Buyer enablement is a crucial aspect of converting your prospects into customers. Enabling your buyers means presenting them with the information to support their purchase decision and encouraging them to take action. When selling software solutions, buyer enablement can become an incredibly powerful tool, as a prominent purchasing barrier is often a prospect's lack of knowledge about how a software service can resolve their pain points. 

A live demo is definitely the climax of any deal, but what happens after the prospect attends a live demo meeting? They're usually left with a desire to further explore the software's capabilities. This is where the leave-behind demo enters the sales process and turns your champion into the hero. 

Here at Demoboost, we offer the ultimate demo creation tool, allowing you to enable your presales team with perfect and highly customizable interactive demos. You can create the ultimate leave-behind demo, enabling your champion with arguments tailored to each stakeholder in the purchase decision. In this article, we define a leave-behind demo, discuss what makes a powerful leave-behind demo, and outline its benefits.

What is a leave-behind demo?

A leave-behind demo, also known as a follow-up demo, is an interactive demonstration of a software's capabilities that you provide to a prospect after a live product presentation. For example, you're presenting a customer relationship management (CRM) software solution to a potential buyer. You conduct a live presentation of the CRM's capabilities, showing the prospect how the product can solve their pain points. During this session, you discuss many features, provide examples of the product's solutions, and answer the prospect's questions. Rather than emailing a pdf summary of the session, you can present the prospect with a follow-up demo. 

A follow-up demo isn't just a recording of the live session or a quick summation of the software's capabilities, it's an interactive demo tailored to the champion, giving them access to the product. Presales and sales representatives can tailor leave-behinds by summarising discussions, addressing prospects' questions and including relevant examples of the products' solutions. The champion can now share this leave-behind internally, turning your champion into your best salesperson as they provide the key stakeholders involved in the purchase decision with relevant info.

What makes a powerful leave-behind demo?

Below, you can explore three key aspects to consider when creating an optimized handoff demo for champion enablement:

1. Personalization

Arguably, one of the most crucial aspects of making powerful leave-behinds is personalization. If you're sending the prospect a follow-up demo, it typically means you've passed the sales discovery stage and already have some helpful information about the prospect and their pain points. You can use this information to tailor a leave-behind that includes details, such as a personalized welcome message calling out the names of all parties involved in the live demo. You can also create a highly tailored and personalized follow-up demo by addressing the discussions, examples, and questions presented during a live session. For example, if the prospect asked questions about the product's automation capabilities, you can ensure the leave-behind demo includes examples of automated tasks. 

2. Timing

Don't underestimate the power of good timing! One sure way to impress your champion is to present a highly personalized demo immediately after the live demonstration. This can allow your champion to review the product while the discussions from the live session are fresh in their mind. If you wait too long before sending a handoff demo, the champion may explore other products, the stakeholders may lose interest and the champion might forget about the discussions and solutions from the live session. 

3. Quality

For the live demonstration, your presales or sales team likely worked hard to create a quality live demo. It would be a shame to let that hard work go to waste by not sharing it and asking the champion to further spread your efforts around the organisation. In the session, you had rich conversations and heard the prospect’s questions and concerns. Your live demo’s value can only be augmented by providing a follow-up that individually addresses all those points. If you present a high-quality follow-up demo to the champion, you can prove to them you were listening. They can then present the demo to the other stakeholders, further strengthening the quality of your live presentation. 

Benefits of an effective follow-up demo

Here, you can explore several reasons a leave-behind might be the ultimate game changer for your sales process:

• Ensures an engaging and interactive demo environment: An advantageous and powerful aspect of a leave-behind is that it's substantially more engaging than a non-interactive video recording. Prospects don't want to review a live session they just experienced. They want to use the product and experience it in all its glory!
• Shortens the sales cycle: The ultimate goal of a leave-behind is to enable your champion, turn them into your best salesperson, and close deals quicker. A follow-up demo achieves exactly this! You can shorten the sales cycle by driving the viral effect of demo sharing and, therefore, fast-track stakeholders toward making a purchase decision. 
• Turns your champion into your best AE: It’s a wide known fact that building a strong relationship with the champion is not enough to close a deal.  Statistics show that 11 to 20 individuals take part in B2B purchase decisions. Your leave-behind demo turns your champion into your best sales rep, as it equips them with the scripted narrative you’ve tailored to their organisation. 

Level up your leave-behind with Demoboost

Now that you know how a leave-behind can benefit your sales and presales team, the next step is to use a tool that enables your demo teams. To send a high-quality, timely and personalized follow-up demo, you need the right tools for the job. Demoboost provides incredible features to streamline demo creations, ensuring high-quality demo environments, a shorter sales cycle and, ultimately, more sales! 

With Demoboost, you can create an extensive demo library, providing you with personalized templates to suit every champion. With a demo library, you can send handoff demos at rapid speeds, ensure consistent quality and personalize demos with ease. 

It's time to experience the ultimate sales enablement tool to level up your leave-behinds! Book a demo today!