Here are seven validatedsales demo success factors that lead to closed business. These approaches map delightfully to Great Demo! principles while differing markedly from traditional demos. How do your product demos compare?
Seven Validated Success Factors
The fine folks at Gong.io analyzed thousands of sales demos to uncover these seven success factors:
- Pre-Demo Discovery
- A Crisp Review of the Prospect’s Situation
- Do the Last Thing First
- Inverted Pyramid
- Peel Back the Layers
- Peel Back the Layers (reprised)
- Transition Vision
Background
The Gong team analyzed 67,149 demo recordings in their original study and matched the results to closed or progressed businesses. More recent studies now include data from over 3 million demos across a broad range of B-to-B software companies’ offerings and verticals – that’s a LOT of data!
Their analysis identified four “acts” in the most successful demos:
Act 1: The Contextual Overview
Act 2: The Upside Down Demo
Act 3: Accelerated Interaction
Act 4: The Wrap Up
Let’s examine each in order and the seven key success factors.
Doing Discovery
Gong found that the most successful product demos focused on what was learned in substantive discovery conversations.

Key Success Factor Number 1: Do Discovery
Presales and sales teams need to actually execute discovery (not just qualification or “BANT”) to uncover the situational information needed to deliver successful demos. This is absolutely key! Improving your demos skills start by better understanding the customer.
The Gong studies also provide a simple guideline: Map your product demo to what you learned in discovery. Sounds obvious, but you need to actually do sufficient discovery in order to accomplish this!
Not surprisingly, the studies also suggest that demonstrating capabilities that were not discussed in discovery puts you at risk of “buying it back” and making your sales demo look too complicated.
Sadly, many sales and presales folks believe they do a good job doing discovery but have actually only scratched the surface. For example, for many vendors discovery is limited to confirming “pain” and a brief exploration of the prospect’s tech stack and required integrations.
This is an important opportunity for improvement and represents a fabulous way to differentiate from your competition! The wonderful book Doing Discovery (Peter Cohan) provides a framework and a structured approach to doing discovery, enabling you to differentiate positively right from your first interactions.
Gong Act 1: The Contextual Overview
Traditional, unsuccessful sales demos consume the first Act with corporate overviews, logo slides, and product and architecture presentations. Rarely do prospects consider this information to be compelling: It’s like sitting through 10-20 minutes of commercials before getting to see your movie or program!
Conversely, the Gong studies showed that the most successful product demos began with a “contextual overview” that ran no longer than two minutes. No corporate overview. No product intro. No architecture slides. And especially no slides of “our customers’ logos”. Just a crisp review of the prospect’s specific situation that you collected in discovery.

Key Success Factor Number 2: Situation Slides
The studies confirm what we logically already realize (but often fail to put into practice), that the demo meeting should be all about the prospect. Traditional sales demo meetings that start with corporate overview presentations are all about the vendor. That’s the problem! Many presenters learn demo skills by looking at their colleagues. They have learned their demo skills in the same way. 20 years ago, someone started with the corporate overview and you are still doing this.
The most successful demos start with a crisp review of the prospect’s situation: They are prospect focused. That’s a critical success factor and another major opportunity to differentiate.
Summarize the vendor’s understanding of the prospect’s situation: Their overarching goals, their current situation, pain and problems, the specific capabilities the prospect is looking for, the value desired, and the required timeline. Your audience will perceive you as a trusted advisor.
Gong Act 2: The Upside Down Demo
Traditional product demos typically follow a seemingly logical linear pathway, from set-up, through a series of workflows, to finally getting to the end results and reporting. The data shows that this is an unsuccessful approach. Why?
- High-ranking people often leave the meeting before the vendor gets to the “best stuff”;
- Those who remain find their brains have turned to mush after the 20, 30, 40 (or more!) minutes of clicking and talking;
- Vendors often run out of time before they get to the “best stuff”…!
The study showed conclusively that successful sales demos showed the most valuable deliverables from the software right after the contextual overview: Right up front!
Consider: When you want a taco, do you want to watch how to chop the onions and peppers to prepare the salsa (cilantro is optional), dice, season, and fry the filling, prepare, roll (or pat) out and cook a tortilla or two, then combine everything – or would you prefer having that taco ready to eat? (Hint: Choose “ready to eat”.)
Key Success Factor Number 3: “Do The Last Thing First”
The results clearly show that beginning Act 2 with the most valuable part of your offering yields the highest demo success rates. As the Gong folks said, “They start with the conclusion…”:

Key Success Factor Number 4: Inverted Pyramid
But wait, there’s more…! Gong observed:

The findings showed that traditional software demos suffered when they followed stepwise workflows and failed to incorporate this key success factor. Furthermore, the study noted that sales demos that mapped the order of presentation to the prospect’s perceived importance of capabilities were the most successful:
- Most important topic first
- Next most important
- Less important
- Least important
This is not rocket science! Following this principle yields the best results.
An additional bonus of this technique is that you only risk sacrificing the least important topics if you run out of time. How do you determine which topics are most important? Do discovery and ask!
This success factor maps directly to Great Demo! methodologies, and specifically to the use of the Inverted Pyramid approach for demos (borrowed from news services and journalism). This demo technique is a core Great Demo! concept.
Gong Act 3: Accelerated Interaction
In spite of vendors starting their demos with, “Please ask questions along the way – we want to make this interactive…” most software demonstrators talk and click for 6, 8, or 10 minutes (or longer!) before checking-in and asking the inevitable “Any questions so far?”
Sadly, “Nope, we’re good…” is the response often heard from prospects or the chirp! chirp! chirp! of crickets in an empty room.
This is not a good sign! Real interactivity is key. Gong found the intriguing following results:
“We didn’t find a single demo that lead to a closed deal in the analysis that involved more than 76 seconds of uninterrupted pitching.”

Key Success Factor Number 5: Peeling Back the Layers – Make Your Demo a Conversation
The most successful sales demos encourage a two-way, bi-directional conversation between you and your prospect. Prospects are actively participating in the demo, asking questions and offering comments.
Unwittingly, traditional demos “pre-answer” most of the questions that audiences might ask, eliminating the possibility of a conversation. This is sometimes referred to as “premature elaboration”!
The Gong results show that vendors should have answers to prospect questions ready – but hold them “behind your back” in a virtual sense. An important demo technique is to let your prospects ask the questions: This is what enables the conversation to take place. If you’ve been presenting for 6 or 8 minutes or longer, you’ve gone too long without an interaction!
Pro Tip: Your demo is going perfectly when your prospect is asking the questions you expect them to ask! A terrific way to precipitate questions is to summarize: “What you just saw was how easy it is to … Thoughts? Comments? Questions at this point?”
Key Success Factor Number 6: Peeling Back the Layers
The Gong studies found that the most successful presenters enjoyed receiving 28% more questions from their prospects than their less prosperous peers:

But how do you stimulate prospect queries? By not over-answering! Provide just enough information to address the question – and leave room for follow-up! Brush up your demo skills by leaving out the boring stuff.
Consider: Most executives only want the 30,000-foot (9,114-meter) view; middle managers typically want to go a bit deeper; staffers want the workflow details; and system administrators desire a different set of specifics.
Gong found that:

Peel Back the Layers by exploring as deeply as the individual prospect players have interest.
Break up your traditional monolithic talk tracks into bite-size components. You can stop selling when the prospect is ready to buy.
Gong Act 4: The Wrap Up
Gong identifies the final part of the product demo as the Wrap Up and comments that this is the most appropriate time for pricing and next steps discussions. Makes sense:

The concept of “next steps” is broad and is an excellent opportunity to differentiate. In traditional demos, vendors focus on “next steps” that proceed solely to the sale. This is adequate behavior, but not exceptional.
Key Success Factor Number 7: Transition Vision
Truly great sales teams interpret part of “next steps” to include a discussion of how the prospect will move from their current painful state through go-live and deployment, all the way to the point where the (now) customer begins to get tangible value from the offering. These vendors discuss Value Realization Events with their prospects and reach agreement on specific ones.
This establishes a “Transition Vision” in the prospect’s mind that includes small successes and victories on the road to full ROI attainment. Vendors that include this discussion in the Wrap Up are in a competitively advantageous position vs traditional vendors.
We teach the Transition Vision process in Great Demo! Workshops and identify two key entities:
- A Critical Date that drives the prospect’s go-live date, along with its driving force;
- One or more Value Realization Events that define an early win or small ROI, post go-live.
This demonstrates to your prospect that you are not just interested in getting the order, but that you have a genuine and tangible interest in your prospect’s success.
Four “Acts” and Seven Validated Key Success Factors
The Gong studies show conclusively that these seven Great Demo! success factors move the sales and buying processes forward most effectively:
- Pre-Demo Discovery
- A crisp review of the Customer’s Situation
- Do the Last Thing First
- Inverted Pyramid
- Peel Back the Layers
- Peel Back the Layers (reprised)
- Transition Vision
If you ignore these findings, you are likely at a disadvantage compared to vendors that adopt and apply these practices. Perhaps it is time to embrace change and brush up your demo skills.
Copyright © 2017-2023 The Second Derivative in collaboration with The DemoScene – All Rights Reserved other than the Gong slides – many thanks to Gong for these studies! (The study text has been edited since originally published and the excerpts above are used with permission.)
To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Demonstration Skills Workshop.