I need a demo, not a sales pitch

Who has the time to listen to a sales pitch?

I lost almost an hour today to a sales pitch just to get a demo to a product that I wanted to check out

I work in the local advertising space, and almost everyone who has a product and allegedly offer a trial don’t let you try out a product until you’re “sold” on a sixty minute sales pitch.

Today’s pitch was not very different from many other rehearsed pitches I’ve heard in the past, and I just didn’t need to listen to the feature set of the product, I could just go out there and explore it.

Nobody gives a shit about your rehearsed sales pitch and slideshow

Especially if you’re selling software-as-a-service, your product needs to sell itself and you shouldn’t really need an army of $24k a year sales reps to explain the feature set before giving out a demo to a potential customer.

If your product is so complex that you need to explain it for an hour to someone, you deserve to go out of business, or at the least, go back and re-build it to make it more usable.

By the time you’re done with your sales pitch, I’m so exhausted that I don’t want to try your product any more

I personally find sales pitches to be a mind numbing experience, especially for something that I can experience myself and explore in less than a few minutes.

By the time it’s all done, I’m so exhausted that I need a bottle of Gatorade and possibly ten minutes of meditation to just get back and about (kidding, of course)