Demos can be the lifeblood to generating pipeline and revenue, regardless of your GTM strategy. Prospects want to see the thing they’re about to buy in action, ensuring it’s the right fit for their needs. But not all demos are created equal.
On this week’s episode of Digital Banter, we’re going to dive deep into the world of interactive demos with special guest Natalie Marcotullio, uncovering what makes interactive demos more effective in moving the revenue needle.
We’ll chat about how interactive demos align to certain GTM motions, as well as discuss why so many brands are still so hesitant to move in this direction with their business strategy.
So whether you’ve already made the shift to interactive, are considering making a move, or have no idea what an interactive demo even means, this episode is going to help you make some pretty significant decisions that can impact your brand’s bottom line.
Podcast Transcript
What’s up everybody back again for another episode of digital banter. Running solo today however because James decided to have a baby last week so he’s on paternity leave for a little while. Allegedly he will be back for next episode but we’ll see how that goes since I’ve been through the two kids scenario I know how it goes how some of our listeners kind of knows as well. But that being said I am still excited about today’s episode because we have Natalie Marco Tulio on from Navattic. Natalie welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Love the intro music, I was vibing to that before it was a nice way to start off.
Yeah right it gets you going ready to go then. So today we are talking about something that is your sweet spot, interactive demos. To give some context behind this before we jump into today’s episode, from our perspective there’s so many competing calls to action, so many ways that you go to market, and so many ways that you engage prospective customers especially in the B2B world. You have our standard you know free trial, our demo you know, our contact us handing off to sales. There’s so many avenues in which somebody can actively participate and engage with a prospective customers but interactive demos feels a little bit more on the cutting edge of things. So let’s let’s kick this off by talking about what is an interactive demo, let’s create the definition here a little bit.
Essentially to your point it’s not like a traditional live demo but it’s also not like a video demo. I think sometimes people think interactive demo they think of the classic like watch a loom video of me walking through their product it is a self-guided like clickable demo that looks and feels like you’re actually in the software. But it’s not it’s a clone it’s a replica and just gives like prospects a little kind of like taste of your product that they can walk through async either on your website or like you can send an email campaigns.
And given Navattic’s presence in the market as kind of this being the product that you guys offer you know what what are some of the ways in which people are using them to drive business operations and business results.
Yeah so I mentioned that the website that’s kind of our bread and butter and that’s the main one we seen. If you go to a lot of SaaS websites you might see this they might have a tier points like product tour interactive demo like click through the product seen a few different variations. But really what it is is, either gated or ungated, and we can get into that more later, but just a way to before ask them to jump onto that live call or to book a free trial to give them a little more information. But ultimately you are trying to drive them to that CTA. So like while it is maybe a secondary CTA usually the business goal is you’re actually trying to drive more people to your live demo or free trial.
Okay so I have a hot take here that I kind of want to get your thoughts on and you know you kind of teed it up a little bit with the whole gated ungated thing there for a second but I feel like there’s way too much hesitation still in the market for brands as far as opening up the veil of secrecy or transparency into the actual product in their either onboarding or sales enablement processes and I don’t know if that’s a result of you know we don’t want to show our product because competition see it or maybe it’s just not as great as we make it sound. I don’t know but when you look at the consumer side of things then right as the potential buyer on either one of our sides right like we want to see the thing that we are possibly buying. We want to make sure it lives up to the expectations and needs of ourselves. I don’t know I mean what where do you come at it and and what are you seeing in the market as far as like that hesitation is concerned.
Yeah I’ve kind of heard all the above and even more than that so so to your point what if our competitors see our product, what if we cannibalize our sales teams live demos like, what if no one you know if they see on the website they won’t want to book a live demo, or to your point like maybe I don’t have the prettiest UI ever. I’d say to all of that I think I can address them all separately heard them all to the competitor’s point I’ll start there. One from a personal perspective I do feel like you should buy prioritizing your buyers over your competitors and let’s be honest like your competitors have access to your demos already. I have not spoken to any marketing leader who’s like you would not know what I know our competitors have about us and what we have about them. There are a whole platforms that exist around competitive intel they’re you’re probably not like hopefully they shouldn’t learn that much more because you’re also not supposed to give away everything in your interactive demo, we’ll get to that more later. It really should just be a little quick sneak peek so if you’re just showing the main aha moments of your product kind of those like big wow moments that’s probably stuff your competitor already knows about. That being said I know I’ve talked a lot of marketers who are like yeah I agree my CEO he’s maybe a little more old school or she there is no way that they’re going to let me put the product on the website. That’s when I say you know maybe try it in like the sales cycle first get familiar with it maybe test it on an ad landing page. Sometimes you have to try it in like smaller ways that feel a little less scary than front intend on your website to be like hey look our buyers do want this and no our competitors didn’t rip off all of our top products.
I think you brought up an interesting point there talking about competitors. I know from my perspective too regardless of like products that I might be looking at for the agency but more so like the competitors that we go against in in potential pitches and you know prospects like I already know their stick. I have already seen their deck probably so to your point like there is nothing to hide; it exists somewhere out there it’s just whether you put in the effort to go find it at the end of the day so go ahead.
I was just gonna last comment there too like if you don’t show it I’ve seen YouTube videos of random people who are customers of your software reviewing it too. Unfortunately it’s a way I mean I think fortunately but it’s it’s way more open of an internet out there people can find a way to show your product whether you want them to or not.
So one thing I also wanted to latch on there too is like I think you brought up and and alluded to like the interactive demo does not replace the actual demo right and and there’s something to be said there where it’s giving enough of a taste to the prospect right.
Exactly yeah like the way we’ve heard customers describe it was for a few different ways like an appetizer a snack a little like taste to get you excited. It really shouldn’t be like we found our best performing demos are between five to 15 steps which is about like 30 seconds to a minute. That’s not enough time to give away all of your secret sauce it’s really just supposed to be similar to how we’ve used like gifs and videos in the past a way to just be like oh hey this thing that I’m trying to accomplish yes your software does it it looks maybe easy to use it looks like it accomplishes what I want cool now I’m ready to dive in further.
Okay so let’s take this a little step further so us as a paid media agency we are as most marketers out there we’re trying to match up the intent the passions and the needs of our audience with the desired outcome and experience that we want them to achieve on the on the landing page. So how do you go about crafting interactive demos using that context where you know your audience might have five different needs and you may know them or you may not know them.
I actually think this is where interactive demos can be a really good almost like intent source because you can then figure out what actually is the need of my of the website visitor; you’re not just getting like third party information. It’s like hey this person maybe read an ebook somewhere once about this topic you’re seeing they literally went through a demo about the topic. But to answer your question what we see a lot of our customers do is they use a little like checklist feature so when you first pop into the demo you’re presented with choices and so for example our customer ramp they are an expense management platform they have like explore ramp for accounting explore it for you know other Finance Management things that I can’t remember right now but essentially you can go and dive into either like the feature or persona you care most about so you can then make sure the demo is personalized that specific person. Then again on the back end you can then just see oh Natalie went through the accounting functionality clearly I should then serve her more ads about accounting versus some of her other functionality.
So is that data then you know how does that data get pushed out or extrapolated and condensed into something that’s usable outside of obviously sales getting the insight of like oh yeah XYZ prospect did XYZ in the demo.
A few different ways. So like we use a slack integration internally okay so when we see we don’t gate our demo so we see it on the account level. We can identify if you don’t gate it on the account level who’s going through so we’ll see for example like hey this customer this pro opportunity went through this demo before or I guess the customer prospect but they went through this demo. We’ll use that information in the sales or like customer cycle basically for upsell as well we also see a lot of customers connect it to their CRMs so if you’re connecting it to something like Marketo Salesforce HubSpot you can then create drip campaigns off of it so if someone went through again this the accounting demo I’m going to send them an email drip campaign all around accounting.
Gotcha but it lives at the account level not at the contact level unless it’s gated and you’re getting that information.
Exactly.
Okay so let’s dive into some of the kind of tangible use cases here and obviously you guys have collected a lot of data over the years but more importantly as of recently you launched kind of your your annual report of the state of interactive demos and I kind of wanted to dive into some of those things because I feel like there’s a lot of hesitation that comes back to demos and giving away information based off of go to market motion like it feels like a very heavy product led growth motion but your data suggests it’s not right.
Yeah it’s so funny because from the PLG side I’ve heard this must just be for sales led companies because we’re already PLG we’re already giving people access to our product so this might not be for us. Then the sales led side I’ve heard this must just be for PLG companies because they’re more okay with showing their product. It’s 50/50. We’ve run this report two years in a row and both times it’s almost entirely a 50/50 split. It works for both.
And I think the other thing that I saw kind of digging into some of that data is like the when you look at size of company it skews heavy towards you know SMBs startups a little bit of mid-market but like not necessarily enterprise and my kind of assumption off of that is well enterprise is kind of grown out of giving away too much information. They have these big sales teams and they are more resistant to change but I’m curious to kind of get your insights based off of the data maybe some of the feedback that you receive received in collecting it.
Yeah I think this will be something be so interesting to monitor every year because it kind of shows where interactive demos are and just like the overall let’s say adoption curve. I think this is largely because startups and mid-markets tend to be a little more like early adopters innovator types and that’s really what we’ve seen like for us. Like mid-market company that maybe has a product marketing function that has an established product feels very good about the UI like that really is a sweet spot because they tend to be a little less resistant at a change to your point like enterprises we’re getting like we’re noticing enterprises adopt more but I think it’s still going to take a little bit of time is good I was just say they can move like faster than maybe enterprise is getting approval for it.
Yeah I think that’s definitely a factor there. As far as like industries that that kind of latch onto this you know which one’s outside of like SaaS as an aggregated view of it but like what are interactives best used for.
Yeah we often see it obviously SaaS so it is cloning your SaaS product because I do get that question all the time of like can I use this for a physical product unfortunately no for right now it’s just for Saas. I think where I see it as like when you have sort of a complex product that’s really hard to get data in in some sort of PLG motion but the UI experience actually is really important so more tangibly cyber security. So you know it’s really hard for unless you’re an admin even if you have a PLG motion you can’t necessarily like connect any sort of cybercity software to all of your systems without getting a big amount of approvals but a lot of what we hear a lot of cyber security companies say is it’s so competitive in markets that their UI is a really big competitive differentiator. Also fintech like very similar. It’s really hard to connect your bank accounts and get approval for that but there’s a reason people love brex and ramp because they’re easy to use.
Right. Yeah I don’t know what else stuck to you when you guys were putting together that report. Like those are just some of the things that I saw when I was viewing the data but like what are some of those things that really was eye opening to you guys.
I think the biggest thing that I was pretty excited to see was how many customers were using it as a main or secondary CTA really above the fold or in the nav bar. That’s something we’ve always sort of pushed. It’s like if you’re going to use an interactive demo why hide it you’re not really going to see results if you bury it at the bottom of your landing page. But for us we saw like 81% of basically the we looked at the top performing demos did have it in some way it’s a CTA whether it’s like product before CTA you know explore more explore a product as a secondary nav bar CTA or above the fold. I think it’s short of just shows to our conversation before about like companies getting a little more comfortable being front and center with their product if they willing to put it that directly on their website. It just like okay we want to be product forward we want this to be we want a majority of our website visitors to be seeing this versus before I think people when they were still at the very beginning they’re like I’ll try this but I might put it on one specific product page not front and center for everyone.
Yeah and I think you kind of nailed it on the head there of like when you think about differentiation in crowded markets like how do you break through the noise like you have to you have to offer up something that is unique is transparent and is people first at the end of the day right.
Exactly and I think I’ve seen so many companies claim that you know they are so easy to use it only takes us long to set up or that users love their software. Like how many times have we seen that phrase right but at some point you’re kind of a little sick of hearing it you’re like just just show me it like if it’s that great then I should be able to see it. We’ve all been burned by being told the software is really easy to use and then using it like oh my God this is a nightmare.
Yeah I mean one of the things that we talk a lot about when we’re talking you know about like developing a paid media strategy you know just because you say it doesn’t make it true. Like you can shout through the the rooftops that you do X Y and Z great but if you don’t live up to that like it doesn’t matter. Like your turn’s going to be ridiculous your prospects your sales process everything else isn’t going to live up to the hype.
I just think right now in this economy right like no one wants to stick their neck out for something that’s not going to work. I think it used to work a little before where when we had more money when we weren’t being a scrutinized where you could buy something and every now and then you be like you know it didn’t work we just got sold we have really good sales people and it’s kind like oh it happens we’ll just you know bury this under the our marketing budget and forget we bought it. But now I feel like everything is being so scrutinized that people really need to know what they’re signing up for.
So let’s say a brand wants to take the step and start experimenting with an interactive like how how much should they consider giving away versus how much should they remain you know hidden either behind the gate or you know saved for like a true demo that is a walkthrough with an AE or a BDR or somebody.
So if your team’s gung-ho about it right if you’re one of those teams who like we want to put our product on our website we are CEOs aligned I think really finding like two to three key aha moments and you can do that through like brainstorming sessions with your CS team and your sales team or your product team. If you are plg you might have that data around what are those key aha moments and then using that as the structure for your website demo again really should just be like 10 to 15 steps not super long but that’s a good place to start. If your team is maybe interested but you feel like you need a little more convincing one thing we’ve seen a lot of customers do is start with a feature like a new feature launch which that when you’re launching a new feature like naturally you’re probably going to make a gif of it you’re probably maybe make a video so the team’s probably going to be more comfortable with the concept of showing that and it’s very scoped in you don’t have to worry about like oh my God what parts of my product do I choose from you know your focusing on just this new feature.
So let’s dive into those aha moments a little bit like give some examples.
Yeah so I think like I’ll use our own not surprisingly we have an interactive demo on our website our own ones for us. We have like an editing capability so if you have a really messy demo environment and you want to change a number from like zero to 100 so it looks like positive numbers you know look at all the results you’re getting from our software we can use our editor to do that and so that’s like step four I think in our interactive demo and I found that out from just asking sales CS team and then watching customer calls and really seeing that moment when the customer is like whoa that’s cool. You kind of see it on their faces that’s what’s always fun about watching the calls. You can really see when something’s like oh okay versus like a oh.
All right so let’s go back to kind of like those hesitations that hot take that I gave and you know talk to me a little bit about how you would address those common objections that came up I mean to give you some context too like I saw your LinkedIn post it was last week or earlier this week around like one of the possible push backs being you know well what if the user asked questions that need answering then like how do you how do we deal with that like what that’s one objection but like what are some of the others that you commonly see people that want to go forward with an interactive have to deal with and create buy-in internally through.
Yeah we talked about a like briefly touched on the cannibalization; that’s a really big one and that’s what I’ll say like that’s when maybe starting with putting ads putting on ad landing pages right like if your sales team is really worried about you know no matter what you say that this is going to replace them start in a way that will it’s not as direct and you can kind of experiment without being as scrutinized. I always feel like putting something in the website it always gets a lot more scrutiny than like one ad landing page. So put it on ad landing page see if it gets results and then when you’re pitching it to your sales team you can literally say hey look this drove like a 10% increase in leads versus a decrease or you might say hey the leads you’re getting from this campaign maybe they’re higher quality and so the sales you might get more comfortable with like okay maybe were weeding out some bad fits. So as far as like cannibalization I say the biggest thing is testing in a way or like give it to your sales team to use in their sales cycle we see a lot of salespeople using it as sales leave behinds replacing like an hour long demo recording with so a short snippet of a specific feature the prospect asked about or an outbound campaigns and I feel like that way the sales team gets more comfortable more familiar and the nice thing about sales is once they see success with something or get some good deals from it they’re they’re generally on board.
Okay so give me give me some business impacts that you have seen your clients achieve by making this transition either through an experimentation or like just going screw it I’m going all in.
Yeah one I loved I’ll give a sales one and a plg one because we talked about 50/50. One I love from the plg side so our customer trainual AB tested an interactive demo versus a video to your point about common objections that’s when we also hear a lot of like why would we just show a video and they actually saw I almost like don’t believe this number when I saw it but a 450% lift in free trial signups when using the interactive demo versus the video. I know I didn’t believe it too but they have the Mutiny screenshots because they wrote a playbook with us and Mutiny on it and okay the screenshots from the experiment so according to Mutiny. I think the biggest thing was just cuz you’re basically it’s almost like letting users in a plg sense try that onboarding experience before they even have to sign up for anything so they’re getting like the best moments of your product and they’re clicking through so they’re actually seeing it versus a video. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve like started a video and then you know I get a slack and then I get a this and then suddenly I’m like oh did I watch that video it just it kind of forces you to be more interactive that’s why we call them interactive demos.
So that was plg right.
Yeah. On the sales side um one of my favorite also customer examples are customer jellyfish who they’re in the developer space again another space where like people might not want to talk to sales it’s pretty hard sometimes to get data into developer platforms but UI experience really important so they have demos all over their website they basically created demos for different product pages for different personas different use cases. I think they built like 15 demos on the website it was awesome um but they’ve had it live for the last six months they redid their website with it and seeing 600k in pipeline. So very clearly we’re hearing a lot of companies say like we can directly tie opportunities and pipeline to the companies that went through these demos and it’s bringing it like to our point before it is bringing in more pipeline versus cannibalizing our sales deals.
Do you know how they’re positioning it like before the user gets the the site like how is it messaged in their marking material and positioning compared to just the regular plain Jane take a demo.
What they did is just a little different is they have them embedded on specific pages so if you’re on a product page versus like the typical just here’s a bunch of screenshots of our product it’s like hey you are an engineering manager take this tour to see exactly how an engineering manager would use jellyfish and then within the demo they do a really good job of prompting prompting other ctas. Some that are you know okay ready for a live demo but some that are hey I just talked through this feature go now maybe go watch a video on it or go read our help docs on it. They really use it almost as like a Gateway into all their other information to really help someone almost like fully self server because it is developer tech I feel like as much as possible developers really love to do their own research.
Yeah yeah nailed that one. Okay so I actually don’t have my prop with me today because I am doing today’s show from home around the office however one of our typical questions is if I have my magic one and I handed it to you what is one thing that you would use it for to change in B2B right now.
I think in general I mean I’ve kind of talked about like buyer trust a lot but like I do just I do just wish we made B2B buying not so complex both on like both on the end user side and internally. So on the end user side I just there’s so many times I’m like I’m going to book a demo it takes five days to get a response and then they won’t tell me pricing until two months in and look if it’s a really enterprise product I totally get it sometimes I just like would like to be told upfront like hey sorry this is a really enterprise product it’s not for you. Like I just wish sometimes we were more transparent with who our ICP is and who it’s not and being okay with just saying that up front and then letting people know like this is a really good fit for you or it’s not let’s not waste our times either way. And on the flip side I feel like I don’t think a lot of the people in the organization like I don’t think BDR always love asking a million questions or feeling like they’re constantly rejecting people or having to manually reach out to everyone. I just wish the organization leaders would think more about the buyer experience versus like processes they’re just used to and feel like they have to do.
So I think you you hit something there that I just want to like harp on for a second too is you know enterprise buyers are still people too they have the same valuable time as everyone else in fact they probably are have less time in most cases especially for brands that are trying to go after you know the C-Suite or VPS and executive layer they don’t like they don’t have time to be screwing around with scheduling or waiting for somebody to get back to you or not having information at their fingertips and really like they buy other crap out there they’re not just like so infactuated with your product that you have to be different than how they go and buy I don’t know anything online. I think that’s just such a uh a jaded way and like egotistical way for some brands to think about themselves like great you’re an enterprise billion dollar company like that doesn’t mean you can make people jump through hoops because that doesn’t make you the best out there. There’s probably an SMB that’s probably doing things way better than you and just they aren’t you know the market just isn’t aware of you yet.
The way I see it is I think like 10 years ago buyers didn’t know how to buy software necessarily it was a new market like we you actually needed to be really handheld through the buying process because you maybe didn’t know how each step was supposed to go. Now like I can’t tell you how many times sometimes I listen to a customer call and the customer jumps on or a prospect call and they’re like okay I have this is my budget this is my timeline like we all get the game we know what’s going on so versus like forcing them to go through this old system that might be really good for our Salesforce hygiene right bant is great for Salesforce hygiene and having very specific criteria to move from one to the next but it’s really uncomfortable when trying to build a personal relationship. I understand that’s scary and understand how important that data is but I just wish we would prioritize buyers over our own data and processes.
And as a buyer just pisses me off it’s like what are you hiding like just give me the information that I need. I mean it I don’t want to use it as like the the rant to go into like transparent pricing but it is kind of along those same lines like show me what it is let me figure it out and if I feel like yeah this is a good fit I will absolutely schedule a conversation because I want to qualify myself I don’t want you to hop on a call and waste my time and your time trying to qualify me if I’m not a fit.
It’s funny we often see like companies to your point about SMBs mid-market being a little more early innovators like being ones using interactive demos we see a good alignment with like companies who have public facing pricing and then we’ll adopt interactive demos. It’s just kind of like this new School shift of to your point like just just let buyers have the information they want up front versus thinking that like if we hide it from them then they have to talk to us and we’re so good at convincing that then we’ll convince them even if it’s not for them we’ll convince them it’s right and like I think that used to actually work a little more I don’t think it works in today’s current buying economy.
Yeah you’re right. One thing I should have asked too is like how is AI factoring into either Navattic but also just in general like the demo atmosphere of things.
Yeah I think as far as how factoring to Navatticand like interactive demos one use case I love is like the hardest part of an interactive demo really is figuring out the story you want to tell to as we talked about before there are so many different parts of your product you could show figuring out those aha moments and like getting internal alignment can be difficult. So we’ve seen a lot of customers using AI to maybe parse through existing like customer videos or through existing demos that went really well to almost help write the script for them and just as like a draft I think the best way I’ve heard AI described is like AI is like an intern. Just to have something so you’re not starting from ground zero and then can tweak from there. And we’re starting to think about like how we could add that into our product right now one thing we do is translation. So we hear a lot of companies saying like hey I know I have 10 different markets I need an interactive demo for all of them so we actually just introduced like AI translation so you can quickly just be like okay take this from English to French to Japanese to whatever and you don’t have to make 10 different demos.
How does it rely does it rely on any like cookie consent especially when you get outside of the US.
That is a good question. I will ask our engineer about that.
Did not mean to stump you live however I was just you kind of you kind of brought me to that that state.
So I’m assuming it’s using like IP addresses but I will follow up on that one that that’s definitely a that’s a new one that’s a question I haven’t gotten before.
All right well how about we shift towards bringing on home. So give me give the listeners three actionable takeaways that they can do.
Yeah I think one actual takeaway if this is something you’re interested in if it excites you but you’re like hey my CEO my sales team’s not going to be on board figure out a way to experiment small scale like even if it is just a video to start on ad landing pages try something get a little bit of success with it and then make the pitch it makes it a lot easier once you’ve shown it versus like trying to convince their of thinking that like you should never show the product. Another actional takeaway is if you are worried about like different personas or what if my demo doesn’t feel personalized and you are using interactive demos or videos we’ve been experimenting internally with basically creating a demo that just asks you up front like hey what’s your persona and then branching the demo based off of what you answer and it’s only been like two weeks so I don’t want to say anything definitive yet but so far we’ve been seeing pretty positive conversion results results from that just creating more personalized demos and asking up front. Then finally I brought this up before but like whether you have an interactive demo a video whether you show your product in some way don’t hide it don’t put it at the bottom of your landing page it’s not going to help. Once you get the buy-in put it front and center make it a secondary CTA or put it above the fold so that prospects actually do know you have it versus thinking they’re going to like comb through your entire website to find it.
And don’t put it behind a form is my personal opinion on that.
I will say what we found my last tip will be if you do gate it gate it after like step five. Give a little bit get get so they get an overview we have seen like a 15% increase in engagement rate if you gate it in step five versus if you gate at the front because no one wants everyone gets excited if you click a button that’s like see a demo and then the first thing you’re present it with is a gate.
Right yeah give a taste and then then gate it that that I can get behind. I know a couple of brands and clients who I will not name that have their full demo behind the gate and it’s like okay let’s let’s let’s bring it a little bit more to the front because there’s also a trial and every other way that there’s a sales handoff involved too. Natalie how can people connect with you and learn more about Navattic.
This gonna be a wild answer but LinkedIn. I’m on there way too much as as you probably are if you’re watching this right now on LinkedIn so if you have questions post about different like interactive demo examples often I show some customer examples or if you just have questions feel free to message me and if you want to learn more about Navattic go to our website we have an interactive demo of Navattic we have a report that we put out that like a lot of these stats came from.
Awesome well Natalie thank you so much for joining us today check out Navattic connect with Natalie on LinkedIn until next time we’ll catch you guys later.