We set out with Reprise to serve sales teams. At our previous companies we had witnessed significant pain because our sales teams could not build a demo they loved. The production app was designed for customers, not for sales.
We developed a platform that allowed a business team to capture a web app, edit it without knowing code, and then host their own version. We assumed that sales would be the buyer.
Were we wrong? Are there other internal teams at a software company that need to show a variation of the product in order to do their job? Are there other internal teams that need their own product?
So far we have heard a dozen different cases where an internal team would want to modify the core software before showing it:
- From a growth marketer: the Product Tour. You need product-led growth to generate ever-increasing amounts of pipeline. But the only way you can show prospects the product is on a call with a sales rep. What if you could make a curated version of the product and send it out as a link to prospects? Or make it the 2nd CTA on your home page?
- From a salesperson: the Interactive Leave-Behind. Instead of a PDF attachment to your followup email, instead send a link to your curated version of the product. Your prospect could then forward that to others in their company to gain purchase support. (And you could track who tries out the product, and which parts they looked most at…)
- From a product manager: the Sprint Demo. How do you show off the new feature that is minutes old and still only visible on some engineer’s development box? What if you could snapshot the app, edit the data to tell the right story, and assemble it into a working flow that showed its value to the rest of the company?
- From an event marketer: the Booth Product. Your tradeshow booth is in the basement of some convention center. Wifi is saturated. You need a product demo that can run off a USB key.
- From a sales trainer: Product Certification. Junior sales reps need a demo that is tightly constrained so they stay on script. Once reps are are certified they can then be given a demo package that includes more of the product.
- From a sales engineer: the Vertical-Specific Demo. Your demo doesn’t resonate when you show retail data to a manufacturing client, or midmarket numbers to a F100 prospect. What if you could clone and modify your demo app for each target market? Or for each…prospect?
- From a product marketer: the Feature Announcement. You need to drive adoption of your hard-built new features, but tiny screenshots in an email just aren’t communicating the value.
- From an exec: the Board Preso. You’ve got very constrained time so you need to show the new product initiative without the hassle of logging in and clicking through even a single unnecessary screen.
- From a website designer: the Embedded Feature. You want to show mini experiences of the product on the external website, but they require time-intensive custom engineering and design. What if you could capture and modify a snippet of the core application and embed it in your external site?
What other use cases are there? What problem could you solve if you could full control to capture, modify, and host your own lookalike version of your software?
Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash
Sam is cofounder and CEO of Reprise
