Demo Script Built From Your Discovery Call

Work from the transcript, not your memory of the call: you need to see who raised each topic, when, and for how long. Speaker names and timestamps help, but a plain transcript will do. You'll also need:

• The slot length, as booked
• Who's attending, and what each person does
• Your standard demo, screen by screen, with rough timings
• Anything you can't show yet

If the call named people you haven't met, a stakeholder and champion map records who they are and who brought them up. Still to hold the call? A discovery call questions template helps you leave it with material worth scripting from.

Gong, which sells software that records and analyzes sales calls, published a study of 67,149 recorded demos in 2017. It found that winning sales demos mirror the topics discussed during discovery¹. Its advice is to cover the problem the call spent the most time on first, then the next, and so on.

So list the themes in the buyer's own words, such as "shift handover" rather than your feature's name. For each, note how long the buyer's side spent on it and how many people raised it.

Then check who started each mention, since time on a topic can just mean you asked about it often. Prompts change answers: after the 2008 US election, Pew Research Center asked voters which issue mattered most to their vote. When the economy was offered in a list, 58% chose it, but only 35% named it in their own words².

Mark a mention prompted if your previous question was already on that theme, and unprompted if the buyer raised it while you were elsewhere. Themes that several people bring back unprompted show what's really on the buyer's mind.

Set the minutes before you pick a single screen. In Gong's study, winning demos primed the buyer with a contextual overview usually lasting less than 2 minutes¹, and spent roughly 4 minutes at the end planning next steps.

1. 1

   Reserve the open

   Allow about 3 minutes for introductions and a recap, ending with "Is that still right?"

2. 2

   Reserve the close

   Allow about 5 minutes for questions and a dated next step. In a 30-minute slot, 22 minutes remain to show.

3. 3

   Weight each theme

   Multiply its buyer time by the share of its mentions that were unprompted, so a theme with none scores zero.

4. 4

   Share out the minutes

   Divide the minutes left in proportion to the weights, then round to whole minutes.

Give every screen in your standard demo a verdict and a one-line reason. A screen with no theme behind it goes. Huthwaite International, the sales training firm behind SPIN Selling, built its method on 35,000 sales calls. A main finding: features and benefits don't work unless they're linked to specific customer needs³.

• Keep: it serves a theme and fits that theme's minutes
• Trim: it serves a theme but runs over that theme's minutes
• Cut: nothing the buyer raised calls for it
• Build: a theme earned more minutes than you have material for

Total the minutes you free, then compare each theme's budget with the material you have. The top theme is often under-built, because a standard demo is written to suit every buyer. In the example, the deck has 5 minutes on handover against the 14 it earned, so the freed time goes there, ideally with data like theirs.

Open with the recap. Peter Cohan, who founded the training firm Great Demo! and wrote the book of the same name, teaches presenters to begin with a Situation Slide. It summarizes the buyer's critical business issue, the problems behind it, the capabilities they need, the change they want and their critical date⁴.

Lead with the result. Cohan structures demos like a news story, with the most important information right at the beginning⁵. Show the finished report or screen the buyer wants, then the few clicks that produce it, and go deeper only for whoever asks.

Lay the script out as a storyboard: one row per act, with its minutes, screens, opening line and closing question. Open each act with the buyer's own words, and pause often. Gong found that winning demos came in short bursts of pitch that let the customer chime in¹. Losing demos tended to run uninterrupted pitches of up to 106 seconds.

Rehearse out loud with a timer and a colleague playing the buyer. If an act runs long, cut detail from its end, not its opening. For questions that would derail the room, Cohan's advice is to write each one where everyone can see it, check you've got it right, and park it for later⁶.

After the demo, send a note with a line on each topic you cut and the next step you agreed. If the deal now needs a shared plan to signature, a mutual action plan template lays out each step with a named owner.

To skip the stopwatch work, paste your transcript into the tool at the top of this page. River scores each theme and drafts the budget, the screen verdicts and the script for you to edit.