Guided Tours provide an effective and lower cost alternative to live in-person product demonstrations.
Guided Tours enable your salespeople to engage the prospect without the delay or costs of scheduling a pre-sales resource and developing a customized product demonstration. Effective Guided Tours greatly accelerate your sales cycle.
Guided Tours help prospects understand how your product or service can solve their problems.
What is a Guided Tour?
A Guided Tour delivers inspired moments of “ah-ha” when prospects envision how using your product solves an important problem.
Each segment of a Guide Tour presents a use case for particular features of your offering. They demonstrate how customers can use these features to achieve superior business results — the value of using your offering.
Each use case captures a moment of truth that, when strung together, inspire the champion, mobilizer or consultant to build an internal consensus to buy or recommend your offering.
A Guided Tour is not an infomercial that uses hyperbolic excitement and the fear of missing out (FOMO) to coerce a buying action. Avoid slick promotional videos that over-emphasize general benefits and under-emphasize the particulars of how a featured set of functions solve prospects’ specific use case needs.
When do you use a Guided Tour?
Your salesperson offers a prospect a Guided Tour after they have jointly concluded that the organization has a critical problem and have identified likely causes. This means the champion has already consumed some combination of Teasers and Explainers. In some cases they may have also seen a presentation of your offering.
Your most effective salespeople use Guided Tours only after the champion has become uncomfortable with the status quo and concluded that their organization must take action to avoid now-certain impending or compounding losses.
Guided Tours convince prospects of the following:
- Your salesperson has clearly understood their problems.
- Your offering is an ideal solution to their problem.
- It won’t be risky to either recommend or initiate the internal buying process.
Your Guided Tours will also be used by your prospect to socialize your solution internally.
After presenting or sharing a Guided Tour, the salesperson should offer to help the prospect with the internal buying process. A Buyer’s Guide enables a salesperson to achieve this effectively.
Key components of Guided Tours
A Guided Tour is comprised of two components:
- A set of independent video segments that each presents one use-case scenario that the customer will recognize as distinct, meaningful, and predictive: “Yep. I can see how that set of functions help address our problem.”
- A presentation slide library that includes a slide to explain the context of a business problem followed by a slide embedding the video segment from #1 above. A salesperson can assemble and personalize a set of such use cases to personalize a Guided Tour for each customer’s needs.
When packaged with customer-specific insights and data, the personalized Guided Tour summarizes the benefits of the value-delivery process. Effective Guided Tours depict and explain the value-delivery process with a set of simple and concrete actions that lead to customer success.
Simple motion graphics or annotated infographics provide excellent additions to the package of videos.
Guided Tour Best Practices
- Guided Tours capture four to seven moments of truth of your best presales engineer or subject matter expert giving an inspired demonstration.
- Guided Tours demonstrate how your offering can solve the prospect’s problem. They do not sell or promote.
- Guided Tours should be personalized as much as possible to focus on each prospect’s specific pain-points and to establish relevance.
- Guided Tours should be as modular as possible so that the prospect can easily understand your unique value proposition as it relates to them as well as share snippets internally to socialize your solution.
- Guided Tours should include two next steps:
- Offer to diagnose the problem on a group or company-wide basis
- Information on how proceed on their own, offering to let them download a Loss Calculator or relevant Case Study.
To learn more about other engagement objects, please see “9 Engagement Objects that fuel B2B Sales Enablement“.
