Customer Story
Bench’s Demo Program Contributes to 17% Higher Win Rate
The accounting software provider set out to improve sales efficiencies and remove the dependency on a “stripped down” demo environment. Reprise helped them do both.
The Challenge: Costly custom demos
Bench provides cloud-based accounting software to more than 25,000 small and medium-sized businesses – everything from ecommerce sites to law firms, mom and pop shops, and social influencers. Bench differentiates itself by pairing easy-to-use, cloud-based software with human bookkeepers that help operators manage their finances.
Its flexibility and user-friendly interface offer entrepreneurs an escape from traditional, daunting spreadsheets, but it can be hard for prospects to visualize. Because of this, sellers traditionally leaned on multiple calls and live demos as linchpins of the selling motion. After getting an understanding of the prospect’s business, typical expenses, and revenues, sellers would load the prospect’s actual documents into their demo environment and initiate a trial. Bench would then deliver a live demo using the prospect’s real data in the demo environment.
“That’s the most tailor-made experience, but it’s also very costly, because only a portion of those trials are actually going to buy,” explained Bench Product Manager Lawrence Yu.
The demo environment also started becoming problematic: “Keeping it up to date is costly. That cost comes from Engineering having to make sure the code is the same across all different environments. Over time, the demo environment became a stripped down version of our real app, but we were using that to sell our customers, which is ironic.”
This pain, paired with a broader initiative to improve efficiencies across their GTM process, led Bench to look for a better demo solution.
“Over time, the demo environment became a stripped down version of our real app, but we were using that to sell our customers, which is ironic.”
Lawrence Yu, Product Manager, Bench
The Solution: Demo toolbox
The Bench team realized that many prospects didn’t need a custom, white glove experience to understand the value of their solution. They sought a demo creation platform that – above all else – would look and feel authentic to the Bench app.
“That’s where Reprise comes in, because we can streamline that demo experience into something that’s very valuable to them. And then a lot of people decide on the spot, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s sign up for a year or month-to-month agreement.’”
More than 80% of the sales team adopted Reprise in the first few months of introducing it, without taking any productivity hits along the way. “Reprise is one of the top three vendors I’ve worked with, in terms of the onboarding experience,” highlighted Lawrence.
Bench uses Reprise to deliver live demos that cater to specific industries; they’re still offering a tailored experience that helps prospects understand the value prop, but it’s not such a costly, manual effort for each opportunity. They can build one demo and then repurpose it for other prospects in the same industry. Messaging is much more consistent across the board. And they’ve started using Reprise to create sales leave-behinds too.
Next, the team is considering using Reprise to create a series of “micro demo” product tours that website visitors can consume. Lawrence’s vision for the Bench demo program is that it will become a “demo toolbox” containing a variety of product materials to support GTM efforts, catering to different cohorts, types of customers, industries, etc.
“The goal of this is not to make everything canned so it’s all standard and boring. The goal is to raise the floor of your lower performers so that everyone is at a certain level, and from there they can add style, flair, and different ways to convert people.”
Lawrence Yu, Product Manager, Bench
The Results: Greater efficiency yields conversions
By powering live, full-featured product demos with Reprise, Bench’s presales motion is much more scalable, and the white glove service experience is saved for paying customers.
“We still do that onboarding, where they give us their documents and we upload them into our system, but that comes after the sale is done,” said Lawrence. “We’re still providing that value-add of doing their books for them so they get off to a good start, but we’re saving this level of investment for customers that have already signed a contract with us.”
And Bench no longer needs engineering resources to keep the demo environment up-to-date. “We’re able to make changes in Reprise quite quickly, and we’re not using engineering time from our own team,” said Lawrence. “Even if we need to leverage professional services from Reprise, that cost is a fraction of what our in-house engineering cost would be, both in terms of actual cost and the opportunity cost of what else the engineer could be working on. From a product standpoint, that’s really valuable.”
It’s a much more efficient go-to-market model that’s helping Bench keep pace with growing demand. As a result of improvements they’ve made to the go-to-market process, including their demo program, Bench saw a 17% year-over-year increase in prospect-to-customer conversions in Q1 2024.
“We’re still providing that value-add of doing their books for them so they get off to a good start, but we’re saving this level of investment for customers that have already signed a contract with us.”
Lawrence Yu, Product Manager, Bench