Studies show that 94% of B2B buyers find demos very influential in their purchasing decisions. However, crafting such demos is a time-intensive endeavour, demanding technical finesse. This is precisely the gap that demo automation tools aim to bridge, making the process both efficient and accessible.

Storylane is an interactive demo software that allows businesses to quickly and easily create personalised, engaging product demos and tours in just 10 minutes, without any coding. Its key capabilities include screen capturing, on-screen guides, real-time editing, analytics, and seamless integration with most marketing and sales tools. 

With Storylane, various teams can deliver consistent product experiences at scale, provide self-service demos for prospects to explore key features and capabilities, capture prospect behaviour data to optimise messaging, and accelerate deal cycles by qualifying leads faster. 

In this blog, we will delve into the world of Storylane, exploring its features, benefits, integrations, and pricing, and how it performs in the landscape of demo automation software.

The evolution of demo automation tools

Demo automation tools have evolved significantly over the past decade to become indispensable sales enablement software. In the early 2010s, basic video recording tools laid the foundation for demo automation by allowing sales reps to easily capture product walkthrough videos. However, these early tools lacked customizability and analytics. 

Later, a new wave of platforms emerged, offering interactive demo builders with more advanced functionality. Key innovations included branch logic to support personalised demo flows, prospect data tracking for analytics, and integrations with leading CRM and marketing automation platforms. 

Today's leading demo automation platforms focus on enhancing the buyer experience through self-guided, interactive product tours. Using intuitive drag-and-drop editors, sales and marketing teams can quickly build guided demos with multimedia content blocks and dynamic personalization. These tools have been instrumental in reducing the number of live demos required, thereby shortening sales cycles and boosting win rates. 

Furthermore, they provide data-rich discovery information on a per-user basis, equipping sales and presales teams with rich insights. As the market matures, demo automation tools have thus transformed the sales process, making it more efficient and customer-centric.

What is Storylane demo automation tool?

Storylane is a demo automation software designed to help businesses create personalised, interactive product demos without the need for coding. It is particularly useful for sales and  marketing teams to demonstrate their product's value to prospects and facilitate a test drive of the product's features. Storylane allows users to capture their product, edit the demo, add guides, and share it with prospects, all within a short time frame, often in as little as 10 minutes. 

The platform is known for its ease of use, enterprise-grade security features, and the ability to integrate with over 3000 other tools through Zapier, as well as native integrations with popular CRM and marketing platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Which teams use Storylane and for what?

Storylane is a versatile platform that is used by various teams to enhance their operations and achieve their goals. Here are some of the teams that use Storylane for various purposes: 

1. Sales Teams

Sales teams leverage Storylane to craft and share interactive product demos with potential clients, effectively communicating the product's value proposition and driving sales by tailoring the experience to the prospect's needs.

2. Growth & Demand Marketing Teams

Demand marketing professionals utilise Storylane to create and disseminate product demos within their campaigns, aiming to captivate leads and clearly articulate the product's utility, thereby boosting demand generation and conversion rates.

3. Product Marketing Teams

Product marketing teams harness the power of Storylane to demonstrate new features and optimise product messaging, providing the sales force with effective demo tools to excite and engage customers, ultimately driving product adoption.

4. Customer Success Teams

Customer success teams use Storylane to facilitate customer onboarding and education, by creating comprehensive guides that enhance product understanding and usage, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What are the key features of Storylane?

Storylane offers a suite of unique features designed to help users create compelling, interactive product demos. Here are some of the key features:

• No-Code Editor: Allows users to change text, images, and other elements in the product without any coding knowledge.
• Interactive Guides: Enables users to highlight product focus areas and create any number of flows using advanced widgets.
• Flows & Checklist: Prospects can see how the product will work for them by selecting the right flows.
• Analytics & Insights: Tracks the behaviour of prospects based on clicks and time spent on pages.
• Dynamic Variables: Personalises the demo experience for each prospect.
• Password Protection: Ensures the security of demos by allowing users to protect them with passwords.
• Custom Domain URL: Provides enterprise-grade features and security, including the ability to use a custom domain URL for demos.
• ‍Integration Capabilities: Offers seamless integration with over 3000 tools through Zapier and native integration with popular platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Pardot.

How does Storylane work?

Here is the step-by-step process of how Storylane works, from signing up to sharing your demos:

1. Signing Up

The first step to using Storylane is signing up for an account. You can sign up using your Google account or by providing your first name, last name, work email, and password.

• Sign up with Google or provide your personal details
• Agree to Storylane's terms and conditions

2. Installing the Storylane Chrome Extension

Once you've signed up and logged in, the next step is to install the Storylane Chrome Extension. This extension is crucial for creating demos.

• Install the Storylane Chrome Extension
• Pin the extension to your browser for easy access

3. Recording and Editing Your First Demo

With the Storylane Chrome Extension installed, you can now record HTML (editable) and screenshot (non-editable) screens for your demos. After recording, you can add guides and edit HTML screens to create a compelling demo.

4. Publishing & Sharing Your Demo

After creating your demo, the next step is to publish and share it. Storylane provides a unique public URL for your demo, which you can share with prospects. If the content is confidential, you can adjust the link settings with a passcode or expiry date. You can also create additional demo URLs to track the performance of each separately.

5. Tracking Engagement and Acting Accordingly

Storylane automatically gathers usage data and tracks leads for you. This powerful analytics feature helps you understand the engagement with your product demo and act accordingly.

• Track engagement and leads using Storylane's analytics
• Use the insights to tweak your demo and improve its effectiveness

6. Adding Integrations

Storylane works seamlessly with your marketing and sales stack, offering over 3000 integrations through Zapier and native integration with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, and more. Once you have a demo built using Storylane and start to see events, the next step would be configuring your integrations so you can receive data in your favourite tool.

What are the benefits of using Storylane?

• Personalised Demo Experiences: Storylane enables the creation of personalised demos that cater to the specific interests and needs of each prospect, moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach and allowing for a more targeted and effective sales process.
• Real-Time Demo Analytics: The platform provides real-time analytics on prospect engagement with demos, offering insights into which features attract the most attention and allowing for the optimization of future demos based on actual user behaviour.
• 10-minute rapid Demo Creation: With Storylane, users can quickly create demos in as little as 10 minutes, significantly reducing the time and effort typically required to prepare product presentations, thus accelerating the sales cycle.
• Integration with Marketing and Sales Tools: Storylane boasts over 3000 integrations through Zapier and native integrations with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Pardot, ensuring seamless operation within the existing marketing and sales stack.
• Scalable Demo Operations: The platform allows for the scaling of demo operations without backend complexity, enabling the creation of templates for different personas, use cases, or market segments in minutes, which is particularly beneficial for pre-sales teams.
• Leave-Behind Experiences: Storylane facilitates the creation of strong leave-behind experiences that help prospects recall the 'aha' moments of the product demo, which can be crucial for internal evangelization and moving prospects further down the sales funnel.

Which tools does Storylane integrate with?

Storylane is designed to integrate seamlessly with a variety of tools, enhancing its functionality and making it a versatile addition to any sales, marketing, or pre-sales toolkit. Here are some of the platforms that Storylane integrates with:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms

• Salesforce: Storylane integrates with Salesforce, allowing users to send demo events and analytics directly to their Salesforce CRM, providing valuable insights into customer interactions with the demos.
• HubSpot: The integration with HubSpot enables users to capture leads and send them directly to HubSpot, as well as embed custom HubSpot forms within their demos.

Marketing Automation Platforms

• Marketo: Storylane integrates with Marketo, allowing users to send demo events and analytics directly.Communication Platforms

• Slack: With the Slack integration, users can receive notifications about demo events directly in their Slack channels, facilitating real-time communication and response.

Analytics Platforms

• Google Analytics: Storylane integrates with Google Analytics, enabling users to track and analyse customer interactions with their demos in a familiar analytics platform.
• Segment: The integration with Segment allows users to send demo events to their Segment platform, providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions.

Other Integrations

• Zapier: Storylane boasts over 3000 integrations through Zapier, allowing users to connect Storylane with a wide variety of other tools and platforms, enhancing its versatility and functionality.

What are the top 5 Storylane alternatives?

Although Storylane offers some unique aspects of demo automation, there are better alternatives available in the market. Here are the top 5 alternatives that you might find worth trying.

1. Demoboost

Demoboost is a superior alternative to Storylane with advanced user engagement functionalities and Live Demo support. Demoboost has targeted functionalities for self-qualification, on-demand use cases (video narrative, collaboration), speaker notes, channel partner-sharing options, and sales-specific analytics. Another significant advantage is Demoboost's ability to build stakeholder and decision-maker maps, which can accelerate the sales cycle.

Key differentiator is Demoboost’s commitment to building and perfecting the demos with their clients as part of their licence. Thanks to the internal team of Demo Engineers and network of Demo Thought Leaders, Demoboost clients gain not only the tool but also demo building partners. Read more here: Demoboost vs Storylane.

2. Saleo

Saleo is another strong alternative to Storylane, offering unique features like Saleo Live™️, which transforms existing products to be data-complete, relevant, and stable. Saleo's no-code AI modelling engine enables total control over every aspect of your software, including graphs, tables, metrics, workflows, and images. Saleo also offers seamless single sign-on (SSO) integration with popular identity providers such as Google Workspace, Okta, and Rippling.

3. Navattic

Navattic is a great Storylane competitor that offers features like guided demos, on-demand product walk-throughs, analytics, and multiple personas. It allows users to create interactive product tours, which can be a valuable tool for engaging potential customers and showcasing a product's features and benefits. However, detailed information about how Navattic stands out from Storylane was not found in the search results.

4. Reprise

Reprise is known for assisting the enterprise clients to create sales demos, trial environments, and product tours. It offers two product architectures to help companies create interactive demos or product tours: screen-level capture and code-level capture. Its screen-level capture feature offers tighter control over how a person moves through the tour or demo, while code-level capture recreates the application including navigation, toolbars, and chat. 

A standout feature of Reprise that stands ahead of Storylane is its ability to offer two types of product architectures (screen-level and code-level capture), providing more flexibility in creating interactive demos or product tours. 

5. Consensus

Consensus stands out for its personalised video demo journeys. It allows users to create a series of questions for potential buyers, and based on their responses, it presents specific videos. This personalization not only enhances the demo experience for leads but also provides valuable information to sales teams for pre-qualifying leads. This feature is a significant improvement over Storylane, which does not offer such personalised video demo journeys.

Storylane Pricing

Storylane offers different pricing plans tailored to meet the needs of various businesses, from startups to large enterprises. Here are the available plans:

• Starter Plan: Aimed at teams looking to build unlimited demos with screen recording, priced at $40 per user per month when billed annually, or $50 per user per month when billed monthly.
• Growth Plan: Designed for teams that want to clone their product with HTML capture, available at $100 per user per month.
• Solo Plan: Offers 1 demo for free forever, targeting individual users who need to create a single demo.
• Enterprise Plan: On-demand pricing for enterprise-scale security & demo coaching. 

These plans are structured to cater to different levels of usage and feature access, with the Starter Plan providing basic demo creation capabilities and the Growth Plan offering more advanced features for comprehensive demo experiences. The Solo Plan serves as an entry point for individuals to experience Storylane's capabilities without any financial commitment.

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