The Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Meta Demo™

By now, you’re up to speed on, and hopefully already delivering, your own version of The Meta Sales Demo™, which I believe is the most natural fit for a meta demo. After all, you’re demoing the sales software you’re using to sell sales software. It doesn’t get any more meta than that! Or does it…?

What if there was a Meta Marketing Demo™, and it appeared at the same time that “meta-marketing” is a trend in marketing? Now we’re talking about an Inception-level mind bender at that point. Think I’m kidding? Check out this TrendHunter article on “meta marketing.” If you have 30 seconds, check out the Arby’s/Pepsi commercial below that they highlight. If you have 2.5 more minutes, it’s also worth watching the Anna Kendrick/Newcastle Beer Super Bowl commercial that wasn’t.

https://youtu.be/_oz5Po3z2N0

Meta-markeitng…so hot right now. More importantly, it’s not new. The Energizer bunny campaign that launched in 1988, and is considered one of the best ad campaigns of all time, was a commercial inside a commercial (a parody of a Duracell ad from the 1970s). The campaign then continued with the Energizer bunny interrupting parodies of other commercials about fake products. Meta before it was cool.

¿Quien es más “meta”?

If meta-marketing is so hot right now, and there’s a Meta Marketing Demo™, how could I argue the Meta Sales Demo™ is more meta? I’m just being absurdly semantic. If you are in a “sales cycle” with a company, it kinda means Marketing already did their job. They handled the Awareness stage of the funnel, and now it’s with you in the Interest/Consideration stage (depending on which funnel you subscribe to). So definitionally, you’re demoing marketing software in a sales cycle. With Dynamics Sales, though, you’re demoing the very sales software you’re using to sell sales software. More meta. But no one in the real world cares which is why I still love the Marketing Meta Demo™.

Besides, the real world isn’t so cut-and-dried. The world doesn’t stop while you’re in a sales cycle. Your competitors’ marketing departments are still marketing while their salespeople are laying landmines for you. Hopefully, your marketing department is doing the same (and if they’re not, your demo is a place to take passive-aggressive shots at your marketing department for not providing adequate air cover).

The Meta Marketing Demo Map

While executing a Meta Marketing Demo™, I would simply conflate Sales and Marketing as much as possible. I would try to avoid using phrases like “sales process” or “sales cycle”, and couch everything in terms of marketing’s recognized roles in the Consideration or Intent stages of the funnel. In other words, technically, you’re in a sales cycle but the demo will focus on how marketing is supporting sales (which, by the way, every marketer wants to do despite sales believing the opposite).

The journey below outlines the guts of the demo. Prior to the first tile (the Segment), I cover leads, lead scoring, and the hand-off to sales. When a Dynamics prospect is in the Consideration stage of the funnel, a demo is coming, but hopefully not before a discovery call which is why I have that as the first action tile. Assuming discovery warrants an actual demo (and it usually does), the demo is the next event, but not before we promote the demo with a Marketing Email to remind the audience of what’s coming. The last step in this journey is the demo itself, set up as an event in Dynamics Marketing (I’ll explain why it’s the last step in this Journey at the end of this post).

Lead with their lead process

I kick off my demo by showing the audience their Lead record. Since my demo environment is not also RSM’s external website, I’m going to be creating their lead manually, from scratch, regardless of how they actually found us. Maybe they filled out a Contact Us form on our website? Maybe Microsoft referred them to us? Doesn’t matter if they attended a webinar, found your company at a trade show, or threw a dart at a list of Dynamics partners — by the time it’s on your plate, the lead was already created elsewhere. So, we have at least two options:

1. Enter the lead manually based on how we believe they found us (which we should be able to find out from the sales rep, or by asking them during the discovery call); or
2. Introduce the prospect as a Lead in our system based on whatever the prospect’s primary lead source is. In other words, if the prospect primarily gets their leads from web forms, I would go to my B2B lead form and enter their info there to mimic their actual process. If, instead, they primarily get leads through outbound telemarketing, I would enter their lead record to reflect a series of outbound calls by another user in my tenant that resulted in the lead.

For my money, I usually go route #2 and fill out as much as I can to enrich the record. Err on the side of embellishing to pump up their Lead Score. No prospect is going to want to see themselves in a demo as a Grade C lead. Go so far as to tweak the Lead Scoring model if you must to show them as a Grade A lead. When finished, Qualify them as a lead.

A Sales-controlled static Marketing list populates a dynamic segment

Now we’re ready to start the journey I shared above. Like all Outbound Marketing Customer Journeys (OMCJs), it starts with a segment. Follow me here: I created a dynamic segment (Demo Attendees) that pulls from a static Marketing list. While there are ways to engineer complex segments to grab your future demo audiences dynamically based on Sales Stage or some other Rube Goldberg workflow, I prefer this route for several reasons:

1. I want total control over who enters this Journey because it is live. Real stuff is gonna happen to real people with real email addresses (not to mention the fact that they’re people you’re trying to sell to!). I don’t mind a couple clicks to ensure only the right people are being added.
2. There is an out-of-the-box Segment template created for just this type of segment. Segment building can look intimidating, so the fact that you can quickly show how you built the segment just by selecting a template Microsoft provides where all you have to do is choose the Marketing list you want is powerful.
3. It has the benefit of being a realistic way to implement a journey like this. As mentioned earlier, technically, we’re in the sales cycle now so Sales should be leading, not Marketing.
4. It’s a great opportunity to discuss the seamless integration between Dynamics Sales & Marketing. This is a feature that empowers salespeople to leverage automation by simply adding their Contacts to the appropriate list(s).

The discovery call is a Phone Call activity

Be your own hype man

Send out a Marketing Email to the attendees of the demo promoting the demo. I put in some cautionary language in mine to indicate this is part of the demo, and that they haven’t been added to some marketing list they’ll have to unsubscribe from (of course, there will be a Subscription Center link in the email because there has to be, but the point is that this Marketing Email is part of the demo). There are a number of benefits of doing this:

• It shows Dynamics Marketing is capable of sending out email blasts (I’d like to think that’s not in doubt, but you’d be surprised).
• You can show personalization. Use attendees’ names and their company, maybe even their job title. Throw in their logo somewhere if you’re really ambitious.
• You can show the Add-to-Calendar functionality. This shouldn’t be the primary appointment for the demo, but we’re including it to show the functionality.
• Showing email analytics is so much better because now you get to show analytics that will show the actions of the demo attendees by name. Who opened it? Who clicked on a link? By the way, you may think that’s creepy, but that’s literally what marketers do!
• You can use it to solicit more information via a Marketing form. Details after the Event section below.

The Demo is the main event. Literally.

This will be your “You Are Here” moment in the meta demo. Create an Event that represents your demo and then save it as an Event Template since you will likely be using it over and over. Post-pandemic bonus: once horse dewormer saves us all from COVID, you can make the event in-person, virtual, or hybrid!

Teams Streaming
Assuming there will be remote participants, this is an opportunity to show off the Teams integration. You’ll likely set up your demo as a Teams meeting, so you can talk to the ability to seamlessly setup Teams Live Events, Teams webinars, or a Teams meeting (recommended). Be prepared to explain the differences in case the question is asked.

Speakers
Set yourself up as one, along with anyone on your team that will be presenting (salesperson, sales manager, both). Set up Speaking Engagements for yourself and others (if a teammate is kicking things off before handing it over to you). I make sure to have profile photos loaded, I put in a link to their LinkedIn profiles, and I grab some About text from their LinkedIn profile for the About section on the Speaker.

Sponsorships
Let’s pretend your demos are so amazing, companies are lining up to associate themselves with them. For example, I show my demos as being sponsored by RSM (my employer), Microsoft (company whose software I’m selling), and Peet’s Coffee (caffeine sponsor and also a Dynamics customer). You might prefer to use Starbucks, Red Bull, Gatorade (who doesn’t need some electrolyte replacement after demos?), or something else altogether. You could be sponsored by the gaming chair you use, or a clothing brand you wear provided someone in the audience might recognize what you’re wearing. I use caffeine because (1) everyone can imagine why they would sponsor presales engineers, and (2) the logos are recognizable; most people won’t know that Secretlab makes gaming chairs.

Solicit more information about your audience in advance of the demo

This step is optional, but I find it incredibly helpful. Create a Marketing form to capture additional information information about the individuals attending. In mine, I ask questions like “What are you hoping to get out of the demo?” and “Which marketing automation solutions do you have experience with?” (the latter may seem like a discovery call question, and it is, but as you know, discovery calls are often just with 1 or 2 people, not the entire audience of the demo, so it doesn’t hurt to learn about the others prior in advance). It’s likely none of them will bother to go to the form, or fill it out, but if someone does, it’s great information and it’ll be impressive when you can show that data in the demo.

As you can see in the form (at right), I also include some profile fields that are required for Customer Insights enrichment. If they’re looking at Marketing + CI, this will let me show the out-of-the-box Microsoft Graph enrichment if they fill out 2 of the 3 fields between Birthday, Zip Code, and Gender. If they’re not looking at CI, I’ve now teased it in a way that’s likely to get them to ask about it if they didn’t already know about it. And I include a link to the Microsoft documentation on Enrichment here.

There are three ways you can create a Marketing form like this, each with their pros and cons:

1. Custom fields on the Lead or Contact tables. You could create a couple fields to store the answers to the two questions above (experience with other marketing automation solutions, anything specific they hope to get out of the demo) on the Lead or Contact tables (or both). If you plan to do the Marketing Meta Demo™ over and over, it’s worth the 5 minutes it will take.
2. Custom Event registration fields. This is the fastest way to do it, and the event will use the default Marketing form and add your new fields at the bottom. This is powerful because it shows Marketers they can easily create some simple fields to collect more information without having to go to their Dynamics Administrator to add fields and publish customizations; the Marketer can help themselves. The downside is (1) it doesn’t store the answers on the Lead or Contact record, and (2) you would re-create the Birthday, Gender, and Zip Code fields that already exist on the Lead/Contact tables.
3. ¿Porque no los dos? Why not both? You can! You can use a combination of Lead/Contact fields on the form and Custom event registration fields. The only downside is that the custom event registration fields will not store the answers on the Lead/Contact record — they will just be attached to the event registration.

I will reach out, privately, to either the main stakeholder (CMO, VP Marketing) or whomever is the primary contact for the evaluation and politely ask them to fill out the form for the benefit of the demo, reiterating that their data will not be used for anything other than the demo to try to get at least one response for the demo.

The demo is the event; the event is the demo

If you’ve set up the actual invite as a Teams meeting, you’re all in the actual event shown earlier in the journey. To re-up the Spaceballs reference, “You’re at now now.”

The real-time meta demo of Real-time Marketing

Remember I said I would explain why the demo event is the last step in the Customer Journey? It’s because the Journey represents everything that has happened up to the point that you’re at now. You showed them an Outbound Marketing Customer Journey (OCMJ) that shows the literal journey they’ve taken with you so far, from lead to discovery call to marketing email to the demo as a Teams meeting event. As if the demo hasn’t been meta already, it gets even more meta as we transition from Outbound Marketing into Real-time Marketing. You can reference the Real-time Marketing Meta Demo™ I wrote about here. I would bring the demo to a climax with the Real-time Marketing meta demo to demonstrate, in real-time, how you can automate more of their journey with you based on an event trigger (completion of the marketing demo) as opposed to the initial journey which was started by virtue of them being part of a segment (Demo Attendees).

The Journey Journey™ vs. the Marketing Meta Demo™

Hopefully you are familiar with my favorite Marketing demo: a long, thorough deep-dive into Outbound Marketing set to Journey’s infamous rock anthem “Don’t Stop Believin’” that I call the Journey Journey™. It is, quite possibly, the most creative demo idea I’ve ever come up with. Which begs the question: The Journey Journey™ or the Marketing Meta Demo™?

It’s not either/or, it’s both (but not at the same time!). I have both ready to go depending on the deal, but more importantly, the time allotted for the demo. The Don’t Stop Believin’ demo is best with 30-45 minutes just to demo the OMCJD so you can really show off a lot of the features. While kitschy, it can be genuinely educational for a prospect if done right, but it takes time to do it right.

The Marketing Meta Demo™ is better when you need to do a high-level demo of Marketing in 60 minutes or less. You’re not using as many tiles, nothing is created from scratch since the Journey is live, and it’s got a natural jumping off point into Real-time Marketing to close out the demo.

In conclusion, the answer is Yes.

Extra Credit: I wanna be a Producer

Setting up your demo as a Teams meeting or webinar is great. But there is a higher risk, higher reward option that I would only recommend if there is an opportunity to sell Microsoft Teams licenses and services and you are compensated for it; otherwise, this is NOT worth the trouble (this is a lot of trouble).

As you know, Teams Live events are for 1:many events, whereas most demos have a fair amount of audience participation. You want to see the audience’s reactions as you go, you want them to be able to interject with audible questions or comments along the way, you’re going to ask if there are questions along the way and wait for audible confirmation, and none of those things are what Teams Live events are designed for.

But…if the prospect is currently using a different webinar provider and they’re considering using Teams Live for remote and hybrid events, and if and only if you have produced Teams Live events before, then set up the demo as a Teams Live event and you are the Producer. In other words, a Teams Live event has three distinct groups –Attendees, Presenters, and a Producer– but your demo is going to have the attendees invited as Presenters, you are going to be the Producer, and there will be no actual Attendees. Essentially your prospect will be watching the performance from backstage so to speak.

You will queue up all the content and push it live even though no one will be watching the live event. The prospect attendees will have been set up as Presenters that are watching you produce the event. You can still have your sales person kick off the meeting with their video on, and slide sharing if necessary. When it’s time for you to start your demo, you can put yourself in the queue, and then push yourself live to start. When someone has a question, you can queue them up and they can ask it in front of the group with full audio since they’re setup to be a Presenter. You can still leverage chat, but you’ll be leveraging the Meeting Chat rather than the Audience Q&A since there is no audience.

If you can pull this off by yourself, you’re the Simone Biles of Marketing demos. If you have an adept salesperson you can trust, you might teach them how to produce the event so they can handle the feed switching while you focus on the demo, but I’m skeptical you’ll find such a partner in crime.