Customer interactions sound like listening to a broken record.
“I want to see a demo!”
“Just let me see the product!”
“When will I be getting the demo?”
There’s a reason for this.
Demos remain the vendor interaction customers want, but often they’re forced to wait for Sales Engineers to see any part of the solution. Multiply this by every sales rep that SE supports and a bottleneck occurs, slowing deals down or stalling them completely.
That’s why more organizations are adopting demo automation as part of their sales strategy.
Automated interactive video demos solve this problem. An automated demo sharpens the buying experience by feeding each prospect only what they need through a single shareable link.
While we don’t recommend you use this strategy to replace all demos (especially the product or live technical demos), there are plenty of other stages where you can use automated demos.
Selling While You Sleep
Live interactions only account for 17% of the buyer’s journey. And that 17% gets split between all the vendors they’re considering, so realistically, you get 5% of their time. Maybe.
Instead, it becomes a game of grabbing customer attention when you’re not there.
How do you do that? Easy, you sell while you sleep.
With demo automation, instead of waiting for the limited window of face time with the buyer, send a recorded demo or interactive product tour they can watch anytime, anywhere.
And we mean anywhere. Mobile viewing lets customers watch a demo while in line at the grocery store or grabbing a midnight snack.
Sending automated demos ahead of meetings helps you qualify them as a customer and cut down on unqualified product demos.
This frees up even more of your Solution Consultant’s time because now they’re free from delivering repetitive intro demos.
For more about how and when to send automated demos to customers, check out our ebook on the 6 Demo Types.
Demoing to Missing Stakeholders
How often do you get all the stakeholders in one call? Probably never.
To take it one step further, how often do you know all the stakeholders at the beginning of the sales cycle? Probably less than never.
While the primary decision makers will be involved from the start, secondary stakeholders – like Finance and IT – need to approve your solution before you can finalize the deal.
If you want until the very end of the cycle, you’ll probably scramble to answer detailed questions involving end-user agreements, GDPR compliance, or security policies.
Not only are interactive video demos shareable, but they discover additional stakeholders organically earlier in the process and give you insights into the types of questions they have.
Once you’ve created content for these closing questions, you won’t have to wait for another in-person meeting to address concerns.
Enabling Your Champion With Personalized Content
Champions make or break your sale. So why don’t we prepare them to sell for us?
Relying on them to remember your messaging means you’re playing a very risky game of telephone. The champion needs to get the messaging right to influence the other stakeholders.
Hand them the talk tracks with a personalized video demo. It will have the information they need for productive conversations and they can share the demo with other stakeholders who can select their own topics.
This kind of interaction isn’t a one-way street, either. Demo automation software gives insights into who viewed the content, what they watched, and how long they stayed engaged.
Making Discovery Smoother
Demo automation can be a lifesaver when it comes to discovery.
Not only does it provide you with detailed analytics, but you can Demo Qualify Leads (DQL). Customers come to their first call ready for a deeper dive into how your product works, and you don’t waste your presales resources on underqualified leads.
You can even ditch the “Request a Demo” button for a “See a Demo” button. Place your product at the forefront and use lead gates to drive quality leads.
