What is Product Experience Management? (Plus PXM Tools to Help)

Envision your customer’s buying journey. They might receive an ad first and then visit your website. They read about the product, but wait—that description doesn’t quite match the ad. And the website doesn’t offer any demos that help them see how your product works. Now what?

That lack of consistency in product messaging, a confusing user experience, and missed opportunities to engage and educate buyers could be avoided with the right approach to product experience management. When buyers don’t get the information they need—when they need it—they disengage, delay, or drop off entirely.

Let’s explore how product experience management works and how the right software can help you deliver a seamless, personalized journey that shortens the sales cycle and keeps buyers moving forward with confidence.

 

 

What is Product Experience Management? 

Product experience management (PXM) is all about crafting a seamless, engaging journey for your customers—starting from their very first interaction, not just the point of purchase. It’s about making every touchpoint count, from curiosity to commitment. With the right approach, you’re not just selling a product—you’re delivering an experience that keeps customers coming back for more.

Think of it as your VIP concierge for the buyer journey: guiding, personalizing, and optimizing every step so customers don’t just buy—they buy in.

 

 

How Does Product Management Work? 

To optimize a buyer’s product experience, companies create a cohesive buying journey that starts with a consistent product story shared by all revenue teams. Using PXM, companies maintain their product information, assets, and content to guide buyers on this journey and through the product’s story. 

Imagine you’re selling a social media marketing tool. Marketing utilizes PXM to ensure they’re telling the right story through their ads and directing potential buyers to an interactive product demo on your website to learn more. The interested customer then requests a personalized product tour, which not only continues the product’s story but also focuses on the specific pain points the product solves for the customer. Sales can then utilize analytics on the customer to give a qualified live demo, ensuring that the demo is both product-focused and customer-centric.

 

 

What is a Product Experience Platform? 

A product experience platform is like your product’s personal hype team—delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right buyers. It’s a set of tools designed to curate, maintain, and share your product’s story in a way that engages and converts. Instead of forcing buyers to dig through scattered content or wait for a sales call, a product experience platform puts the most relevant, compelling information right at their fingertips.

While there are different types of product experience platforms, they all share a common goal: to ensure buyers get the clarity, confidence, and engagement they need to move forward. Whether it’s interactive demos, guided tours, or personalized content, these platforms streamline the buying journey. While buyers are still figuring it out on their own, you’re helping them get to that “aha!” moment a bit faster.

 

 

The Benefits of Effective Product Experience Management

Now that we’ve talked about the “what,” let’s talk about the “why” of product experience management. Here are some of the biggest benefits of PXM.

 

Personalizes the Overall Buying Experience

Personalization in sales and marketing is crucial today—with more than 70% of consumers saying they expect personalization. Product experience takes a customer-centric approach. Although it tells a cohesive story of your product, PXM lets you take that story and personalize it to each customer, ensuring they’re seeing information and assets that relate to their own use case. 

Source 

 

Shortens Sales Cycles 

When buyers have to jump through hoops just to understand your product, deals slow down—or worse, stall out. Product experience management removes those roadblocks by giving buyers instant access to the information they need, exactly when they need it. Whether it’s through a product simulation, an automated demo, or other self-service tools, a seamless product experience helps buyers self-educate, gain confidence, and make decisions faster—without waiting on a sales call to move forward.

 

Increases Conversion Rates

PXM means optimizing the user experience, offering personalized product recommendations, and engaging and responding to potential customers. These actions can improve deal sizes and win rates since personalized, optimized experiences yield 20% higher customer satisfaction rates—and a 10% to 15% increase in conversion rates. 

 

Rapid Revenue Growth 

Bigger deals and higher close rates created by PXM mean more revenue in a company’s sales pipeline. Companies that focus on product-led growth through PXM grow faster than companies without product-led growth—and are almost three times as likely to have gained market share in recent years.

 

 

Product Experience Management vs Product Information Management

Product information management (PIM) is part of PXM, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. While PXM examines every piece of the product’s story, from information to assets, PIM ensures that product information, such as description and pricing, is accurate and accessible to revenue teams.

 

How PXM and PIM Work Together 

PXM needs PIM to thrive since product information is an essential part of the product experience. To ensure that buyers have a positive overall product experience, every marketing and sales channel they interact with needs accurate, consistent, and contextualized information. Companies need PIM to keep that information true and accessible to the teams working in these channels.

 

 

Best Product Experience Platform 

Because product experience encompasses so many different facets of the customer journey, PXM tools are diverse and optimize various stages of the sales funnel–and your sales pipeline. Let’s take a look at the best product experience platforms available today and how they can help.

 

1.  Consensus: Best Product Experience Platform for Buyer Enablement

Today, the number of interactions needed to complete a sale is up to an average of 27 interactions, while the number of stakeholders required to make a sale is more than six. It’s no wonder why Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers say that their last purchase was too difficult.  

Enter: Consensus, here to cut down on frustration, unhelpful and unqualified product experiences, and sales cycles. Consensus is the world’s first Product Experience Platform, helping revenue teams power growth with buyer-led experiences. The platform makes buying simple by giving buyers access to product experiences when and where they want them. Revenue teams can quickly and efficiently build, share, and track these experiences, helping them optimize the sales process and close deals faster.

Consensus offers:

• On-Demand Video Tours: Buyers get personalized video demos throughout their buying journey.  They tell Consensus what features they care about most, and they get a video tour that perfectly addresses their use cases and pain points. Sellers get intent data that tells them key insights into the buyer that help them better engage and sell.
• Interactive Product Tours: Buyers view and try out your product in a controlled, contextualized guided tour. These tours are simple to build, easy to navigate, and help your buyer envision what it would be like to use your platform.
• Automated Product Simulations: Buyers explore one-click sandbox demo experiences that skip engineering and time constraints. In seconds, they get a data-rich POC experience that lets them unpack your product’s functionality.
• Actionable Intent Data: Consensus offers analytics that gives sellers a deeper look into what their buyers really want, from feature rankings to new stakeholder discovery to organizational heat maps. With DemoBoards, your buyers can share their demos with key stakeholders, boosting your stakeholder discovery.

 

The Product Experience Platform turns your potential buyers into your champions—and your sellers into top performers. Consensus users have seen their stakeholder discovery rate increase by more than 50%, added $30 million in revenue related to demo automation, and shortened their sales cycle by 68%.

What’s available: 

• Demo Creator: Create demos for every stage of your customer journey, designed for a personalized experience every time.
• Product Tours: Show your buyers the features they want to see and tell a story through a unique multimedia tour.
• Screen Recorder: Capture and edit video demos right through Consensus.
• Chrome Extensions: Create video demos instantly with the help of Consensus’s Chrome Extensions, going beyond screenshots to build a more interactive experience.
• Demo Player: Deliver interactive demos on any browser or device.
• DemoBoards: Provide your buyers with a secure, branded, and customized landing page that shows off your product.
• Playlists: Share multiple product experiences in one link, keep content relevant, and guide buyers throughout their journey.
• BuyerBoard: Give your champions a place to show your product to key stakeholders and colleagues.
• Content Downloads: Supplement your demos with additional content that can be easily downloaded by your buyers.
• Public Links and Merge Links: Create custom links that can be shared via your social media, email campaigns, website, and more.
• Demo Library: Build a centralized hub for your demos that’s accessible to your team and easily searchable.
• Demolytics: Track how your buyers are engaging with your demos to receive intent data that helps you better qualify and interact with your leads.

 

What’s not: 

• Consensus is focused on enterprise and mid-market companies and may not be ideal for businesses in earlier stages.

 

Pricing: Consensus builds custom plans based on licenses and use cases. Explore pricing here.

 

2.  Adobe Experience Manager: Product Experience Management Tool Including Product Information Management

Adobe Experience Manager is a product experience manager with multiple products. When PXM is needed, so too is PIM, and that’s where this suite of tools comes in. Adobe Experience Manager offers content and digital asset management, the ability to integrate forms into products, a documentation publisher, and a learning management system (LMS). It creates one location for content and assets, ensuring that information is accurate and accessible.

Photo courtesy of Adobe

What’s available: 

• Content Management System (CMS): Create, manage, store, and send content.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM): Source, improve, and send digital assets.
• Learning Management System (LMS): Train employees and onboard customers.
• Digital Enrollment: Create responsive forms for customers to sign.

 

What’s not: 

• It has an overly complex system
• It requires a steep learning curve
• It’s not the most affordable product for its functionality.

 

Pricing: Adobe creates custom pricing plans.

 

3.  Chameleon: Product Experience Management for Post-Purchase Product Adoption

If you’re in SaaS, you might not be thrilled to learn that about 80% of features in SaaS products are rarely or ever used. Certain types of product experience software focus on getting that number down. Chameleon focuses on product and feature adoption. Users can build product tours for selling and onboarding and then add interactive features like banners, lightboxes, and videos. They can also add content directly to their product through Chameleon, like embeddable cards and tooltips, to walk users through the product while using it.

Photo courtesy of Chameleon.io

What’s available: 

• Segmentation: Segment audiences, track conversion, and trigger next steps.
• Launchers: Add customizable in-product widgets.
• Microsurveys: Collect feedback through in-product surveys.
• Templates: Pre-made templates for product tours.

 

What’s not: 

• Users mention frequent bugs.
• It lacks the integrations and customization options of other similar products.
• Its integrations do not always work as intended.

 

Pricing: Chameleon has four pricing plans: HelpBar, StartUp, Growth, and Enterprise. All pricing is determined by your Monthly Tracked Users (MTUS).

 

1.  Jotform: Product Experience Tool for Online Forms

There’s a common misconception that PXM is product-centric, but it’s actually more about how the product is used by customers. For a customer-focused approach, some PXM software focuses on data collection and the use of that data to optimize the customer experience. 

Jotform is a form-building platform that lets users create no-code forms to add to their products, collect data, and integrate that data into their tech stack. Users can build forms from the platform’s template library. In addition to collecting data, users can also collect payments through their forms. These functionalities both improve the user experience on the product and also offer revenue teams the data they need to better address customer wants.

Photo courtesy of Jotform

What’s available: 

• Workflows: Connect multiple forms and trigger action with conditional logic.
• Form Builder: Build no-code forms.
• Report Builder: Generate reports based on online form data.
• Smart PDF Forms: Create mobile-friendly forms with easy signing.

 

What’s not: 

• There are limited features for lower-priced plans.
• There are limited customization options for more personalized online forms.
• Users mention poor customer service.

 

Pricing: 

• Starter: Free
• Bronze: $39 per month
• Silver: $49 per month
• Gold: $129 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

 

5.  Sprig: Best Product Experience for Gathering Product User Feedback

A Salesforce study looked at what today’s buyers expect of companies: 88% said their overall experience with a company is just as important as the product itself, and 73% said that they expect companies to be able to provide an experience based on their individual wants and needs. With Sprig, companies get the feedback they need to create those personalized experiences. 

Sprig is an AI-driven product experience platform that focuses on tracking and implementing user feedback. Users can see how their customers are using their products, get feedback directly from buyers, and receive AI insights and recommendations. It can show users areas for improvement to boost product and feature adoption.

Photo courtesy of Sprig

What’s available: 

• Replays: Record user sessions.
• Heatmaps: Receive a digital representation of in-product interactions.
• AI Explorer: Get AI-generated information pulls on user behavior and sentiment.
• AI Recommendations: Receive AI-driven actionable insights.

 

What’s not: 

• There are limited survey options.
• Surveys sometimes contain bugs.
• The functionality of the product’s features is limited.

 

Pricing: 

• Individual: Free
• Starter: $199 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

 

 

Start Implementing PXM for the Ultimate Buyer Engagement 

If you’re looking to improve product experience management, start by making it easier for buyers to buy. While there are many types of product experience management, perhaps none are as important as buyer enablement—especially at a time when the majority of B2B buyers say that the buying process is too complex. 

Today’s buyers want three things: to talk to sellers less, to research on their own more, and to have the information and resources they need to get their stakeholders on board quickly. And that’s where Consensus shines. Consensus gives buyers the product experiences they crave for them to explore at their own pace. Its Product Experience Platform solves the buyer’s dilemma by giving them product tours, demos, and simulations that help them make informed decisions faster. Meanwhile, sellers get data and insights that help them better qualify leads, engage with buyers at the right times, and outperform the competition.