Ten years ago, the term demo automation didn’t exist. In fact, we helped create the category for demo automation. Before we came along, the space was largely empty with a few companies attempting to blaze a trail but few having much success. Today there are over 400+ customers and 10s of thousands of presales and sales professionals all over the world.
It’s crazy to me how time flies. When I think back on how intelligent demo automation got its start and where we thought it could take us, I get really excited to see that in a way we’ve arrived. For a long time now I have been passionate about software that solves real problems and impacts the lives of individuals and organizations for the better.
As I look back on how far we’ve come in one decade of demo automation, I’m overwhelmed by how the buyer enablement trends we identified have taken hold and how the market has thrived and now includes many different technology providers now focusing on making presales teams more effective. And the best part is, we’re just getting started!
How it All Began
The idea for Interactive Demo Automation started long before Consensus at another technology startup I ran back in 2011. We were fortunate enough to have an abundance of leads, but there were so many we weren’t able to keep up with demand. We were struggling with demo lag and were losing customers because of it. When we couldn’t provide a demo for everyone who wanted one, they found someone who could.
In an effort to help our sales team, I started giving demos as well. There was one day in particular I did six demos back to back. By the end of the day, I hadn’t had time to work on any other projects and I was thoroughly exhausted. The process was totally inefficient. I started thinking that there had to be a way to remove some of the grind.
I had a conversation with a friend that verified what I had experienced wasn’t uncommon in the industry. This friend was a technical selling professional who was also in charge of delivering demos. He made the comments, “Sometimes I feel like the demo monkey or the demo chimp!”
This confirmed my suspicion that there was an opportunity to create a solution that could deliver repetitive demos so the presales professionals weren’t reduced to a demo monkey. I knew automation was necessary to resolve the demo bottleneck issue so many organizations were experiencing, but that was only the beginning.
Videos Weren’t Enough
Over the course of the next year, I tried and failed several times to automate product demos. We posted videos online and sent out Webex recordings, but it wasn’t enough. Using generic videos didn’t fully replace demos because they lacked the ability for customers to select what topics they were interested in and they didn’t return any discovery information back to us.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time and resources to devote to solving this problem. I ended up selling that company, but I couldn’t stop thinking how buying enterprise software is difficult, painful and slow, and it really ought to be easy, pleasant and fast.
Uncharted Territory
In 2013, I was ready to start my next project. I started really thinking through how you would go about automating a product demo. To truly fulfill customers’ requirements, it would need to be personalizable for every organization and every stakeholder persona in each buying group. To be beneficial for solution consultants, it would need to feed stakeholder data back to the technical selling team.
Convinced there’s a way to accomplish all these objectives, I locked myself in my study for eight hours and developed the first prototype of a demo player. I reached out to my network and began workshopping my idea. I spoke with professionals from all areas of technical sales: presales, sales, and even marketing.
The more people I spoke to, the more I realized this problem was everywhere. It seemed that many organizations were struggling to keep up with the demand for demos. We spent the rest of the year creating the beta version of our platform and in early 2014, we released our first demo automation solution into the market.
Buyer Enablement is Born
For the next two and a half years, I began researching why sending an interactive video demo would help buyers and buying groups to move faster through the sales process. I discovered that acting as a buying coach guides buyers through their process at a much quicker rate rather than forcing them to follow our sales schedule. From that, I was able to publish my book Selling is Hard. Buying is Harder. This book discusses all the ways sellers can guide their buyers through the buying journey to close deals faster.
Presales users that were using our Consensus demo automation platform were having tremendous success almost immediately after implementation. Not only were their sales cycles getting shorter and their close rates going up, we also discovered that the morale of these Presales teams was improving because they had fewer overview or harbor cruise demos to do. This freed up their schedules so they were able to spend time doing high value strategic conversations, proof of concepts, deep dive, and technical demos.
The Market Takes Notice
While we were discovering how to enable our buyers, more and more demo automation platforms started joining the market. By 2019, there were 5 demo automation solutions available and funding equaling 7.2 M being spread across those organizations.
The idea of demo automation started to take hold in 2020 as $31.2 M was injected into the industry. Support continued to grow in 2021 when the number of organizations grew to 6 with a total of $82.5 M flowing into the market. While all this was going on, Aragon declared Demo Automation a category and predicted the market for Demo Automation will reach $2.1 Billion by 2026.
Things really took off in 2022 when a wave of $238.3 M dollars washed across the industry and the number of Demo Automation solutions rose to 16. G2 created the Presales software category this same year as well.
In early 2023, we closed a $110,000,000 investment into Consensus. The market for Demo Automation began to be recognized by leading analyst firms such as G2, who then released an interactive demo report on the state of the industry. The number of organizations is still climbing and was at 19 total at the time of the blog.
To differentiate ourselves as more competition emerged, we began to create intensely focused thought leadership and engagement with the Presales community. We published blogs, hosted Scaling Presales webinars, created DEMOFEST – the largest virtual Presales event, opened the DEMOFEST Community on Discord, and established the annual SE Compensation and Workload report.
It’s gratifying to look back at those early designs and think about how far we’ve come. Going from simply wanting to solve the demo bottleneck to making the process better for buyers has not only yielded success for Consensus, but has given birth to a brand new category of demo automation and buyer enablement.
I just want to say thank you to everyone involved including my team, all of our customers, and all of the presales professionals and solution consulting experts that we’ve engaged with over the last several years. I want to say happy birthday, ten year anniversary to demo automation and Consensus! Thanks everybody!
