From first demo to a live account: the demo and onboarding operation for a procurement product
After designing Sherpa Dental, I helped sell it, onboard customers and support it: about 250 demos, and a repeatable path from booking to a live account.
- Outcome
- Each demo was easier than the last, whoever ran it.
- My role
- Set up booking and the demo rotation, prepared and ran demos, specified go-live, wrote the follow-up, handled support, trained the sales team
- Team
- With the client's sales and operations teams and its development partners. I helped build and set up the quoting tool; I did not build it alone
- Scope
- Customer onboarding, sales enablement, training, support, service design
- When
- 2024 to now
- Kind
- Service and operations
The six steps
The count of demos is my own. No customer or business figures are shown, by agreement with the client.
The problem
A practice decides on procurement software in one call. If that call shows sample products, the buyer has to imagine their own. If the booking, the prep and the follow-up depend on who happens to run it, every demo starts from zero.
What I did
- Book. I set up the booking system in Calendly and the demo rotation, and trained the sales reps to book and prep demos.
- Prepare. A checklist and a team briefing for every call. We ran the practice's purchase history through the quoting tool I helped build: a savings quote, matched alternative products and their products reformatted into an import file.
- Demo. Their purchase history was already imported, so they saw their own products. If their data came in late, we used a pre-built demo account with a rehearsed script.
- Go live. I specified the go-live features: credentials could be set up before, during or after the call, and one click activated the account.
- Follow up. A follow-up email sequence after every demo, a recap to the rep, and a booking usage report for leadership.
- Support. I handled support chats, tickets and screen shares, and logged what customers asked for as product requests in the development backlog.
Decisions
Show their own products, not a sample. It cost preparation before every call and needed the quoting tool to exist. It meant the first thing a buyer saw was their own order history.
Let credentials happen whenever the practice was ready. Tying go-live to the call would have been simpler to build. Letting it happen before, during or after meant no demo stalled on a password.
One standard process, written down. Sales consultations ran on different schedules and steps. I documented one standard process as a wiki and built the slide deck for each stage, and before a release I wrote and ran a five-session training series for the sales team.
What happened
About 250 demos to single practices, buying groups and dental service organizations. We talked before and after every call. That is what made this work: each demo was easier than the last, whoever ran it.