Presales Leaders: Here’s How to Gain Credibility with the Executive Team

Is your presales team constantly in reactive mode, racing to keep up with ad-hoc requests from sales reps and clients? If this sounds familiar, you may feel like your team isn’t collaborating well across functions. It might even seem as if you have limited influence on strategy or sales outcomes. How do you elevate your team’s position from transactional to proactive and strategic, gaining credibility with the executive team in the process?

A demo program is one initiative presales can own from end-to-end — its mission is to drive better conversations with prospects and close more deals through scalable, repeatable demo storytelling. Many teams in your organization likely use demos (or could be using demos more effectively). These teams include marketing, product marketing, sales, and more. By establishing a demo program, presales can extend the strategic use of the product narrative across the organization — driving better sales and marketing outcomes in the process.

How a demo program can deliver value for the organization

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a demo program is a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos. Demo programs aim to provide organizational structure and governance to demos, empowering presales to be more productive and strategic.

The best part is that you can expand from where you are in your current use of demos, with the goal of creating a scalable and repeatable program. For example, if your marketing team is using product tours, those assets can be repurposed as the foundation for a more robust library of demos targeted at the live sales demo use case.

Here are three ways your demo program can deliver value across the organization:

• You can scale revenue growth, faster. A demo program helps you scale your sales operations, enabling more sales reps to customize their own demo templates without presales teams having to reinvent the wheel every time. What’s more, a demo program is measurable. That means you can measure which demos are having the greatest impact on sales — and optimize the ones that aren’t.
• You’ll increase capacity for your presales team. According to the 2024 Presales Landscape Report, presales teams spend a whopping 21 days per year cleaning and maintaining their demo environment. Plus, many are building demos from scratch for every prospect meeting. With a demo program, presales teams can gain back valuable time by creating a demo library that is scalable and reusable for stakeholders throughout the organization.
• You’ll gain alignment with a consistent story across teams. A demo program gives presales governance and control over demos, so you can ensure that your team is staying accurate and on-message. This is especially important as new features or products emerge. In addition, sales and marketing teams can pull from tried-and-true scripts and referenceable customer stories that apply to prospects’ pain points or use cases.

Setting up your demo program

Like any strategic program, a demo program requires buy-in and participation from cross-functional stakeholders. The goal is to gather key stakeholders in the planning phase, and align on the best way to demonstrate value to your prospects via your product story. In the beginning, you’ll want to nail down a set of capsule stories that can be used across teams. You’ll also want to decide where and how demos will be used (for example, in a live sales demo setting, on your website, or as a leave-behind for committee decision-makers).

From there, it’s time to start building your demo library. A demo creation platform can make this job much easier, helping you organize and scale content management and distribution. Think of your demo library like a Netflix menu of available options for stakeholders. You might choose to organize your demo library by sales play, prospect pain point, vertical, feature, or whatever makes most sense to your team. The goal is for demo stakeholders to have access to the customizable demos they need, on demand.

Measuring progress and driving revenue with demos

The best part about a demo program is that it’s measurable. You can gather demo presenter or user feedback, prospect feedback, and demo analytics to refine and focus your demos over time. Over time, you can track metrics such as which demos win the most opportunities in sales, or convert the most leads on your website for marketing. Demo analytics gathered through your demo creation platform can reveal how website visitors or buying committees are interacting with your demos.

You can report those success metrics to the executive team, and establish a continuous improvement process for your demos based on what drives the best sales and marketing results. This process helps elevate presales teams away from the ad-hoc service model and toward a strategic advisory role, where they can add most value with their technical expertise.

For presales, expanding your seat at the leadership table starts with vision, planning and measures of success. A demo program can proactively establish presales as the keepers of the product narrative, while empowering other stakeholders to scale the use of demos across the organization. The goal is to reach even more prospects with the right product story at the right time, opening up more strategic capacity for SEs — and ultimately driving more revenue for the company.