How to get more buyers to request a demo from your sales team
How to get more buyers to request a demo from your sales team
Turns out there's a killer tool for that
Ok. Let’s kick this off with two questions:
Hands up if your sales team wants more buyers to request a demo on your website 🙋🏽 Ok, that was an easy one. Hands down.
Now think back to the last time you purchased software. Hands up if you’re excited about requesting a demo from a vendor site 🙅🏽 Yep, thought so.
Requesting a demo is a frustrating experience for buyers (and it’s inefficient for sellers)
I’m not surprised if you didn’t raise your hand to the second question because here’s what requesting a demo typically entails:
You fill out a form on the website and book a meeting with an SDR.
You wait a couple of days for the next meeting.
You endure the SDR’s qualifying questions and act delighted when the SDR says it sounds like you a good fit to meet with the AE. You book a call with the AE.
You wait a couple of days for the next meeting.
You endure the AE’s discovery questions and act delighted when the AE says it sounds like a good next step is a product demo. You book a demo call with the AE.
You wait a couple of days for the next meeting.
You get a demo of the product. (FINALLY!) Then immediately endure more sales pressure.
At this point you’ve spent a week waiting and a couple of hours on the phone with salespeople to get to the point of beginning to evaluate the product. It’s not just frustrating, it runs counter to how we buy things today.
Today’s buyers prefer to do their own research and see a product in action before talking to a salesperson and expect a “show, don’t tell” experience that doesn’t involve enduring an interrogation lightly disguised as a discovery call.
The typical request-a-demo experience also creates inefficiencies for sellers. Go look up how many of your opportunities are closed lost after the demo because the buyer wasn’t ready to move forward (“timing not right”) or discovered the product wasn’t a fit (“feature gap”). It’s a real number.
Now multiply that that number by the time your team spent working those opportunities. 30 minutes for your SDR to prep and hold the initial call. 45 minutes for your AE to prep and hold the discovery call. 60+ minutes for your AE to prep and hold the demo call. It adds up to a lot of wasted time that could have been spent fully pursuing higher intent buyers.
The basic way to fix this is to put the demo on your website so buyers can see it before talking to you
There’s no better way to get excited about a new product than by seeing it in action (That’s why the “request-a-demo” button became the de-facto call-to-action in software sales). The simple way to do this is by recording a video of yourself demoing the product and there are lots of tools to do this.
But if you want to do it well you need to:
Write a script that addresses who your buyer is, the problems they have, explains how your product solves the problem and communicates the impact they will see.
Record a few takes to make sure your voice over and your visuals match up. Few things are more confusing than looking at a busy product dashboard while listening to the voiceover talking about something else, or watching a mouse moving in frantic circles to highlight an area of the product.
Create a final product. Edit the best take, add an intro slide, add captions, add a call to action. It’s a lot of work and no wonder most teams end up outsourcing this to a video production agency.
But putting a polished demo video on your website doesn’t actually solve the problem. It just creates a maintenance nightmare.
What if your product has multiple use cases for different people? Do you create one long demo showing the whole product only for nobody to watch it until the end? Do you create multiple demos, one for each stakeholder and increase your production costs?
What happens if additional stakeholders need a demo? How do you personalize them? How do you keep the quality consistent with the polished demo on your website?
What happens when your product changes? How do you keep track of all the demos that have been created? How do you decide which ones need updating?
How do you track which demo actually drives conversion? How is your demo video hosting platform integrated into your CRM?
The pro way to fix this is with a demo automation platform, like Storylane
Demo automation is an exciting new category of sales and marketing tech that allows sales teams to educate and engage prospects early in the sales process and provide analytics to qualify leads. It’s a win-win for both buyers and sellers.
I’ve teamed up with Storylane, the leader in the demo automation category to tell you about how they have solved this problem for 500+ companies including Gong, Clari, Twilio and Nutanix.
Storylane is a demo automation platform that helps sales and marketing teams increase qualified leads and shorten sales cycles with personalized product demos that can be built in a few minutes.
With Storylane you can:
Create templates for different buyer personas and use cases to guide them through your product.
Create personalized demos that your champion can share internally with their colleagues to get buy-in.
Analyze engagement to figure out which demos are driving qualified leads.
Integrate into your existing stack (Salesforce, Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo etc) for a full view of ROI.
Here’s how Clari is using Storylane on their website
And here’s how Gong is using Storylane on their website
Want to learn more?
Go to Storylane’s website to see it in action for yourself! Like literally go see a Storylane of Storylane. It’s brilliant.
PS thank you to Storylane for supporting this issue of the newsletter!
If you found this post useful, please share it with your colleagues. And if you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing. I help startups design and execute their go-to-market strategy — each week I pick a common issue and provide a specific, actionable solution that you can apply immediately.