Captivate, educate, and convert potential buyers with interactive product demos throughout their buyer's journey. Discover eight powerful ways to strategically incorporate these demos and provide a seamless and captivating experience.

Imagine this

- Your buyer understands your product well even before they speak to your sales rep

- Your buyer has convinced other stakeholders to invest their interest

- Your buyer asks you the right questions with high intent to purchase 

Too good to be true? 

Well, this is exactly the outcome when you take the progressive approach to product demos. Today, as attention spans are dwindling and competition is fierce, it's crucial to find innovative ways to capture the interest of potential buyers.That's where interactive product demos play a vital role by allowing users to experience at their convenience, anytime, and throughout the journey. 

But here's the best part – interactive demos can be strategically integrated at different stages of the buyer's journey, maximising their impact and guiding potential customers toward a purchase decision. From initial discovery to the final evaluation, these demos act as interactive touchpoints, ensuring a seamless and captivating experience for your buyers.

Now, you might be wondering, how exactly can you leverage interactive product demos throughout the buyer's journey. Well, we've got you covered! 

In this article, we'll unveil eight powerful ways to incorporate these demos into your sales process, enabling you to captivate, educate, and convert buyers.

1. Add a Demo Library section on your website:

Modern B2B buyers are very clear on what they want: a personalised experience, convenience of self-serve, and relevant information to help them learn. A significant portion of the buyer's journey takes place before the buyer even interacts with a salesperson. This gives a unique opportunity for you to engage with buyers and exert a real influence on their decision-making process.

A demo library serves as a curated collection of interactive product demos, specifically tailored to different industries, personas, and use cases. By offering buyers the freedom to explore and choose from various elements within the library, you can instantly provide relevant answers to their questions and address their specific needs.

Imagine a virtual space where buyers can browse through a wide range of interactive product demos, organised based on industries such as healthcare, finance, e-commerce, or manufacturing. 

Within each industry category, subcategories can cater to specific personas, such as executives, developers, or marketers. Furthermore, the demos can be further refined based on various use cases, addressing different pain points and showcasing the value of the product.

Here’s an example of a well-designed demo library from Celonis who has taken a similar approach of segmenting the demo library based on industry and use case. Buyers can explore the demos at their own pace, gaining a deeper understanding of the product and fast forwarding the informed decisions. 

The demo library provides you with a granular level of customization that empowers buyers to take control of their exploration process and helps you deeply qualify the leads before they enter your sales pipeline. Such immersive experience builds trust, and confidence, and acts as a catalyst for sales teams to build relations.

2. Add them to your outbound campaigns

Outbound campaigns often face the challenge of low response rates, typically hovering around 10-15%. Why? It’s often due to a lack of personalization, non engaging emails, standard calls to action, and more. 

Many leads remain unresponsive to the messaging because they are approached by someone they don't know. Furthermore, asking for their time without offering anything in return creates a value exchange gap between you and potential buyers.

Instead of bombarding leads with generic emails and asking for their time, you offer them an opportunity to engage with your product. By helping the leads visualise the benefits they can expect, you solve the value exchange gap.

This is where interactive demos come into play. By incorporating interactive product demos into outbound campaigns, you can significantly increase open and reply rates, capturing the attention and interest of your target audience.

For example, when a lead encounters an interactive demo within your outbound campaign, they are given a choice to experience and then make the decision. They can explore the features, functionalities, and potential use cases of your product in a hands-on manner. This interactive nature captures their attention and creates a sense of involvement, driving up curiosity and motivation to learn more.

This value exchange of showcasing your product's capabilities in exchange for their time and attention establishes a more equal footing, increasing the likelihood of a positive response.

Here’s an example of how you can add interactive demos in your emails, 

3. Qualification questionnaire in the first call  

At the qualification stage buyers are prompted to complete a short survey before diving into the interactive demo. This survey is designed to gather essential information about the buyer, including their company, department, role, and specific interests. 

By collecting this data upfront, you can ensure that the subsequent sales meetings are tailored and personalised to address their unique needs and requirements.

Using interactive demos at the qualification stage of the buyer journey offers certain benefits. Like, 

• Build rapport: It demonstrates that you value their time and are genuinely interested in understanding their specific pain points and challenges. 
• Sense of collaboration: Buyers become more emotionally and mentally invested in the demo process. This more likely leads to scheduling a follow-up call with your sales team.
• Data insights: The data from the qualification survey provides your sales team with relevant background information about the buyer, enabling them to have more informed and targeted conversations moving forward. 

This accelerates the sales process, as your team can immediately understand the buyer's context, pain points, and interests, allowing for more effective communication.

Furthermore, when buyers engage with the interactive demo and see the product in action early on, they can assess its relevance to their specific needs. If they feel that your product is not a good fit for them, they will likely opt out of the process. 

This improved qualification reduces noise for your sales teams, who would otherwise have to invest time in meetings and discussions only to reach the same conclusion. By disqualifying leads that will never convert anyway, you can focus your sales efforts on those who have demonstrated genuine interest and alignment with your product.

Here’s an example of the qualification survey before taking the interactive product demo,

This combination of a pre-demo survey and interactive product demo for qualification enables you to gather data, tailor the demos to buyers needs, and educate the leads before they meet your sales teams. 

4. Using the menu approach for the discovery stage

A sales discovery demo stands out from your typical product demo, as its primary purpose is not to directly sell the product. Instead, it serves as a conversation starter to understand the needs and pain points of potential customers. 

One of the key advantages of interactive demos for the discovery stage is the ability to strike a balance between asking questions and showcasing the product. 

Using a demo library with a menu-like selection allows your sales team to easily navigate between pain points, corresponding benefits and showcases of success with other clients.  This approach prompts a thoughtful discussion that leads to a deeper understanding of what the buyer truly needs.

Rather than asking buyers a series of interrogative questions, the demo itself becomes a catalyst for conversation. As buyers navigate through the case studies and explore the various features and benefits, they naturally share their thoughts, preferences, and pain points. This creates an organic flow of dialogue where questions arise naturally from the interactive experience. Cherry on the cake, this approach widens the line of vision for the buyer helping them verbalise the problems they didn't know they had.Here’s an example of how a demo library with a menu approach,

By leveraging interactive demos during the sales discovery stage, it allows buyers to see the product in action instantly, providing a contextual understanding of how it can address their specific needs. This approach creates a more engaging and collaborative environment, where buyers feel actively involved and heard.

5. Instant demo delivery of mid-funnel demos

Interactive product demos can be incredibly valuable during the mid-funnel stage of the buyer journey, which is often characterised as a lengthy and labour labor-intensive phase. 

Typically, sales teams find themselves conducting multiple sessions with potential buyers, ranging from four to even eight or more. In many cases, these demos involve customization to address specific client requirements, resulting in a significant amount of time and effort from the presales teams. 

However, a considerable portion of these sessions often involves repetitive questions and concerns from multiple buyers in different opportunities. By leveraging interactive demos in the mid-funnel stage, the repetitive nature of these sessions can be streamlined and simplified. 

Rather than reinventing the wheel for each session, demo experience platforms allow you to create demo templates to accelerate the delivery process of frequently requested demos. 

The Account Executives can access ready-to-use demo galleries, personalising the content to specific deals and delivering it live to the buyer without delays.As presales don’t need to produce the custom demos for each deal but rather create a set & forget libraries they save time and can focus on more complex proof-of-concept demos. 

This immediate availability of demos leads to a shorter sales cycle, higher buyer engagement, and higher deal velocity. Interactive product demos effectively enable sales teams to save time for presales and facilitate smoother progress through the mid-funnel stage.

6. Nail every live demo, every time.

Live demos are an opportunity for the buyer to ask questions and gain a deeper understanding of the product. Oftentimes presales are pulled into any live sessions due to limited technical knowledge of the AEs to answer all the questions from the buyer.

Here's how interactive demos can be included in the live demo stage and how they can help:

1. Enhancing message consistency: Interactive demos with speaker notes functionality allow presales to add notes, instructions, and guidance to the AEs. This ensures that the key messages, value propositions, and product features are accurately conveyed, creating compelling demos across different AEs.
2. Showcasing multichannel journeys without jumping through the apps. Interactive demos allow you to demonstrate complex journeys across multiple platforms and applications, all in one seamless journey. The AEs can even integrate elements of the prospect's digital ecosystem, creating a hyper-personalised experience. .
3. Enabling tracking and insights: Interactive demos, provide organisations with valuable insights into live demo engagements. These insights help organisations gain visibility into demo performance and can be used to inform sales strategies, identify areas for improvement, and enable more informed decision-making.See more here  
4. Personalising the live demo experience: Interactive demos can be tailored to meet the specific needs and interests of each buyer for any  live demo session. AEs can use the demo library to navigate through different features and showcase functionalities that are most relevant to the buyer's requirements. This personalised approach enhances buyer engagement, as they can see firsthand how the product addresses its unique challenges.

By incorporating interactive demos in the live demo session, organisations can overcome challenges related to message consistency, sales enablement, and visibility into the demo performance. AEs can deliver more consistent and compelling demos, leveraging the speaker notes and interactive elements provided by the presales experts. 

7. Use them as leave-behind demos for the follow-up stage

Imagine this scenario: during the sales call, the buyer expressed interest in a particular feature of your software. Rather than sending them a lengthy document explaining its functionality, provide them with a quick and interactive self-guided demo showcasing that feature in action. 

This allows the buyer to explore and experience the feature firsthand, gaining a deeper understanding of its value and relevance to their specific needs. 

Furthermore, if the buyer shares a similar challenge or problem with one of your existing customers, seize the opportunity to demonstrate how your software successfully addressed that issue. 

The key advantage of interactive leave behind demos is their engaging nature. They capture the buyer's attention, allowing better recall than static one-pagers. 

Buyers can interact with the demos at their own pace, a explore specific features or relevant use cases that align with their interests. This level of personalization and interactivity enhances the buyer's engagement and understanding, ultimately influencing their buying decision.

Interactive demos can be effectively utilised in the follow-up stage of the buyer journey to, 

1. Provide recap and personalised highlights: You can reinforce the value proposition and keep their attention focused on the most relevant aspects of the product.
2. Enable Exploration of specific features: By allowing them to interact with the demo and explore those areas on their own, you empower buyers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how the product can address their unique requirements.
3. Addressing objections and concerns: By incorporating interactive elements, such as case studies, testimonials, or comparison charts, you can demonstrate how the product overcomes objections and provides solutions to their concerns.
4. Nurturing ongoing engagement: By adding interactive elements like quizzes, surveys, or interactive walkthroughs, you can keep buyers actively engaged with the demo content. 
5. Stakeholder mappingInteractive demos sent to your champion can be shared internally within the organisation building a viral effect and allowing the vendor to meet all the stakeholders in the decision-making process. Thanks to built-in comments- the vendors get the first row seat at the internal conversation about the purchase.

8. Make interactive product demos of your deal-closing asset

In the closing stage of the buyer journey, the effectiveness of the closing demo can make or break a deal. At this point, the buyer knows the product, and other stakeholders are involved to make a decision. 

To bring the deal home, it's crucial for you to provide a personalised demo experience that caters to the specific needs and interests of each stakeholder involved in the decision-making process.

One effective way to achieve this is by implementing a short survey at the beginning of the closing demo. This survey prompts the stakeholders to identify their roles and functions within the organisation. Based on their responses, the system can dynamically link them to different and personalised demo experiences. 

For example, the CEO might be interested in high-level strategic benefits, the CFO may focus on financial implications, the end user might be concerned about usability and features, and the economic buyer is interested in the overall ROI.

By tailoring the closing demo content to address the unique perspectives and priorities of each stakeholder, you can create a highly relevant and compelling experience. This personalised approach showcases the value of the product in a way that resonates with each decision-maker, increasing their confidence and likelihood of moving forward with the purchase.

Instead of delivering a one-size-fits-all presentation, leveraging reliable sales demo environments empower you to share interactive product demos with all stakeholders. This interactivity fosters a deeper understanding and connection with the product, as stakeholders can interact with features, navigate through relevant use cases, and even simulate specific scenarios. 

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Build a seamless buyer journey experience with Demoboost

Buyer enablement is essential in today's competitive market, and it must meet a minimum set of standards to effectively support potential buyers throughout their journey.

The best buyer enablement goes beyond simply providing information and interactions. It should encompass several key aspects, including being shareable, aligning with customers' emotional needs, instilling confidence, and leading back to the supplier's unique differentiators. Platforms like Demoboost empower you to build interactive, personalised, and data-driven experiences that allow potential buyers to make informed decisions.