The new kid on the Block: Interactive Demos
The first station for self-serving "something"
This post is sponsored by Storylane, drive product-led growth with no-code interactive product demos.
This article is part three in a three-part series on the state of product-led growth onboarding.
Choosing between freemiums, trials, interactive demos, and Gary the sales guy
The new kid on the block: Interactive Demos
Houston, we have a problem
Imagine all business is happening on the internet and you’re still not “really” there.
Wundermanthompson has a great report on what’s happening in B2B in 2023:
Over half of all global B2B buyers have changed all their suppliers in the 18 months leading up to the report. The year before that the number was at 18%. A number that in isolation already seems to be extremely high, and now we talk about a tripling of that?
But why did they change?
Cheaper prices!? Better terms?? Whatever it is, it’s gotta be Gary’s fault, the guy from Sales who didn’t do his job to keep our clients! Right? Right!?
Let’s have a look:
First off, let’s unpack the whopping 22%: My favorite is without a doubt “Didn’t recognize me as a customer” aka “Let’s forget as fast as we can about our existing customers and just focus on acquisition.”
We can split the rest of the reasons into two categories.
Category one: understandable problems
25% of those who did switch said it was because of better contract terms/pricing while 29% cited better bundling products elsewhere.
This makes sense. B2B companies often struggle with how to efficiently revamp their products and address the evolving concerns of their customers. It’s difficult as an acquisition-driven business that only learned how to convert customers better but not necessarily how to retain them.
Category two: easy-to-fix shouldn’t be problems at all
But what about the 25% that say it’s too difficult to find the product(s)? Or the 23% that switched due to a bad online experience?
Customers not finding your product and just having an overall bad online experience is inexcusable for any company. There are easy ways to fix this!
And no, you don’t need to wreak havoc on your existing pricing model and company. All you need to get started is…
Interactive Demos
Let’s whip that definition out again:
"Interactive Demo: A simulated experience of your product offering often split by audience types. Rather than some useful output or value it mimics the experience of a complex product.”
What’s not described in this description is how it might fit into your strategy in a way that a freemium and trial just can’t.
In the first article of this 3 part series, we looked into how a SaaS business wrecked its revenue by jumping head over heels into doing freemiums:
One of the overall conclusions I took from it was that they probably threw out the baby with the bathwater. They tried to be customer-centric too much, too early.
For Sales-led companies that have never done anything in this regard, especially big ones, it’s sometimes the right thing to go self-serve but not feasible immediately.
In the second article, we looked at what you should choose between freemiums, trials, and interactive demos:
While I’m still of the opinion that freemiums coupled with smart trials are by and large the best option for any business offering whenever possible, there is a large swath of businesses who need something…more than a self-serve option.
No, Gary, I’m not talking about you.
❗Note: interactive demos are not a tool of “product-led growth”
An interactive demo cannot sell itself. But it can help to assist sales and part of the sales process to be more product-led.
Implementation aka ‘let go of the steering wheel, It’s fine Gary’
When we change a company’s existing distribution to be more product-led, we ask this business to give away control. It’s uncomfortable for sales to not have complete control of the buyers’ experience.
That’s understandable. Experienced Sales reps have done hundreds of demos and know exactly how to show off the product so it shines. They know what questions will come up and they know how to answer them. But, Gary, it just doesn’t scale.
You want to assist your prospect as the problems come up. While that makes sense, it’s not scaleable and does not match up anymore with what B2B customers demand in a buying experience.
Even more importantly, the problem with a sales-led approach is everything that you aren’t able to see:
All the prospects who leave because you’re forcing them to talk to a person
It’s inefficient and it doesn’t inspire confidence when the customer has not yet arrived at a point in their buying journey where they are ready to make a positive or negative buying decision.
The purpose of an interactive demo
Let’s be very clear: The purpose of an interactive demo is not to convince a customer to buy. That’s part of the outcome of a great interactive demo.
The purpose of it is to show prospects how your product works in a way that:
respects their time
gives them a deep dive into how the product will actually work
allows them to compare your product with others in the space
In that way, it serves the same purpose as a pricing page. It makes your product comparable not just in price but value.
The difference between an interactive demo and other self-serve motions like a freemium and trial is that here, the goal is not to convert the prospect into a paid customer.
The goal of an interactive demo is for most companies to convert a prospect to a sales call. Just get them ahead in their journey to make a decision.
Sales-led organizations are extremely good in iterating around the amount of $ part of a deal but not when it comes to respecting a prospect’s time:
The good side effect is also that some prospects disqualify themselves. Low intent or simply bad matches are out really quickly. Getting more leads is not always the best solution to your problems.
Now that you’ve got the interactive demo up and running, let’s bring some efficiency into the mix.
“Product”
When you create an interactive demo through a vendor or if you create it yourself you have a chance to start on a clean slate. That’s what makes it so attractive for Sales-led behemoths that can’t get anything to ship:
You probably don’t have to deal with any technical debt and can iterate fast.
There’s an important caveat though: Anything worth doing in business is only as good as your efforts to consistently improve it.
This also applies to interactive demos: This is not something you just ship and then go back to your usual backlog.
How to create an interactive demo that’s actually good (hint: data, the answer is data)
We have to integrate the interactive demo into our product backlog with intent and strategy. This isn’t done overnight. It requires iterations based on data-driven feedback.
The first iteration will not be great, the 10th will be pretty good, and the 14th will be amazing.
As the product changes, so too must the demo
Create an interactive demo with sales, not just for sales. Regular iterations require regular meetings with sales and processes that they want to attend, not have to.
That means we should account for it over the longer term as a position on our balance sheet. Treat it like a salesperson who has a dedicated salary. If you stop paying it, it will stop working for you too.
3 checkmarks of a good interactive demo
Intent, simplicity: You know exactly “what” you want to show, which is guiding anyone who looks into it toward the core value your product solves. That means cutting away things that are unnecessary. Don’t include too much. A typical mistake is to include demos about every upsell feature that simply won’t matter for 90% of your prospects
Time to “value”: If you can measure the time it takes for each different audience in the demo to reach the “aha” moment you think is the point where a prospect “gets” your value, then do so. This is not the same as measuring how fast someone converts to a sales call. We talk about how long it takes to get what I want from a demo.
In the example of Zendesk, it could be how long it takes to see how a support agent can handle multiple customer inquiries.Easy to change: Your first iteration will not be perfect, and the more you iterate on it the better it will be. You will iterate on it more likely the easier it is to iterate on it. Whether you hand this to a team or someone in marketing (or yourself) to take care of through an external provider, pick tooling or a startup that specializes in this.
What metrics to track for interactive demos
Interactive demos don’t just provide insights for your users. You can - and must! - leverage those insights.
But tracking with interactive demos isn’t as simple as freemium trials since you can’t really measure retention or classical usage patterns.
But we can still leverage some more business-driven metrics:
— Interactive Demo to Sales Call Conversion %
How did our conversion funnel look like from people who took the interactive demo and then landed in a sales call?
Keep in mind that especially in B2B interactions are on a longer timeframe, it’s not common for someone to interact with a demo and immediately jump on a sales call. We need to be able to track this somehow.
The best practice is to demand some registration even just for looking at an interactive demo. This allows us to track these integrations, but make sure to keep the registration simple.
— Interactive Demo time spent per segment
Since interactive demos are usually guided, linear experiences, it’s quite easy to track inside them where people spent the most time and where they dropped off.
Measure inside of them if possible where most people start to drop off.
Treat it like a book. If your readers aren’t getting past Chapter 1, why should you spend time optimizing Chapters 2, 3, and 4?
Careful though: A drop off because of lack of interest vs. a drop off because they contacted sales can look the same inside your data.
— Sales call outside vs. inside of Interactive Demo
Don’t forget to integrate into your demo a simple way of contacting sales to capture immediate interest.
— Shares of Interactive Demo within Account users
Make it easy for someone in an interactive demo to share it with their colleagues directly out of the demo. Besides being convenient, this allows you to track the behavior across different demo users and summarize them into account-based tracking.
I’ve seen “Invite a colleague” actions that can help facilitate this by sending direct links to the demo to colleagues so they don’t need to register at all (since someone at the company has already registered).
In summary
It’s best practice to treat your interactive demo like a product and optimize it continuously.
To close out this essay, here are some good examples of companies that use interactive demos and a couple of quotes I collected from leading voices in the PLG space on why they use interactive demos.
Good examples
Jit.io
Embedding parts of your product in the website is the name of the game here for Jit.Io, they use it for collecting data and their sales reps might even use it to walk prospects through.
Drift
Drift has a great example of a great interactive demo. They have been leading in many aspects when it comes to understanding how to optimize a sales pipeline with a complex product. After all, that IS their product.
Zendesk
Zendesk has a really great multi-role Interactive Demo that shows the product from different perspectives for the different roles that use their Support platform:
The customer who needs help
Support Agent that assists the customer
Admin that needs to manage the Support Agents
Seller to assist sales through Zendesk
The demo leads the user to the correct demo experience relevant for their user type. It also requires a low-touch registration that doesn’t get in the way of the demo.
Industry Voices and Examples
“We have 75% lower total acquisition cost due to fewer demo environments running, over 200,000 product tours were taken last year and we offer overall over 8 different tours”
— Anonymous insight, still waiting for clearance to attribute it.
Pleo
“60-70% of prospects come in wanting to learn what Pleo does without immediately talking to a sales rep.”, Haresh Bajaj
"That got a 10x conversion on not just people watching the interactive demo, but getting an MQL, relative to every other entry point on the website. “ Haresh Bajaj
Source:
, Article
Pendo.io
“I’ve seen them (Interactive demos) used with partner teams like marketing and CS as well to help everyone prepare as best as they can for GTM efforts. And of course, there’s nothing like watching your customer explore features and derive value without actually using the product itself in a way that gives you the feedback you need to build a solution. All around this tool tells a story and aligns people to the problem that you’re seeking to solve.”, Christine Itwaru, Pendo
This post is sponsored by Storylane, drive product-led growth with no-code interactive product demos including integrated tracking.
Further material
At the 32:40 timestamp, David Yockelson and I talk about Interactive Demos on the ProducTea. If you listen to just one thing, that’s the one conversation you should listen to.
I want to hear from you!
Put it in the comments:
Do you have interactive demos as part of your offering? Yay or nay?
Did you face any difficulties yourself when using interactive demos?
Is there an outstanding experience you had with an interactive demo from a supplier?
This wraps up the three-part series on the state of product-led growth onboarding. What do you want me to cover next?
Love this movement. No matter your GTM, interactive product demos are huge. I’m finding all of my best clients are using Navattic.com as it’s a genuinely interactive product demo vs slides or video.
Interactive demos are killing it! We decided to move with Guideflow.com for our SaaS, it's a super cool tool to create interactive demos in seconds!