Did you know that every time a SaaS company adds a “Request a Demo” page to their website, somewhere a Solutions Engineer’s (SE’s) blood pressure rises?
SEs are scrambling to keep up with the demand for product demos. There’s just not enough time in the day to build the demos, customize the demos, prep for the demo presentations with their Account Executives (AEs), and then walk buyers through the demos on every single sales call.
Why are SEs buried in demo requests?
TrustRadius’s Annual Research Report found that 90% of today’s B2B tech buyers can’t think of anything they hate more than a sales discovery call. So what do they want instead? Demos. 58% of B2B tech buyers say that they rely on demos to make purchasing decisions.
B2B tech buyers are increasingly younger, too, 60% are between the ages of 25 and 39, and this emerging generation of decision-makers is 2x more likely than older generations to discover your product by searching online. This is one of the reasons why your “Request a Demo” page is seeing so much action, and your SEs’ workloads keep getting bigger.
It’s time to prioritize SE resources.
The demand for demos isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, making it increasingly difficult for your SEs’ to keep up. Sure, your company may add even more SE roles, but scaling for growth needs to be about more than just adding bodies.
The following are two changes that need to occur in order for your current and future SEs to prioritize their resources and gain control of their time.
- The way SEs make demos for their AEs has to improve. The process needs to be faster, the demos need to be more easily customized, and the end-product needs to feel like a real product experience..
- Your AEs need demos they can run without an SE. Give AEs scaled-back demos they can independently show buyers in early meetings, so your SEs can reserve their time for calls with qualified buyers who require a deeper dive or advanced proof of concept (POC).
Sounds nice, but how do you actually do that?
Demo creation platforms make it possible for SEs to spend hours (instead of days) creating demos. They can quickly create scalable, sandbox demos for their AEs to use during initial sales calls.
For example, the Reprise demo creation platform allows SEs to fully capture the functionality and flow of their software in one go, creating a demo with a sandbox environment. Or capture their product screen-by-screen, then stitch those screens together in whatever order they like.
Reprise also gives SEs variables that make it easy for their AEs to edit and customize existing demos; swapping out data points, graphics, and more. SEs can create “base model” demos for specific vertical markets, then their AE’s can change the variables as needed.
With a demo creation platform, your SEs will make and customize better demos faster, and gain back the time they’ve been spending walking unqualified buyers through demos on calls.
How do we know this? SEs who used Reprise had a 20% reduction in the need for engineering to be involved with demo creation.*
Ready to give some time back to your SEs? Try out Reprise and see for yourself how easy it could be.
*Results are from The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Reprise Platform, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Reprise in 2022.