I remember the moment I began to envision what eventually became Consensus. I was running my last tech startup, selling B2B software, and I had just finished six straight demos, back to back with no interruption. I was exhausted and thought, “I just did the same demo over and over, except that I modified it on the fly based on prospect input. There has GOT to be a way to automate this!”
This was the moment of frustration that demo automation was born. Do you ever get that feeling that you were born for something more than just repeating yourself over and over all day long? So stop wasting your gifts doing mindless repetitive demos and start using demo automation to intelligently do the repetitive parts of demoing for you so you can focus on spending the majority of your time closing.
When we ran into this problem, we initially tried to use a screen recording tool and published some YouTube videos. But that didn’t really work well for the following reasons:
- We would send people the link and not know when or if they watched it
- We wouldn’t know who they shared it with, so we had no idea whether or not our demo videos were reaching the right stakeholders
- We wouldn’t know what was really driving their interest even if we did find out they watched it, so we didn’t know how to tailor the follow on conversation
We began asking ourselves these question:
- “What kinds of questions does a rep ask to understand what is driving the prospect’s interests?”
- “How does a sales rep personalize a demo to each prospect?”
- “How does the sales rep discover and engage other stakeholders in the buying group?”
Then we asked, “How can we automate all of this?” The answer was to create a technology that would automatically ask the prospect some questions then based on the responses personalize the demo to their unique interests. Then track how they answer the questions, how they engage with the demo, and who they share it with and send this information back to the salesperson for smart follow up. This is exactly what an expert sales person would do in a live demo, so why not automate it so that the sales rep can spend the majority of their time closing instead of demoing!
Demo automation changes everything. Just ask Renaissance Learning, who is seeing more than a $9M annual ROI on their investment in Consensus demo automation technology.
How does demo automation work? Experience intelligent demo automation for yourself.
First we ask a question about the role (or persona) or vertical and route them to a demo specifically designed for that group.
In our case we ask first about the role, so when someone indicates they are in Sales, we route them to the demo that begins with an intro video describing the sales problem we are solving and how we do it.
Then we ask more questions to customize the demo to their unique individual interests.
Based on the prospect’s responses, Consensus intelligently pulls from a library of video clips and documents to create a demo experience that not only covers what they want, but actually spends more time going in depth on things they care more about and less time on things they care only somewhat about.
So really, why should you spend time demoing over and over when technology can do that for you and you can spend the majority of your time nurturing and closing those high value accounts? Use technology for its purpose and your talents for their purpose. Don’t waste your gifts!
Experience intelligent demo automation for yourself.