You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m obsessed with all things demo-related. That’s why I’m excited to introduce our new podcast Demo Diaries hosted by our own Jorge Soto.
And I’ll be breaking down the top takeaways from each episode so you don’t miss a thing, even if you don’t have time to listen to the whole episode.
For our first podcast, Jorge talked to David E. Henriquez who is the Team Lead of Sales Engineering at Klaviyo, about how to create a good demo environment.
Who is David?
David spent quite a few years in sales engineering and has moved over to drive success in the developer community. He started in tech young, building websites for his friends and their parents’ small business. David got into tech sales for about 10 years, and then changed into building products and engineering.
He joined Klaviyo to build out the sales engineering team in a slightly different way than the norm. Klaviyo is all about hiring SEs who are engineers first and who can also be highly empathetic to customers as well.
How Do They Demo?
Klaviyo takes a different approach to sales engineering. Their sales engineers don’t just go from demo to demo (a demo jockey, if you will) showing product features to fill a pipeline and hit their quota. Instead, they’re focused on how they can help customers with their technical challenges and solve problems.
Customers vary so much, and creating completely custom demos for each one of Klaviyo’s 60,000 customers just isn’t scalable. You need to build an environment that works for everyone. Instead, their SEs focus on empowering AEs to do their own demos while the SEs are all about coaching, strategy, and training instead of clicking through the demo themselves.
It helps that Klaviyo makes a real effort to hire very bright and tech-savvy AEs, and ensure everyone at the company is excited about getting into the technology themselves. And the SEs work to give the AEs good tools and processes so they can get it done themselves. In fact, the SEs get time to work on technical projects like creating full-stack sales tools that empower the sales team.
Get Good Data
Klaviyo tracks everything in Salesforce to get good insights into what’s going on. AEs can request an SE on a demo, and they track where SEs are being requested to help surface any product or process improvements that these assignments could indicate.
Everyone is always leveling up the sales and engineering processes, and this helps them scale as well.
Create an Empathetic Environment
David’s biggest tip for SEs is to always be incredibly empathetic to the customer. The best demos show customers something that matters to them – not always what you think is the coolest feature, or the feature that’s succeeded in the past.
Really put yourself in your customer’s shoes, understand their challenges, and be honest with them about if your product is the right fit. Customers need to trust you have their best interests at heart – be the buddy to the buyer.
Don’t miss a thing: check out the full podcast for more of David’s incredible insights.
