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Scale Presales by Elimination with the Demo Qualified Lead (DQL)

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This article continues our series on Scaling Presales using the principles of “Eliminate, Automate, Delegate.” You can also download the e-book for a complete guide to scaling presales:

Download the E-book “Scaling Presales: 8 Strategies to Boost Coverage and Customer Experience With Existing Headcount”

Eliminating Wasted Demos

After you’ve defined the gap between your demo capacity and demand, it’s time to set to work on solutions. If repetitive demos are the biggest limiting factor—the bottleneck—then we first need to explore whether every demo is necessary. Are there demos we can eliminate?

Obviously, there’s a tradeoff here. We’re saying we’re not going to deliver all demos live with sales engineers. Which ones do we want to eliminate and why?

Reviewing the 6 Demo Types

We’ve published a guide to the 6 Demo Types as well as a webinar, and we should review the basics here because not all demos are alike.

When we hear the word “demo”, sometimes we think of only one type of demo: the technical demo. In reality, SEs are involved in preparing and delivering many types of demos that correspond with the needs of the buyers as they go through the buying process.

The 6 Demo Types

The 6 Demo Types

Which Demos Can We Eliminate?

How many of the demos your SEs do are under or unqualified? More than half of the respondents to the Consensus Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload survey said 30% or more were unqualified. One in five respondents said that more than half of their
demos were unqualified. This is obviously a
huge problem, and a huge opportunity.

30% of demos or more are unqualified

What we really want to eliminate are unqualified demos. If we could eliminate those unqualified demos, that would free up an enormous amount of time.

How can we eliminate under qualified demos?

Better Qualification: The Demo Qualified Lead (DQL)

Most go-to-market teams have several lead qualification gates through which leads must pass before they get assigned to other resources. These include Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), and so on.

We recommend that you implement a new type of lead qualification gate that we call the Demo Qualified Lead (DQL). This is the qualification standard a lead must go through before a presales resource can get involved.

Add DQL to your presales lexicon

At least one key qualification is whether or not the lead will engage with either an interactive video demo first, or a shorter introductory demo that you delegate to your sales team to deliver first. If they’re not willing to do that, then we should ask the question: “Are they really qualified enough to merit a presales resource?”

As interactive video demos can be a key DQL qualifier, we’ll next explore which demos can potentially be automated and where they fit in the Buyer’s Journey.

Get the full guide to scaling presales by downloading our free ebook:

Scaling Presales: 8 Strategies to Boost Coverage and Customer Experience With Existing Headcount

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