your job or do your work or run your
team or run your company. And if you don't do it,
then this is the status quo. You wanna highlight people about that. And you want to tell people like, "Hey, here are similar customers just like you that are using our software and the success they're seeing." Here, they've committed
to this transformation, they've decided to let
go of the status quo. The reason they've done
that is because their team can actually use this core product loop. Behind the scenes,
we're doing these things and you as the manager get this and the business ROI is this and you leave the status
quo and then you transform and there comes the cherry on top and that's when the demo
really comes together. And by the end of that, when you tell a story like that and when you demonstrate
a product like that, customers are gonna lean in and say, "Oh my god, I gotta have
this." That's what you want. That's how you really bring it home. You can do all the work on
generating leads and pipeline, but if you don't nail it down
to your product demonstration, it won't convert whether it's a demo video or a sales presentation. And when you implement
these seven elements, it's gonna completely transform one, how you actually run your sales calls or your product led process. Two, how you think about your product. Three, how you run your product roadmap and also how you market and tell the story about your product. And that's the power of an
unstoppable product demo. So to recap, in order to give
our unstoppable product demo number one, don't get
stuck in the features. First, think about what
is the transformation you're bringing in terms of the market, the go-to market and the
product that you have. What does that jigsaw puzzle look like? This is a lot of
go-to-market strategy work, which we talk about in this channel a lot. Out of that then go right
into the product demo into the action shot. Users using your product is gonna experience this
in their day-to-day lives. Then show all the things
that the software does behind the scenes. That's your no hands mode. Then because of one and
two and the data you have and the insights you can create and the reports that you can
show, show the manager view, the heads up view that what they get. Then highlight the business
ROI and what the software does. Does it save money? Does
it make them more money? Does it reduce risk? And then highlight what happens if they don't go with the software in terms of the status quo. And then go into, here's a transformation we're really delivering for you when you actually buy this
product, do you wanna buy it? And that is an unstoppable product demo. So now you know what
the key components are. What you may not know is how do I implement all these pieces? What are the other
components I can think about in terms of driving growth
for my staff's business? A product demo is just one small thing and a lot of pieces that go into this. So if you wanna dig more into this, if you're a founder and
you have some revenues and you're really looking
to accelerator path to that next stage of growth that encourage you to grab a copy of my "Five-Point SaaS
Growth Strategy Guide," it's completely free. And when you download the guide, I'll go through the five critical pillars to actually driving growth
for your SaaS business. Product analysts, just
being one core piece of it. I kind of double clicked
on this in this episode 'cause so many people ask for it and it's been top of mind for me as I've been creating some products. So if you wanna grab a copy of that guide, just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy, getunstoppable.com/strategy. It's completely free. And inside of the guide,
I'll go through the five, four pillars of driving
growth for your SaaS business product demos, just being one part of it. Also, if you got value from this video, please smash a like button
for the YouTube algorithm that just really loves it
when you do that and so do we. We put a lot of love into these videos. If you have a fellow
founder, a team member, if you're part of a Slack
group or a WhatsApp group of other SaaS founders and leaders that would get value from this video, please share this with them also, we wanna help as many
SaaS founders as possible. I also drop an episode like
this every single Sunday with actionable strategy and tactics from the trenches from
having been SaaS founder, from being a SaaS founder, from coaching over 250 SaaS founders. As part of my SaaS program
record coaching program, I bring you these strategies
from the trenches. So be sure to hit the subscribe
button and at bell icon, that way you'll get
notified every single time I drop an episode. And lastly, remember, everyone means a strategy for
their life and their business. When you are with us, yours,
it's gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see
you in the next episode or inside of that "Five-Point
SaaS Growth Strategy Guide." Link below, I'm just gonna
get unstoppable.com/strategy. Take care everybody. (dramatic music)
