According to Gartner, an average of 11 individual stakeholders are involved in a B2B purchase, which can occasionally flex up to nearly 20. That’s at least a football team’s worth of prospects you need to convince to make just one sale.
And to make things more difficult, each one of those people has a different role in the organization and buying process. Some are defensive tackles, guarding the bottom line, and blocking unneeded purchases. Some are linebackers, clearing the way for optimization via a great tech stack. The quarterback is looking ahead to the next play.
So to make your sales play successful when faced with a deep bench of stakeholders, you need to enable a player on the field to help you out—that’s your champion. And champions can’t make the right play for you unless you equip them with the tools they need to help you sell your product to the rest of the buying committee.
Sure, you can create a one-pager for your champion to use as a leave-behind. But those simply aren’t a compelling way to convince the rest of the stakeholders that they need your product—making your champion’s job harder.
As buying committees continue to grow, the way of the future is creating interactive guided demos as a leave-behind instead. Shareable demos make everyone’s life easier—let’s dive into why, and how, you should be making them!
Speeding Up the Sale: Enabling Teams with Interactive Guided Demo Leave-Behinds
Like product storytelling, demos resonate when prospects can imagine using the product. What better way to empower your potential buyer to get hands-on with your product and share it with other decision-makers than an interactive demo leave-behind? This is a custom product tour that replaces the boring one-pagers that no one ever reads.
By sharing a guided, custom tour with your potential customers, you enable them to effectively internally sell your product to the rest of the buying committee.
Let’s briefly sketch out how this works in real life. You have a prospect who is an end user of your software, and they think it’s great after experiencing an interactive product tour on your website (Yay, product-led growth!). However, even though they love what they see, they can’t make the purchase decision on their own—their manager, manager’s manager, department head, finance and IT need to sign off.
That prospect is ready to run all the way to the end zone for you, but first you need to help them get the football and clear the path. You talk with them about what the business needs, and develop a custom guided demo you can email to them and they can share with everyone involved in making the purchase decision.
This demo works because it’s targeted to their unique business concerns and hits on the features and specs that matter to all the decision-makers. You might still have follow-up conversations with the IT team to discuss security issues and finance about costs, but you’ve provided those stakeholders with a reason to enter into a discussion with you.
Your champion gets you in the game, and the guided demo gets you into scoring position.
How B2B Buyers Want to Buy
Consider it from the buyer’s perspective for a moment. Would you rather have a basic white paper that’s entirely sales-oriented to hand off to a skeptical stakeholder who is determined to keep the company from investing in software that isn’t needed? Or go back and forth trying to get them into a call they’re not eager to join so you can go through their objections one by one?
Research from Forrester shows that the number of buying interactions (the self-guided and personal steps to get information about competing offers and providers) jumped during the pandemic from 17 to 27—a stunning leap. Buyers have a lot on their plates when trying to make a purchase, so anything you can do to streamline and simplify their research is vital.
A guided demo leave-behind offers an “on the rails” tour of your product so each stakeholder can get a feel for its capabilities themselves, on their own time. And you can, and should, customize these leave-behinds so the buyers quickly see the value that is most relevant to solving their problems.
As B2B buyers grow increasingly impatient with the traditional sales process, allowing them to explore on their own terms is essential. Custom demo leave-behinds enable that independence for buyers while still ensuring your champions deliver the message that will resonate with the buying committee.
You’re making the champion’s job both easier and more effective—everybody wins. (This isn’t possible in football, but you get the idea!)
Getting Valuable Data: Gating Guided Demos
It can be challenging for an outsider to find out who is even part of today’s buying committees. Determining who the key decision-makers are can help you target your sales efforts more precisely.
And gating your leave-behind guided demo can provide that information—you’ll learn who viewed the demo, how long they looked at it, and how they interacted with it.
Having these insights at your fingertips is not only a powerful way to see who has accessed your demo but also give you a way to see what features matter most to the members of the buying committee. B2B SaaS companies that incorporate guided demo leave-behinds can better enable champions to close deals faster. .
Enabling B2B Buyers
You’ve heard it more and more—the way buyers want to buy is changing fast, particularly in the B2B world. Forcing buyers into your own existing sales processes, like requiring that decision-makers be on calls, might sound like a good idea to get buy-in.
But those tactics can backfire as managers and leaders don’t have time to get on those calls most of the time, and you might lose a big sale by requiring that participation. Leaving your champion with a guided demo they can share with those stakeholders enables them to go through the product on their own time, helping buyers make decisions faster and in the sales team’s favor.
Technical sales teams can help shorten sales cycles and raise close rates by focusing their energy, planning, and resources on enabling buyers, instead of putting buyers through a forced process. That’s how both sides get to the end zone faster—and happier too.
How to Create Guided Demos to Enable Your Champions
Turn your prospect into a champion with shareable demos. And easily turn your product into a customized, shareable demo with Reprise! Our no-code demo creation platform makes creating leave-behind demos simple and fast, and our advanced analytics will help you gather information on the key decision-makers based on how they interact with your demo.
Get started today—book a demo or try Reprise Starter for free!
