What is Demo Experience?

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The success of any SaaS product depends on the quality of its demo experience. Yet, creating an impactful demo experience has traditionally been a challenging task for sales teams. To address this, more and more go-to-market (GTM) teams are adopting a product-led growth (PLG) strategy that centers around building amazing demo experiences using demo experience platforms.

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What is a demo experience tool?

A demo experience tool is a type of SaaS sales tech that allows sales teams to create interactive and engaging product demos. This can help you make a lasting impression on prospects, as it enables you to create a carbon copy of your product, including visuals and the same level of interactivity, without having to be coupled to your backend. With a demo experience platform like Folio, anyone can use a code-free sandbox environment with a visual UI to create interactive demos.

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Why does the quality of your demo experience matter?

The fate of your deal depends on the demo experience. The demo experience is the prospect’s first impression of the product, so you’ll need to make it count. A bad or boring demo experience can spell doom for your deal, while a memorable and interactive demo experience can help customers understand the value your product brings.

In addition, demo experiences offer a way for customers to immerse themselves in your product, and they allow sellers to differentiate their product and show buyers something they haven't seen before. The key takeaway here is that impactful product demo experiences can be your best weapon when it comes to converting leads.

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What causes product demos to fail?

There are several traps that reps can fall into during the demo stage, including not personalizing the demo, not reading the room, not creating a narrative, and not watching the time. These mistakes can be prevented by taking the right approach to creating high-fidelity demos using live environments.

However, creating high-quality demos using live environments can be time-consuming and prone to unexpected issues. A demo experience platform solves this problem by enabling sales teams to create demos quickly and easily, without relying on developers.

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Key features of a demo experience tool

Demo experience tools like Folio have several key features that enable sales teams to improve the overall demo experience. These include:

• Personalized demos at scale: You can create and reuse demo templates and tailor them for specific prospects.
• Codeless editing: Demos can be customized using a simple, visual interface with drag-and-drop and live editing tools.
• Boosted time-to-value: There’s no long integration process, so sales teams can start improving the demo experience immediately.
• Tracked insights and analytics: Demo experience platforms track valuable data and metrics to gauge the performance of your demo and team.
• Stable and safe environment: Demo experience platforms offer safe, controlled environments that minimize the chance of bugs, downtime, or blue screens of death.
• Encouraged sharing and collaboration: Completed demos can be shared with the outside world using links or embeds.

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Demo experience platforms benefit the whole company

A demo experience platform benefits not only sales reps but the entire company as well. For the pre-sales team, a demo experience platform allows them to quickly create and share product demos based on ready-made templates. For the sales team, it makes it easier for SDRs and AEs to take more control of the demo process by optimizing demos without outside help. For the marketing team, a demo experience platform allows them to embed self-guided demos in your website and emails, capturing the attention of leads and helping to qualify them. For customer success managers, interactive tutorials can be created to show users about new features that are relevant to them. Lastly, for the R&D department, there’s no need to trouble them with provisioning and decommissioning sales demo environments or creating brand new demos from scratch.

Overall, a demo experience platform is a powerful tool that can help go-to-market teams create impactful demo experiences and drive customer acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention. By enabling sales teams to easily create high-quality demos that speak to prospects’ specific needs, demo experience platforms can benefit the entire company, from presales to R&D.

Try folio for improving your demo experience now.