The Product-led Growth Hybrid: Interactive Product Demos

When you have a great product, it practically sells itself. At least, that’s what organizations using a PLG model think.

PLG offers several advantages over traditional sales-led strategies. But it doesn’t work for just any product. It’s best reserved for solutions with a low entry barrier and that customers can get value from without much hand-holding.

It may be difficult for your organization to switch to a PLG entirely. Still, with the help of demo automation, you can create a hybrid approach that will give you the agility of PLG and the stability of traditional sales strategies. 

What is Product-led Growth?

Product-led Growth is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a sales strategy that relies on the product as the primary seller and driver of revenue, expansion, and retention.

Organizations using this strategy develop their product to be as easy to use as possible while simultaneously making it essential to their customers’ processes. The goal is to make their solution so valuable it’s impossible to cancel.

Some benefits of PLG strategies:

• Acquire customers at a lower cost 
• Doesn’t require a large sales team to close deals 
• Have increased rates of customer satisfaction 
• Retain more customers 
• May offer the opportunity to try out the product before they buy (if a freemium option is available)

When your product is that easy to use, interactive product demos can be helpful for customers to explore the product without having to wait for a rep.

This is especially important if you don’t have a free version of the software that they can use to dip their toes in.

Remember, there will be solutions that aren’t a good fit for a click-through demo environment. Those are generally the types of solutions that are more robust and require a more traditional sales strategy. 

For those instances, an automated SaaS Demo is a better fit. 

No matter what, customers are looking for a self-service experience, so if you can create a demo, they can view on demand, and you’ll get better deal outcomes.

PLG Strategy with Interactive Product Demos

A PLG strategy works for organizations that have:

• Low-security procedures
• May include a freemium offering
• Purchases made directly from users
• Few users per organization

You should consider Interactive Product Demos if you’re employing a PLG Strategy since these demos lend themselves to customers’ interests. 

An Interactive Product Demo:

• Replicates your product’s appearance in a test environment.
• Captures leads on the website with a limited sandbox that the prospect can “drive.”
• Analytics show views and click patterns within the demo environment.
• Sanitizes data (dummy data) in your demo environment.

Use these demos to augment a live demo as a controlled demo environment or for technical buyers who want to click through a product facsimile.

Automating The Sales Approach

A sales-focused approach works for organizations that have:

• High-security procedures
• No freemium or trial period
• A large buying group
• Many users per organization

Suppose your buyers need a guided approach to understanding your product but still want as much of the process to be self-serve as possible. In that case, automated demos are an excellent way to give buyers the information they need without sales or presales becoming overrun with demo requests. 

A Software Demo Video:

• Approximates the presales demo experience through guided product education.
• Branches and personalizes through automated discovery.
• In-depth Demolytics show view times, heat maps, and reveal individual interests on a per-user basis.
• Scales presales resources by automating repetitive or unqualified demos.

Use interactive demo application software to automate repetitive demos on demand. This demo automation strategy works exceptionally well if you still have a more traditional leaning sales process.

The Hybrid Approach: The Best of Both Worlds

Some organizations fall between a complete Product-led Growth approach and a sales-driven one.

A hybrid approach works for organizations that have:

• Medium security procedures
• Low-cost packages or trial periods
• A small buying group that may include users
• 1 to 2 teams of users

This approach works for customers who need to be able to click through the software but still need some extra guidance regarding the technical aspects.

A product demo experience:

• Utilizes both text and video explainers incorporated into live product UI 
• Enables independent product exploration without forcing them to “click every click”
• Requires no professional services to create and manage
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Lead by Product or Sales

Whether your organization is product-led or follows a traditional sales approach, you still have a product to sell. 

Which means you have a product to demonstrate to customers. 

How you show your solution matters. Depending on what approach you take might determine if you use interactive product demos, demo automation software, or a mix of both.

Not sure where you fit? We’ve got you covered with our massive resource library for all things demo automation.

Don’t have that kind of time? Start here!