The average prospect's attention span is shrinking, so traditional sales demo methods must be revised to make a lasting impression. As per our own Survey Report, 77% of software purchasers confirm that their recent purchase process was complex or presented challenges. This complexity in the buying process leads to lost sales opportunities. 

Let’s explore steps and tips for creating interactive demos that will turn passive viewers into active participants and increase your conversions.

What is an interactive demo?

An interactive demo is a dynamic, self-guided software walkthrough that lets prospects experience the product firsthand. It's like a guided experience in a controlled environment where you explore the software's features by interacting directly and testing it in real-time.

However, unlike trials, interactive demos offer walkthroughs for guided navigation, making it easier for prospects to explore the product's value. Unlike traditional static demos or one-way product demo videos, interactive demo builder offer personalised, immersive experiences that enhance your product's appeal and understanding.

Interactive demos help you understand how a product works like a real one. Such an experience can help sales and marketing teams increase engagement, adoption, and sales. Gartner found that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience, suggesting a strong preference for self-service options. 

Note: A hybrid approach that blends digital and human-led sales strategies provides optimal value to B2B buyers.

Sellers find it challenging to build confidence and a sense of control in buyers during the purchasing process. Most progressive interactive demos consist of multiple capabilities that are constantly evolving. To cater to the needs of a modern buyer, it’s vital to understand the ability of interactive demos and how they can help you engage with your prospects better. With an interactive demo platform, you can:

• Create immersive virtual simulations hosted on the cloud
• Build a personalised interactive product tour for specific use cases, personal or even specific individual 
• Develop narrative using text/audio/video to present value even in the unassisted use cases
• Gamify for higher engagement and improve lead velocity
• Easily share and embed into your outreach materials

Read: Why companies are looking beyond video product demos‍

6 Steps to create interactive demos:

Listed below is a step-by-step approach to create interactive product demo:

• Step 1: Identify your Ideal Customer Profile
• Step 2: Understand the buyer journey
• Step 3: Create an empathy map
• Step 4: Segment for effective personalisation
• Step 5: Choose the right interactive demo software
• Step 6: Measure the results

Here is a detailed walkthrough of each step.

Step 1: Identify your Ideal Customer Profile

Before creating interactive demos, you must identify your audience and understand their needs, goals, and pain points. This will help you tailor your demo to their specific situation and make it more engaging.

Tip: Use data from existing customer interactions, such as support tickets and sales feedback, to build a comprehensive ICP (Ideal customer profile). This real-world data enriches your understanding of customer needs and helps close more deals.

Step 2: Understand the buyer journey

As you figure out your personas, it’s crucial to map out their journey right from acquisition to conversion. Create a journey map and find out the touchpoints that are more effective for users who reached the AHA moments and for users who converted. This will give your product demos the arsenal to be more effective! A journey map will let you,

Tip: Regularly update your journey map based on customer feedback and changing market conditions to keep your demos relevant and effective.

• Find the top AHA moments for each persona
• Figure out what touchpoints the persona goes through and has friction
• Learn how effective your value proposition is

Read: Demos are crucial to every step of customer journey

Step 3: Create an empathy map

Once you have the buyer journey ready, create an empathy map outlining specific needs, concerns, or fears along the buying journey. This map will be the backbone of your storytelling and allow you to craft the narrative.

Now, you can ensure the information you share at each stage of the funnel is relevant and engaging. Furthermore, by mapping out and phasing your story across several demos, you can avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information too early, which oftentimes can have a detrimental effect.

Tip: Involve sales, product marketing, and development teams to gather diverse insights into customer emotions and pain points.

Step 4: Segment for effective personalisation

Segment your users into the personas you are targeting and personalise a specific demo per persona (e.g., the CFO might need a different argument to buy into your offering than the sponsor or daily user). 

Instead of focusing on features, highlight how your product can solve the problem of your targeted persona. Personalising the demo based on segmentation will address each stakeholder’s needs and concerns, speeding up the sales process.

Tip: Utilise behavioural data from your CRM and analytics tools to further refine persona segments. This will ensure that each demo is highly targeted to user expectations and needs.

Step 5: Choose the right interactive demo software

To help you create interactive product demos, it's crucial to find the right software that allows you to create these demos. You will always find a bunch of tools out there, but not all can cater to your needs. So before you move ahead, determine what you need and see if the product tour tool matches them well. The best interactive demo software usually includes:

• Easy personalisation
• Intuitive interface (no-code preferable)
• Easy to scale
• Integration with your tools
• Enterprise focused and secure
• Advanced analytics and reporting

Step 6: Measure the results

Measure the results of your interactive product demo to see how effective it is. Use analytics to track engagement, conversion rates, and other metrics to see what is working and what needs improvement. Keep experimenting till you find out what works.

Tip: In addition to standard metrics like engagement and conversion, track user feedback through surveys integrated at the end of the demo. Using this method, users can gain qualitative insights into their satisfaction and areas for improvement.

How to create interactive demo with Demoboost?

Here are the general steps to create interactive demos using Demoboost,

1. Plan: Before you begin creating the demo, figure out where in the buyer's journey the demo would fit. Determine whether it's on your website (for visitors), in-app (for customers and onboarding), or whether a follow-up demo to shorten the sales cycle. Understanding the demo cycle methodology plays a crucial role in planning your creation process.

2. Build the storyboard: Once you have a plan ready, you can determine what use cases and benefits of the product you want to showcase. Create a storyboard or script to guide the creation process. Figure out your narrative for the demo. The storytelling through a demo is like peeling an onion- you start with very generic problem-solution statements, bring your prospect closer to specific benefits per persona, and finally describe the features that drive those benefits. With Demoboost you can also take our team's help to create the desired product demos for you.

3. Capture Screens: As you create a storyboard, you can capture your product seamlessly. With our Chrome extension, you can clone your product with just one click in our secure cloud environment and then build your best story for sales. At Demoboost, security comes first, so you don’t have to worry about the data.

4. Customise: One of the most effective ways to make the demo engaging and informative is the ability to customise. Add interactive elements such as text bubbles, videos, images, and weblinks to allow users to interact with your custom demo and learn about the product. Additionally, use your narrative through audio and video to enhance the demo. This adds a more engaging layer and allows you to guide the leads through the story.

5. Test and refine: Once you have created the interactive demo, test it thoroughly to ensure that it works as expected. Refine the design and content based on user feedback to create the most effective and engaging demo possible.

6. Publish and share: Finally, publish the interactive demo and share it with your target audience. Demoboost allows you to embed the demo on your web page or a standalone shareable link. A shareable link makes it easy for you to reach your prospects faster and help them sail through the buyer's journey.

7. Analyse and enhance: Track your users' interaction with the product demo using built-in insights. Gather feedback from customers/users and keep improving your product demos for an enhanced experience.

7 ways to showcase your interactive demos with examples

Creating interactive demos is probably the first step. However, what's also important is how you can deliver them to your buyer. It should be at the buyers’  fingertips wherever they are researching, reading or gaining information about your product. Let’s deep dive into the best possible ways where you can add these interactive demos and make it more effective.

1. Place it on Homepage:

Your product itself is the best starting where the buyers first land. One of the most effective ways to showcase an interactive demo is by adding it to the homepage of your website. This will make it visible to all visitors and increase the chances of engagement and conversion.

Here’s how Octiv Fitness did it, by adding it right at the Hero section of their website.

2. Embed in blogs/communities:

Embedding interactive demos in blogs and communities can be a powerful way to showcase the value of your product to your target audience. Using Demoboost you can easily add them to areas where your audience is being most active.

Here’s how Atlassian has used interactive demos on their community to bridge the gap between product and marketing.

3. Add them in live chat:

Live chat can be an effective way to engage with prospects and answer their questions in real-time. Embedding an interactive demo in the live chat can help to showcase the value of the product instantly, thus helping leads to make decisions faster.

Here’s how Dooly uses it in their chat, explaining their features with an interactive demo for better understanding of the product.

4. Create a Product Demo Library:

Creating the library can be a valuable asset for organizations. It can help to improve the customer experience, increase conversion rates, reduce support costs, provide a competitive advantage, and provide a scalable way to provide customers with information about your product.

Here’s how Limitless uses the interactive demos to educate the users for their specific needs.

5. Dedicated demos for use case:

Adding interactive demos for specific use cases makes it much easier for the user to resonate with your product. This makes your demo more personalised to users' needs and increases engagement. You can also add these demo’s across the website on footer, pop-ups and even webinars.

Here’s how Celonis uses interactive demos for its use cases.

6. Include in email outreach campaigns: 

Adding interactive demos in email campaigns can be one of the most effective ways to allow people to experience your product. The targeted audience can know what your product offers using a simulated interface of your product just at a click of a button. You can use the product demos for multiple use cases in an email like newsletters, product update emails, cold outreach emails and more. 

7. Add in sales calls:

Sales teams can use interactive demos in their demo call presentations to showcase the product's key features and benefits. This can result in better engagement and higher recall for the prospect, leading to higher conversion rates.

👉 Check out our Interactive product demo examples to gain more valuable insights and inspiration.

KPIs to monitor the performance Of your interactive product demo

When measuring the effectiveness of your interactive product demos, consider tracking the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Engagement Rate: Measure how long users interact with your demo, including which features they explore.
• Completion Rate: Track the percentage of users who complete the demo from start to finish.
• Conversion Rate: Monitor how many demo viewers convert into leads or customers.
• Drop-off Points: Identify where users tend to exit the demo, indicating potential areas of confusion or disinterest.
• Feedback Scores: Collect and analyse user feedback on the demo’s clarity and usefulness.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Evaluate the effectiveness of calls-to-action within your demo.

Tip for Optimisation: Regularly review these KPIs to identify trends and areas for improvement. Also, perform A/B testing for different demo elements, such as the layout, content, and calls-to-action, to see what changes positively affect your KPIs. This will help you fine-tune your demo to appeal to prospects and enhance overall demo performance.

That's All Folks!

Interactive product demos can be an incredibly effective tool for engaging with potential customers and showcasing the value of your product, even before the prospects meet your sales rep. By following the steps outlined in this blog, you can create interactive demos that boost conversion rates and streamline your sales cycles. So why not start creating product demos today and see the benefits for yourself?

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