December 8, 2025 | Read online
Demos aren't the problem. But how we use them is.
by Kevin 'KD' Dorsey
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about demos - specifically how much time teams spend trying to “fix” them.
Coaching the pitch. Rebuilding decks. Getting feedback from SEs. Shadowing top reps. Overhauling demo environments. All good things.
But here’s the hard truth: even the best demo is still a single moment in time. A snapshot.
And most deals? They don’t close in the demo. They close in the six conversations that happen after - when your champion is explaining it to their CFO, looping in IT, or just trying to remember how your platform actually works.
That’s the part we miss.
We obsess over perfecting the one demo... but ignore the five follow-ups that decide the deal.
And no amount of pitch coaching changes the fact that your rep can’t be in the room when those convos go down.
I see this all the time in the sales orgs I work with. A rep’s got decent pipeline, the product’s strong, the discovery was fine. But the deal stalls out. Why? Because we’re relying on someone who isn’t us to re-sell it - and we’ve given them nothing to work with.
No recap. No messaging. No assets. No CTA.
We just hope for the best.
Let me bring this back to something I teach constantly: BIPSY.
When deals stall out post-demo, most leaders jump straight to “we need to close better” or “reps need to ask for next steps.”
But go deeper.
- Is it a behavior issue? Did the rep fail to follow up with anything useful?
- Is it a skill gap? Did the demo fail to hit what the buyer actually cared about?
- Is it a process gap? Is there a system in place for following up with something that reinforces the pitch internally?
- Or is it a YOU problem? Did you as the leader actually coach how to run a follow-up loop?
This is what I mean when I say “you can’t change results without changing the metrics - and you can’t change metrics without diagnosing what’s really behind them”.
A missed close isn’t just a close rate problem. It’s a follow-up problem. A multi-threading problem. A buyer-enablement problem.
This is where something like Consensus comes in - not as a silver bullet, but as a bridge.
You build a demo once. Your best one. Clean, persona-specific, tight messaging. Then reps can plug it in:
- Before the meeting, to warm people up.
- After the meeting, to keep momentum alive.
- During multi-threading, so the champion isn’t just paraphrasing your pitch, they’re forwarding the actual thing.
It’s not about “demo automation.” It’s about enabling the buyer to do their job: get to yes, internally.
And for the managers reading this: that also gives you visibility. You can finally see who’s engaging, which personas are watching, and who’s ghosting. That’s micro-awareness, not micromanagement.
If you want to dig deeper, Consensus just dropped some solid research on Speed to Demo - how faster, on-demand demos impact win rates and buying behavior. Worth checking out 👇
Final thought:
I tell reps all the time: “You gotta make them want it.” That’s the goal of every interaction. If they don’t want it, they won’t fight for it.
But we also have to recognize how people buy has changed. They don’t just want to be pitched. They want to explore. They want to come back to it later. They want to share it with people you’ll never meet.
And if the only way they can do that is from memory… good luck.
We’re not selling to individuals anymore. We’re selling to groups.
And those groups need more than a 30-minute Zoom to make a decision.
Might be time we gave buyers the material to make those pitches count. Let’s help them out.
-KD
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