There is an epic battle raging on right now between buyers and sellers. Buyers have access to more information, private communities, and research reports than ever before. This makes them more educated about a problem area and the various solutions long before they come to the table looking for a demo. They want the control of being able to see a solution demo before they are shoved into a long and arduous sales process.

On the flip side, sellers want to hold back doing a demo only for the buyers that actually have a possibility of purchasing (also referred to as a highly qualified buyer). If a buyer is “just browsing” and not likely to make a purchase right now, well then it’s a waste of time across all sales resources to engage with them. This “gating” of product demos until a buyer is deemed highly qualified has been a staple of sales processes on the seller side for almost two decades.

So here we are, at an impasse of when and how to deliver a demo. It’s a dumb argument, but luckily it is one that can also easily be solved.

What Sellers Really Need

Hiring people is expensive. Hiring really good salespeople is really expensive. In fact, it (payroll) is probably the number one expense in most organizations. So if a vendor is paying a whole lot of money for good sales talent, they probably want to ensure that they are making the best use of their time! This means focusing their sales teams on customer opportunities with the highest likelihood of success. Additionally, there is a need to automate certain tasks (like building demos) so sales teams can spend more time with their high intent customers. Both of these goals boil down to one outcome; reducing Go-to-Market (GTM) waste.

With the rise of demo automation software, this can now become a reality. For one, demos can be built once and captured in a (demo) library to be reused again in the future. Additionally, those captured demos can be turned into product tours that live directly on the website. By delivering these product tour demos to buyers, it gives them the “look and feel” of your product that they are after without the need to engage directly with the sales team. However, if a buyer wants to dive deeper and see more of the product, the sales team will be notified and that buyer will tend to have a high level of purchasing intent (vs someone just blindly submitting a demo request). 

But wait, there’s more! When a buyer interacts with a product tour demo they are providing some level of analytics behind the scenes with areas, or use cases, that resonate most with them. If they move into a live demo, the sales team can use that (first-party) intent data to deliver value faster and more accurately forecast their deals.

There is a lot of upside for sellers by using demo automation, but what about the buyer?

What Buyers Really Need

If you look at most vendor websites in cybersecurity they are littered with buzzwords and industry jargon that doesn’t do a great job of describing what problem the vendor actually solves. This is unfortunate, particularly when most buyers have at least some idea of the problem they are trying to solve. Let’s say for a moment that your website does a really good job of explaining your solution and how it can help. Awesome. But most buyers still want to “see it” so they can envision how they, or their teams, will ultimately use the product. This includes how it integrates with their existing tech stack.

By seeing a demo of your product, a buyer can start to fill in the blanks of both the why and the how regarding your product. The problem though is that they want to achieve this without always being forced into a sales process. Being able to see a demo directly on a vendor’s website would allow some buyers to qualify themselves out as “not a fit”. To some vendors this sounds terrifying because they are always playing a numbers game to acquire more leads. But isn’t the ultimate goal to reduce GTM waste? Isn’t that exactly what would happen if more buyers who actually were ready to buy “opted in” for a live demo?

Buyers simply want a better buying experience and with product tours, sellers are finally in a better position to deliver it. The question isn’t, “Should we only demo to highly qualified leads?”, but rather, “How can we deliver a better buying experience to drive demo requests with higher intent?”. Through the intent data that demo automation provides, you can respond to both types of requests; live demos for high intent signals and product tour demos for low intent signals.

With the reduction of GTM waste and ability to deliver differentiated demos based on intent type…this myth is officially busted!