How to Use a Demo Program to Customize Live Demos for Each Prospect

According to a recent poll of the PreSales Collective community, 22% of teams build bespoke demos for each new prospect in their pipeline. On the other hand, nearly 44% either use the same shared demo environment or demo template for every prospect. This data shows that most teams either find themselves spending too much time customizing, or sharing a one-size-fits-all demo regardless of the prospect’s pain points or challenges.

In this post, we’ll show you a happy medium. The approach involves using a demo program to scale your live demo capabilities, while customizing the details for a unique prospect experience every time. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a demo program is a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos — commonly championed and led by the presales team.

Step 1: Map out stories for your target personas

The first step to scaling live demos is determining a core set of stories for your target personas or industry verticals. These stories will serve as the foundation of your demo program. Presales can work in tandem with the sales and marketing team to determine key messages that resonate most with these audiences — mapping the product story and features shown to each persona’s pain points or common industry challenges. The collective team can also identify the most relevant customer case studies to reference for each audience segment.

From there, presales will take the lead in creating a “golden” demo for each segment. The idea is to get the demo flow locked into 90% of its final state. The last 10% of customization, data augmentation and personalization can be done by presales leads or AEs based on what they’ve learned in discovery.

Step 2: Organize and manage your content in a demo library

To truly enable the sales team, the presales team should establish a content management system where demo templates can be stored and shared for the broader sales and marketing team to access on-demand. Using a demo platform makes this process much simpler, as you can store demos in a logical folder structure, and create role-based access controls (RBAC) for demo folders and individual demos.

This layer of governance ensures that the golden demo content remains intact, and that only the people who need to use each demo or demo folder have access to it. Maintaining consistency is an important part to scaling the use of effective demos throughout your organization, and ensuring that all security and compliance protocols are followed.

Step 3: Empower presales and AEs to complete the “last mile” of customization

Once the right organizational structure is in place for your demos, a demo platform like Reprise makes it simple for broader presales teams and AEs to fill in the blanks for the last 10% of customization, data augmentation and personalization. For a demo program to work effectively, there should be business-friendly editing capabilities that allow AEs to replace logos, as well as update charts and tables with the right datasets. Pulling from shared datasets available via a demo program will help tell the story perfectly for the customer.

If you’ve properly identified your personas’ key stories, this “last mile” of customization should only take minutes, instead of hours.

Step 4: Measure and improve

An important part of any demo program is the ability to measure effectiveness. Presales teams should seek feedback from sales and customers on how well certain demos are performing relative to closed/won deals. The sales team may also have important anecdotal feedback on which stories resonate most, convert fastest and which should be improved.

A demo platform can also help in this area by providing analytics for interactive demo assets that live on your website or are sent off to prospect buying committees as leave-behinds. According to the same PreSales Collective poll cited above, only 8% of companies measure the success of their demos with demo analytics. 53% don’t measure success at all, while 39% rely on anecdotal feedback from sales. Embracing this best practice will set your product apart from the competition.

Beyond the steps described above for live demos, a demo program’s assets can be used with other stakeholders throughout the organization, including digital, product, and event marketers. It’s a strategic way for presales to set the strategy and define how demos are used across an organization and gain influence in actively setting sales strategy.

Want to learn how leading organizations are scaling their demo libraries with Reprise? Read our customer stories