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Global Lean Sales: The power for Demos

Playbook RoundtableOn Oct 18th iSPIRT organized a #PlaybookRT in Mumbai and the topic of discussion was Global Lean Sales. Pallav Nadhani founder of FusionCharts came down for the RT and shared a lot of useful information about how they do things at Fusion Charts. Most of the information from the RT has been covered in Rushab Mehta’s excellent blog post about the RT. I am just adding to that post…

Pallav showed us the demos that Fusion Charts built for their products and I wanted to share a few thoughts about what I learnt from that…

When selling online using a low touch sales model, the web site must replace the sales person at least in the initial phase of the sales cycle. And that is a very difficult job to pull of.

You need to anticipate every piece of information that the prospect may be interested in and make that easy to find. Your web site must then convince the prospect that your product is the right solution to the problem they are seeking to solve. Or convince the prospect that your product will enhance their business and give them a competitive edge.

But the web site must still be simple and clutter free. Putting pages of text explaining everything is of little help because the prospect will rarely spend so much time reading. So what do you do?

Almost everyone today will put up a product tour/demo to try and solve the problem. But a one size fits all demo has its limitation. Not everyone can see a general purpose demo and connect the features to their business requirements, without help from a sales person.  What can work much better are industry specific demos so prospects see how your product can be used in their industry (or a closely related industry).

Seeing the product in the context of one’s usage scenario can make it much easier to understand. Also instead of throwing all functionality at the prospect, only specific features can be showed in a usage specific demo.

FusionCharts does an amazing job of this. Their products enable data visualization and on their web site they have built a comprehensive section with dashboards to showcase the different capabilities of their products.  This includes a Gym Dashboard which demonstrates how membership based businesses can analyze their membership via cohort analysis and a really cool Music Player which showcases the performance of their product.

Looking at these dashboards it is clear that a lot of thinking and effort has gone in to them. It is surely not a trivial exercise and would require a dedicated person/team to pull off. But I think the effort would pay dividends in prospects understanding the product and encouraging low touch sales.

It has inspired us to try and do the same for our product SOHODOX.

Contributed by Shiraz Ahmed, Founder and CEO – ITAZ Technologies

Global Lean Sales – Selling your software online to global markets, without field-force #PlaybookRT, Bangalore

This #PlaybookRT is scheduled for 11th October 2014 and will focus on Global lean Sales model for Product startups. This Playbook Roundtable will be facilitated by Pallav Nadhani, Co-Founder, FusionCharts.

Topics that will be discussed in the Roundtable:

  • How to identify your audience and means to reach them (lead generation) – discovery, targeting and campaigns
  • How to keep them interested throughout the cycle (nurturing) using either automated marketing or inside sales
  • Closure strategies
  • Working with Channel Partners across the globe, structuring their incentives and alignment
  • Building sales team, compensation
  • Processes and systems required to enable all of this

Who is this session best suited for?

  • Who’re selling products or looking to sell products online. Should have >$2-3K+ monthly revenue.
  • People who have discovered product/market fit, and niche segment of audience and positioinng
  • Marketing collaterals done, basic marketing systems in place, and have a clear message to deliver to audience
  • To apply for this PlaybookRT please fill up the online application and we will get back to you.

The session is open to the company’s CEO or head of Sales. Applications are due by the 5th October 2014. Apply Here if you are interested.  The goal is to have at most 12 companies so as to make the interaction effective. If there are other interested attendees, we will arrange subsequent RoundTable. We will confirm the short-listed companies by 7th October 2014. This #PlaybookRT is FREE and there are no charges.

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