Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 21st edition of the good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this weekend’s reading!
Product walkthrough demos generally suck - a take by April Dunford
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6966412876110594048/
We take a lot of product demos while evaluating companies and we wholeheartedly agree with April on this. Most product demos do not cover the fundamental question - why should we pick you over alternatives?
What not to do?
Focus on endless features
Focus on basic workflows
Focus only on your product
What to do?
Set the stage as to why you are having the conversation & product demo - ideally, your sales team should provide your some context via their targeting or initial conversations
Give customers the context to understand the product and what makes it unique. You don’t want to have a generic demo - this is an opportunity to truly show your customer how are you solving their problem
Organize the walkthrough around the product’s differentiated value. Once you show them how, you show them how well or how differently you solve their problem vs alternatives
Show, don’t tell. Share customer testimonials, case studies, statistics, usage metrics, and use cases where your product is being used
End with an ask - the sale is not yet complete. Ask them the best way to take this forward toward a sale
Case study on Gusto
Summarizing what Gusto did well:
Used simple questions like “How to do X?” “How to fill a form?” to their advantage and ranked on almost 200,000 keywords
Capitalized government-generated content to their fullest advantage
Flanked the above by inviting guest contributors to expand on topics
Added custom calculators and tools to become the de facto answer engine
The Path to First 5 Customers
B2B SaaS founders building in India for the world have shared their experiences and stories on their path to the first 5 customers.
Until next time!