Best Product Tour Software for SaaS in 2024

In the competitive world of Software as a Service (SaaS), ensuring that prospects understand your product’s value is essential. Enter product tours—interactive guides designed to showcase a product’s key features and functionalities. These tours are essential for helping buyers self-evaluate, which is becoming an increasingly important part of the modern buyer journey.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the best product tour software for SaaS in 2024, discussing what makes these tools indispensable and how to choose the right one for your business.

What is a Product Tour?

A product tour is an interactive, guided walkthrough designed to introduce prospective buyers or new users to the key features and functionalities of a software product. These tours help users navigate through key parts of the tool, understand its value, and quickly get up to speed with its capabilities. Product tour software is specifically designed to create these guided experiences, ensuring that buyers and new users can effectively learn how a product can benefit them, with minimal friction.

Product tours can be used on a company’s homepage or product pages, in marketing materials, at events, on live sales calls, or as leave-behinds for committee decision-making closer to the end of the sales cycle.

Why are Product Tours Important?

With complex enterprise software and SaaS tools, first impressions of a product are crucial. Product tour software has become an essential tool for SaaS companies looking to attract qualified buyers, enhance user onboarding, and improve product engagement. By using product tours, SaaS companies can provide a hands-on experience that showcases the tool’s benefits and functionalities, helping prospects and new users understand the product better.

For example, HR platform provider Hireology uses product tours to accelerate its sales cycles.

• At the top of the funnel, Hireology uses the product tours on their website to engage prospects with self-service marketing content, allowing them to self-qualify in or out of a sales process early on – without consuming the Sales team’s cycles.
• Mid-funnel, in addition to presenting live demos, Sales teams share guided product tours as leave-behinds to highlight specific features for different audiences and their unique needs. They extend Hireology’s reach to a broader circle outside of the core buying committee in order to create wider consensus without needing every stakeholder to participate in every live call or demo. And they’re easy to build – Hireology’s eight feature-specific leave-behinds were created within a single month.
• Across the funnel, every demo makes a bigger impact with consistent delivery and tight messaging.

As a result, Hireology has seen opportunities involving product tours close 50% faster than those where product tours were not utilized.

Features of Reliable Product Tour Software

Customizable

A quality product tour software should be highly customizable, allowing companies to tailor the tour to their specific needs and branding. This means being able to adjust the steps, add custom content, and align the tour’s look and feel with the company’s visual identity. Customizable tours ensure that the prospect’s or customer’s experience is cohesive and relevant to their needs.

Analytics and Insights

Analytical tools are vital in product tour software. These tools provide insights into how users interact with the tour, where they drop off, and which steps are most engaging. By analyzing this data, companies can optimize their tours to improve user experience and increase conversion rates. Analytical insights help in making data-driven decisions to enhance the effectiveness of product tours. These insights can also be used to discover new buying committee decision-makers, and understand which areas of the product are most relevant to them.

Interactive Elements

Interactivity is a key feature that distinguishes an effective product tour. Interactive elements such as tooltips, pop-ups, and clickable buttons engage users and make the learning process more enjoyable. These interactive demo elements can guide users through complex processes step-by-step, ensuring they understand and retain information better.

Ease of Use

The ease of use of product tour software is crucial for both the creators and the end-users. For SaaS companies, the software should have an intuitive interface that makes it simple to create and update tours without needing extensive technical knowledge. For example, many go-to-market teams incorporate product tour creation into their demo program — a solutions engineer might create a library of tours for marketing or product marketing to customize and use externally. For end-users, the tour should be easy to follow and not feel intrusive or overwhelming.

Integration Capabilities

Integration with existing tools and platforms is essential for seamless operation. The best product tour software should easily integrate with other SaaS platforms, CRM systems, and analytics tools. This ensures that the tour can leverage existing data and functionalities, and become a more cohesive part of the buyer’s journey. For example, a marketing automation integration might help your team score leads based on demo activity and trigger automation to generate more MQLs and PQLs. An integration with a CRM can give sales reps visibility into how prospects view and share guided demo leave-behinds.

Scalability

As a company grows,  product tour needs may evolve. Therefore, the software should be scalable, accommodating increasing numbers of users and more complex tour requirements. Scalable product tour software can adapt to the changing needs of a business, ensuring that it remains effective as the company expands and demo capacity needs increase. For example, if you are demonstrating at an event or tradeshow, your product tour may need to support several hundred simultaneous users.

Customer Support

Reliable customer support is a critical feature of any software. Reliable product tour software should offer robust customer support to help resolve any issues quickly and efficiently. This support can come in various forms, including live chat, email support, comprehensive documentation, and community forums.

How to Find the Best Product Tour Software in 2024

Integration with SaaS Platforms

When choosing product tour software, it is essential to consider how well it integrates with your existing SaaS platforms. Integration capabilities ensure that the tour can pull in data and offer a seamless user experience. Look for software that can easily connect with your CRM, marketing tools, and analytics platforms, such as Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. A product tour software with a data API can enable you to pull data into a data warehouse or data lake, then push to another platform to create or update records. You can also trigger and automate sales or marketing actions based on prospect or customer actions.

Scalability and Flexibility

The software should be scalable and flexible to meet the growing needs of your business. This includes the ability to handle an increasing number of users and the flexibility to customize tours as your product evolves.

Traditional demo environments can be costly to maintain, in addition to the resources required to update and verticalize data for every demo. Choose a platform that enables you to build demo environments and product tours that faithfully render your products without drawing on cloud computing costs. Doing so will help your team demo simultaneously and at scale, such as at conferences and events, without additional SE resources in place to maintain the environment.

Data-driven Optimization

Data-driven optimization is crucial for improving the effectiveness of product tours. The software should provide detailed analytics and insights, allowing you to understand user behavior and optimize the tours accordingly. Select software that enables you to get dashboards with key metrics, such as total number of views per demo and time spent on each demo.

Other important analytical tools include the ability to drill down into individual user activity, such as which screens they viewed, how long they spent on each screen, and where they dropped off of the demo. For leave-behinds, you should be able to create a custom sharing link to send to your prospects, and get notified when they open it.

Mobile Responsiveness

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it’s vital that your product tour software is mobile responsive. This ensures that users have a consistent and effective experience, regardless of the device they are using.

Cost and Pricing

Cost is always a significant factor when selecting software. Evaluate the pricing models of different product tour software options to find one that fits your budget while offering the features you need. It’s important to consider that many stakeholders throughout your organization may need demo capabilities — including presales, sales, marketing, product teams, and more. Choosing a comprehensive platform that serves multiple stakeholders may reduce unneeded spend, while increasing the utility of your demo program throughout the go-to-market motion.

Frequently Asked Questions About Product Tour Software

What is product tour software?
Product tour software is designed to create interactive, guided walkthroughs that help users understand and navigate a software product. These tours provide step-by-step instructions and highlight key features to demonstrate value to prospective buyers, and ensure customers can effectively use the SaaS software they’ve purchased.

What features does product tour software offer?
Product tour software typically offers features such as customization options, interactive elements, analytics and insights, ease of use, integration capabilities, scalability, and customer support.

What are the benefits of product tour software?
The benefits of product tour software include improved conversion rates, better user onboarding, increased user engagement, reduced learning curves, and higher user satisfaction. By providing a guided experience, it helps prospective buyers and customers quickly understand the value of the product.

How do you make a product tour?
Creating a product tour involves using product tour software to design an interactive guide. This includes defining the steps, adding interactive elements, customizing the design, and integrating the tour with your existing platforms. Testing and optimizing the tour based on user feedback and analytics is also crucial.

Are product tours effective?
Yes, product tours are highly effective. They provide hands-on experience, which helps users understand the product better and faster. Effective product tours lead to higher sales conversions, as well as improved user engagement, satisfaction, and retention, making them a valuable tool for SaaS companies.

Key Takeaways

• Product tours are interactive, guided walkthroughs that help users understand and use software products effectively.
• They are essential for SaaS companies to accelerate the buyer journey, as well as enhance user onboarding, engagement, and retention.
• Reliable product tour software should be customizable, offer analytics and insight, include interactive elements, and be easy to use.
• Key factors to consider when choosing product tour software include integration, scalability, data-driven optimization, and more.

Choosing the right product tour software is crucial for ensuring a seamless buyer journey and effective user onboarding experience. By considering the features and factors outlined in this guide, SaaS companies can select the best tool to meet their needs and empower users to discover their product’s value.