Demo training · for teams that show software

A demo that shows everything
sells nothing.

Forty minutes of feature tour, five screens the buyer never asked about, and a “we'll be in touch.” A great demo isn't a tour; it's a personalised first week. The difference is a trainable skill.

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The offer, so you don't have to scroll: discovery-led demos, trained on your product, your buyers, your deals.

£2m
programme budget held
on the buyer's side of the table
£1.5m
largest single deal at BT
biggest in the division's history
20+
years in the field
before the flipchart
1 in 3
close ratio held for a full year
at 100% of target
Every number on this page is verifiable. My sales managers at BT and Croner will take your call.
You already know this story

Wednesday, 11am. The demo slot.

The prospect said “sounds interesting, send me the proposal.” The demo went perfectly. Every feature worked. Every tab got opened. That's the problem: the demo was about the product, and the buyer was buying their Thursday afternoon.

Your rep knows the product cold, and that's the issue. Knowledge wants to be shared. So the demo starts at Settings and ends at integrations, and the only question the buyer actually had (“what happens on Monday?”) never got asked out loud.

In the debrief the rep says the demo “went really well.” It did. That's the trap: demos that go well and deals that go nowhere aren't a coincidence. They're a system.

The quiet math of the feature tour
A demo team converting at 1 in 5 instead of 1 in 3 is a revenue event, not a coaching note. Same leads, same product, same price. Demo skill is the cheapest multiplier you own, and it trains in weeks.
Demo training
The demo that went perfectly and sold nothing. · brand scene

I sat on the other side for years: the £2m budget, hundreds of demos, choosing the suppliers who showed me my own problem and the week after it solved. The winning demo was never the most complete one. It was the most relevant.

Demo excellence isn't product knowledge. It's discovery, choreography and the ask. All three train.

The turn

Demos don't fail on the product. They fail on the first ten minutes.

What do you want them to feel by minute ten? Which one moment proves it? What do you ask for at the end? Three questions. Most demo teams have never been asked them. Relevance beats completeness, every single time.

Stories from the room

Three scenes you'll recognise.

Twenty years in the field, told honestly. The Receipt stories are mine and verifiable. The Pattern stories are composites: details changed, lessons intact.

The Receipt

The buyer's chair

Holding the £2m programme budget, I watched hundreds of demos. The winners had one thing in common: they showed my problem and my week-after, not their feature list. One demo opened with a screenshot of our own workflow. They had done the homework. They won.

Relevance is a choice, and it wins.
The Pattern

The tour

The pattern: the demo that starts at login and ends at integrations. Forty minutes of everything, no decision. Everyone claps politely. The buyer remembers one screen, and it's never the one that mattered. Feature tours feel safe. That's exactly why they fail.

Show everything, decide nothing.
The Pattern

The demo that asked

The pattern worth copying: the rep who ended the demo by booking the next meeting in the room, with the technical stakeholder and the pricing question already invited. Not pushy; choreographed. The close was the demo's last slide.

A demo without a date is a hobby.
Who's training your team

Jamie Sonnex, on a first-name basis with every seat at this table.

i.

The practitioner

Twenty years selling before teaching: £1.5m at BT, a 1-in-3 close ratio held for a full year at 100% of target. I only teach the moves I've run myself, at scale, on real money.

ii.

The trainer

At Think Tank I closed 100 owners into $10k-a-year coaching programmes, then trained the owners myself in prospecting, pricing and closing. The ones who drilled it beat the ones who "just had the gift." Every time.

iii.

The buyer

I've held the £2m programme budget and sat through hundreds of pitches and demos as the decider. I know what a room does next, because I was the room.

iv.

The operator

Training that doesn't survive contact with the day job is theatre. I ran programmes at BT scale, so everything I teach ships with the operational kit that keeps it alive after I've gone.

"I only teach what I've done for money. That's not a slogan; it's a syllabus."

The standard

How I train: the whole method in four lines.

Before

Your deals, not case studies

Training built from your pipeline, your recordings, your objections. Nobody practises on someone else's business, because nobody sells in someone else's business.

During

Drill, don't lecture

Nobody learns to close from a slide. Rounds of filmed practice, feedback the same hour, everyone rotates until the move is theirs. Uncomfortable for ten minutes, then unbeatable.

The week after

The manager's kit

One-page scorecards, a 1:1 script and a coaching rhythm, so the training compounds after I've left. Training that needs the trainer forever isn't training.

The result

One team, one playbook

Shared discovery, shared objection handling, a close that's allowed to feel like a conclusion. New starters onboard to a system in weeks, not folklore in months.

The receipts

Anyone can claim. This brand exists to prove.

The numbers above, the deals behind them, and a public ledger of the whole journey: applications, rejections, results, lessons. The highlight reel is boring; the work is the evidence.

The Training Room: proof in public
The offer

The same offer I make on every call.

✓ What the 20 minutes is

You bring a recorded demo and your win rate. I'll show you the three moments costing you deals, and the restructure that fixes them. If your demos aren't the problem, I'll say so.

✗ What it isn't

A pitch. There's nothing to buy on the call except a decision, and you'll know inside ten minutes whether I'm the person to train your team.

The Training Deal
Bring me the team. I'll bring the drill.
  • Built on your real deals, objections and prices, not generic roleplay
  • Practice-first: filmed rounds, same-hour feedback, nobody hides at the back
  • Every person leaves with the same one-page playbook
  • Manager's kit included, so it survives the week after I leave
Book the 20-minute call
From the engagements One proposal, eight technologies, every option priced.
Enterprise IT · EE/BT · the full story on the hub
Last line

Fewer features.
More decisions.

Discovery-led demos, trained on your product and your real deals. Every demo ends with a date, not a “we'll be in touch.”

Book the 20-minute call

You'll know inside ten minutes. · Every number on this page is verifiable.