The Changing Role of the Product Demo: A Conversation with Don Carmichael

I sat down with Don Carmichael, an experienced PreSales professional, mentor, and coach with over 30-years of customer facing, insight sales, and solution consulting experience. Don holds advisory roles at Avnio and Consensus and is the founder and Chief Presales Guru at Winning Skills, where he supports global PreSales organization with the skills, organizational structures, enablement and processes that win.

As a presales coach and mentor, Don has seen the role the product demo in the sales cycle dramatically change along with the presales industry as a whole. As we discuss in our conversation, buyers today don't "trust" sales people and simply don't want to talk to sales when making a B2B buying decision. This has forced vendors to rethink their go-to-market strategies and product positionings to create a more buyer-friendly experience.

In this transition, the role of the presales professional is shifting as well. In our dicussion, Don and I explore how presales professionals can prepare and upskill themselves to get ready for this change towards a product-first strategy. We also talked about how new roles within revenue organizations are starting to own a piece of the product demo. Lastly, we explored how the changing role of the product demo is actaully facilitating new responsibilities within the presales market including a new deliniation between pure technical advisors and technical content producers.

As companies reimagine how they share their product in the sales process, both the product demo and role of the presales professional are constantly changing to adapt to new buyer demands.