Uplevel your sales kickoff (and rest of the year) with a demo experience platform.
So, it’s the beginning of the year, and time once again for your sales kickoff. You’ve got the location (or decided to go remote), have the themes, agenda, speakers, sessions, discussions, and activities.
Maybe you’ve even thought about how to enable your sales kickoff. You know you need a conferencing platform, a way to show screens and presentations, some audio and video hardware and software.
But, have you thought about how to enable what truly matters in your sales kickoff… your product?
Especially with the advent of product-led growth, teams must be conscious of the effort required to constantly put the product first, both internally and externally.
Therefore, when it comes to your sales kickoff, you should think about using a demo experience platform to not only properly showcase your product to your team, but to current and potential customers as well.
How to use a demo experience platform during your sales kickoff
Flawlessly showcase new features
One of the best things to do during a sales kickoff is to showcase new features and functions. Show your go-to-market teams and sellers what they will be able to provide to customers and how they can edge out the competition with added value.
When it comes to demonstrating these new features, there is no better way than a demo experience platform. Demo experience platforms ensure that your presentation goes off without a hitch.
How? By cloning exactly what you need to show, and guaranteeing it will work flawlessly. I’ve seen more than one total failure of a feature unveiled, and it leaves a sour taste in every seller's mouth that they will not forget. How can they confidently sell something that didn’t even work right internally?
Further, demo experience platforms are better than any presentation or screen recording because not only do you control the pace, but you’re still interacting with the product, just in a completely sandboxed environment. You can show the product without any of the risks.
Make it interactive
Speaking of showcasing your product, test driving the car is way more fun than just looking at it. But, are you ready to let every member of your team run amok in your internal demo environment? From crashing the demo instance, to changing important data, there is simply too much at risk when you let everyone play.
Instead, a demo experience platform gives everyone their own, idiot-proof sandbox that is completely protected and detached from your actual platform. It is simply a clone of your UI, with no actual integration, connection, or data from your product. Try as they might, no one will be able to put your product at risk.
Now, during your sales kickoff, you can let everyone experience the very features you are showing. They can see how it works and ask questions. This reinforces your presentation, increases their training, and helps everyone understand exactly the value these new features will provide.
Never worry about your connection
Whether your SKO is remote, offsite, or even in the office, there are probably going to be connection issues. Luckily, it won’t impact your presentation. A third-party demo experience platform runs on entirely separate servers than your product to ensure that you always have access to your demo, regardless of what is happening internally. With one less thing to worry about, you can give an even better presentation.
After your SKO
Demo experience platforms aren’t just for your sales kickoff, they are truly meant to help your team sell better, shorten the sales cycle, and create new efficiencies.
Create (just enough) guidance around the demo flow
With your sales team eager to sell your new features, they will want to start redoing them as soon as possible. But, we’ve all experienced what happens when sellers get too excited, they can over promise and under deliver.
To ensure that your team is demoing your new features in the right way, you can create demos within a demo experience platform that only includes the flow of features that you want them to show. As sellers demo your features, they are still afforded the flexibility of a live product, while still being limited to certain scenarios.
Effortless personalization
Harvard Business Review found that as much as 80% of buyers are more likely to purchase from the company that personalized their sales demos. Now, custom demos are table stakes.
Buyers buy what they understand, and when you can show them their names, customers, and logos in your platform during a demo, it creates an emotional connection to your solution. Moreso, in Demostack you can easily edit any number, chart, graphic, or dataset to reflect the size, revenue, or outcomes that your customer desires.
That way, they aren’t distracted by numbers that are too big (or too small) and can see exactly what success looks like with your product.
Free up resources
Since personalization in sales is so crucial, many teams rely on their sales engineering, product, or development teams to create these custom instances within their own product.
These one-off demo environments take a significant amount of time to create and fill with data, and still must be managed to ensure they look realistic. There is also the constant risk of sensitive customer data being exposed, the product crashing, or an unplanned change to the demo instance.
Instead, a demo experience platform makes demo customization as easy as point and click. Sellers can do it themselves in minutes, freeing pricey and important engineering resources to work on the actual product and eliminating risk from the demo.
Win more revenue
With increased personalization and reduced expenses, as well as a shorter time-to-demo, sellers can show your product along with discovery, capturing more interest and shortening the sales cycle.
