I'm Dan Katz I'm head of solutions here at Demostack and I am joined by the amazing Jonathan Friedman our CEO
How's everybody enjoying the program so far?
I want you to fire up the chat So if you love it, type, love it in the chat.
I want to see the chat blow up. I want to hear how it's going so far. Blow it up. All right. Loving it. Loving it. I want to see more.
Oh, a lot of you guys want more because we're ready here to put the icing on the cake. This is this is the last session of the day. We're going to talk about money and revenue, which everybody loves.
So if you want more, I want more.
Jonathan Friedman: Blow it up. Blow it up.
Dan Katz: Oh, yeah, I love it
Dan Katz: Awesome it is the last session of the day. Thank you for your patience and these have been amazing sessions. I want to invite you in this conversation to please put your questions in the Q and A.
We will save time at the end to answer just as many as we can. I mentioned this is about sales transformation and revenue, and I wanted to start this conversation asking you a question, Jonathan. Sales transformation is a pretty broad topic. And I know you meet with a lot of other founders and revenue leaders out there.
What are you hearing in the world right now? How are people thinking about sales transformation?
Jonathan Friedman:
Hey, the world has changed. The best analogy I can give. And if you were in tech in the last two years you were playing soccer. And then in the middle of the game they change it to basketball. So you have half the time to score instead of three goals, you need a hundred points.
You have half the team. And you need tall people versus quick runners and a million things that have changed, right? So the world is changing and it actually goes back to what tech was always supposed to be, which is a very efficient way of going about and not needing armies of people to do everything right.
The whole, that's why it's called tech. The tech actually has the brunt of carrying the brunt of the weight. And therefore you have effectiveness and therefore you have very valuable companies. over time, right? For example, Google, if you had people, if I would query Google and someone would need to do something in the back, that wouldn't be tech.
And the whole point is that nobody does the query. That's the technology that does so much, gives so much of the value. It's the enabler
Dan Katz:. It's an accelerant, right?
Jonathan Friedman: Exactly. And it comes back to where we are today. It changes the game in terms of efficiency. There is, when you say efficiency, people are tired of hearing about that.
But essentially what it says is very simple. It's like you need to be able to work with technology, to work all the tools you have to work, the processes you have to work, the people you have to do a lot more. And it doesn't mean overworking, killing your people. It means rethinking strategy.
And while we're doing so, a lot of companies have scrapped business units because they're like, we can't be in different places. And a lot of other companies we can't, Airbnb had the magazine. I remember I got a magazine for Airbnb. And I was like, is Airbnb printing magazines?
And why do I need a magazine in my interaction? That was the first thing to get scrapped. So maybe they should, a magazine is not the best thing for them. And other business units have less obvious examples like that. But the biggest example I think is, okay, you have a sales team. It's much smaller.Especially when it's expensive and that's where it gets to where the product meets sales, right? The products, the meat of the business. And if it takes you so much effort where you need the best trained people, the most expensive people on the market that have sales and engineering qualities, need to marry them together.
And if only five of them can show your product. You're not doing it right. No matter what, just by, by definition, you're not doing it right. And that's the biggest change.
Dan Katz: I hear that loud and clear. And I think. In solutions engineering, there's a lot of change that's happening, and we're feeling that pressure really acutely.
Presales used to be pre-sales, right? But solutions today, we're supporting both pre-sales and post-sales. We're supporting implementation and technical evaluation. And there are never enough SE resources to support all those tasks. Especially when we're talking about something that requires a lot of technical know how.
So Putting technology in there to ease that burden sounds great to me.
Jonathan Friedman: And if you facetime with a customer, Oh my God, that's holy time, right? Customers are not going on the phone. They have their own problems and issues. And if they go on the limb and buy your software, Oh my, they better be very sure. Along multiple interactions that you've done that you can do what it means because it can cost them their job. It's not in the past or anyone, people just bought stuff and interns just signed the 20K contract because [could have been useful. That's not the case anymore. People's jobs online.
So if you, the human touch that that, that time is getting more and more valuable. And that's another point that's important to understand and change.
Dan Katz: For sure. Jonathan I've heard you talk a lot about the specific levers that organizations can pull here.
And I'm wondering if maybe we could queue the slides and you'd be willing to share a little more perspective around that.
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, I'm happy to. So I, I saw the chat in the other sessions and a lot of it, I think came through a little bit. I saw discussions here about AEs and should a demo, should it not, and old school versus new school.
I think they're just the basics here at least, this is part of a sales deck that we show. So this is our narrative, but I'm a true believer in democratizing the demo. And let me explain why. I think it's the best thing you can do for your company. And actually, there's not really any other solution.
We will also touch, the kind of provocative things I put in the chat before, which is to kill the demo. So we'll talk about it after.. I think the main thing and why people are here and, signing up, hundreds of people signing up for an event about demo bottlenecks.
Cause the people get that demos are important, right? They're very important. If I take your ability to make a demo today, what would the impact be in your business? I think a lot of sales leaders, SE leaders I would talk to be like. Everything. If I can't demo, I can't sell. So we know they win deals, but there are two big problems with them.
One, they're frustrating roadblock. Nobody's yes, the demo stage. This is the stage I own. A demo is always like a demo. So it's like multiple people doing that, right? It's a roadblock. Nobody's excited to show a live demo. It's almost like the opposite of what you want to do.
So that's like the cost to do one. On the other hand, there is an opportunity. That's very hard to measure when you go to your sales leader and say ah, man, we need to improve the demo. He's like, why? It doesn't work. Okay, ask Jim in engineering to do it. He can do it two months from now, right?
There's no way to optimize or understand it. And if you think about it, sales is all about optimization and measurement, right? So those are the two things that we know it's important. But because of these two things, it's very hard to do, and we can't measure it.
So that's like the basic premise, and that's like the philosophical piece Demostack is built around essentially
Dan Katz: Jonathan, bringing it back to revenue. This is where I see that like bottom line. Lever and the top line lever really meeting, right? So the frustration that we all feel in solutions engineering is, it takes time to prepare a demo. Maybe we need a different environment. Maybe the data is not right. All those things slow us down and we know what happens when deals slow down, right? They die, right? The measurement and optimization is really more about optimizing that top line, right? How can we push things through? How can we do more demos? How can we show things that are gonna be more compelling and more tailored so that people can imagine themselves in those, in the shoes of someone using the actual product.
Jonathan Friedman: So I love talking about it like this, because this is where efficiency and growth meet. And it's hard to convince someone to do something if you can't tell them why even bother, right? Because the default is not to do anything. That's the lowest energy state. So that's like how the world works.
But let's talk for a second. Let's talk first because people have a hard time understanding and they come to us like, Oh, I have a little demo problem. I might get my engineering to fix it. Or, our biggest competitor in the market. is Acme, right? Acme is essentially the build, build a home the new VP engineering comes and they're going to build a home and in two months we'll have a perfect solution that will work for us.
It's always great, but I want to hear, make a point here of why there's always going to be a rift. A rift between product and the product roadmap and a demo roadmap. And my argument is that there are two completely different things, two parallel lines that will never meet, right? Products are not easy to demo. They're never, they're also never going to be. right? Why? Because products are built for use, and that's a completely different use case.
You need things that are secured and have accurate data inside that manage permissions. They're very functional, right? Permissions have to flow normally. You can't like Do different things with them. It's very much built for usage. However, When I want to do a road map, I want to tell the story of a product. I need the complete opposite. Instead of it being secure. I want it to be shareable instead of accurate data.
That's like a boring average day. I actually need idealized data of a big swing that we had because we want to Make up, make a point of the effect. Not like after a year, when data normalizes. Also, you don't need permissions. Actually, you want to jump between users and point of views and a million things.
So if you see what I'm saying here, and I can go on and on, the list is super long, everything that a product requires, the demo requires the complete opposite. And guess what? Product teams. So your R&D team is building a huge usable product. So they're always going to cover the left side.
They're not going to cover your demo roadmap. So you're always fighting for scraps no matter what. And if the new VP R&D and gives you some scraps, great. Two or three months, the thing is gonna decay. If demos, environments would not have decayed. We wouldn't need to build to do this. I could go and have some, go to Australia and have a trip for three months. I wouldn't need to be here and talk about this thing. The problem is decay. And the problem is that demos will always be different from the utilizer. So that's like a basic thing. And when it is also a bit of a relief for people are saying, Why can't I demo? What's wrong? Why can't I figure this out? It is really hard because philosophically It's hard. So don't start rushing yourself.
Cool. Okay. So hopefully by now, everyone agrees here. It's hard. Okay. And we understand why there is a philosophical rift between demos and usage. Great. What are the implications? So there are a few business implications. And with Demostack, we want to help you bridge those activities that the demo stuff to actual results.
So now you can talk to the CEO, which will be board level discussions that are interesting, right? If you say the demo doesn't look that well, nobody cares. I'm telling you, nobody can, I'm a CEO. If someone, I'm in demos, but anything else, someone tells me if someone's we're losing 20 percent or it takes a 10%, then I listen.
And I tell the board, et cetera. So, preparing for demos, that's the cost of acquisition. It's the cost of acquisition in just the number of SEs you need to train and enable. It's a bottleneck on SEs because you only have a few specialized people. Someone leaves. You drop 20 percent capacity in demoing, and it's also time because eventually, if you have five people and you have 20 AEs, because the ratio is always 2:1, 3:1?
You're always going to have a funnel that's narrowing at that point, right? And you also have a funnel where these up, up, upstream resources are competing to shove their deal in faster because they know this is a good piece of just you shove it in and who knows, maybe they see it and you get a free pass.
It just doesn't work and increases your CAC and slows deals down. And that's also the other piece, which is the low velocity. We heard Hanan talk before about, time kills all deals. You can't risk that in this environment. That's it’s immediate CAC costs and the low velocity.
And then now switching to that's like the cost side. On the revenue side this is a deep in funnel stage. You're sitting in front of people. They have your attention. Sometimes you have five people joining, including VPs CROs. And right. You can't have low conversion here, this deep in the funnel.
Because this is a culmination of a gazillion efforts of marketing and SDRs and reps and everything. And so these touch points matter and they matter a lot. And having a demo that doesn't tell the whole story. It's just unacceptable. We talked about the macroeconomic pieces. If you have low in this stage, if you got it all the way there.
It's a waste of time. You optimized lifts of your SDR and you optimized the discovery state, everything, but you get to where you show the product and you fail, that will kill you. Eventually all this efficiency is translated to lost revenue. And that's the bottom line. And the main important pieces here, can you measure that?
And I think that's the key, right? Measuring it.
Dan Katz: Jonathan, what you were saying about. Being that deep in the funnel and excuse my French You're shitting the bed with the demo if you've ever been an SE or a revenue leader right in your career Like me I've made a lot of Mistakes, right?
And some of the worst feelings that you can have is that everything's going great with the deal. You're sitting in the room, you have the right people there. And for whatever reason, you weren't prepared enough. There's a technology problem, the mercury's retrograde, whatever the demo just is off. And you feel it in your gut, you feel it in your heart. Like you're carrying the ball at this point in the deal and you drop it. It's the worst
Jonathan Friedman: It was always like, what can we do? I can't control R&D So I guess that's my demo.
But my point here, the main point is there's demo complexity and you can be like, okay, demo complexity. I'm going to the market. What can I do?
I'm telling you, a demo is not the product.
We talked about it before the demo roadmap is actually a go to market roadmap because the product is trying to optimize the complete opposite of being able to demo.
So when we say sales transformation, it sounds like a big word or, like this high level speak, but it truly is because the transformation here is that you take responsibility from, the product and what I can do. And you take ownership of it on a stage.
So it's, I argue, it's the last black box of the modern revenue stack, right? There's no other important piece of the revenue stack that's under optimized like demoing.
When I say sales transformation, I'm talking about GTM, taking responsibility for that stage. And guess what? You have to take responsibility. Yes, that sucks. On the other hand, you can enjoy the spoils of that responsibility once you manage it as a CRO, right? That's where the exciting part comes in.
Dan Katz: So let's look at how you manage this? How do you get there, Jonathan?
Jonathan Friedman: Cool. It took us a long time to understand, right? We went on the path. We understood, I think early on, that the demo and product are two different things, but now I feel like we got to a place where we understand completely the four things that need to happen in order for the stage to be optimized and you need technology in all four stations. And if those four stations are aligned. It's magic. And we have some customers even here, but also elsewhere where you see that magic explodes and it's amazing, right?
You get entire companies to use it with hundreds or thousands of users. It's incredible. Okay, so what do you need to do if you want to manage the demo experience?
Step 1) You need to have an asset, right? And build a demo. Now, there was some talk here, like about calling it a demo, not a demo, I'll touch on later about killing the demo and what I mean when I say that, but essentially it doesn't matter a demo, any demo you build is a map. It's not the real deal, right? The product is built for usability, so anything that's demo is a map of the product and the map is a simplification no matter what, right? The map is not a terrain, so the demo is not the product. And in terms of what people believe it or not it's very important to say this is a map of the terrain, right? There's a map because I can't, it's like I can't show you the entire terrain. It doesn't make sense and nor do you want to. So it's okay to tell people you're building a map. So anyways, the first thing is building these maps. All of your products and the demos can take many forms.
Step 2) Like when you have it, you actually want to, you want to enable, that's where a few people build demos, right? And decide an architect, what the story is, what we want to show. But then you need to go from a few people down to a lot of people. All right. That's one of our main things we're saying.
Step 3) You have all this firepower, storytellers, AEs, SDRs, CSMs, executives. So you need to enable them and roll them out on it. And once they do, you want to make it easy for them to deliver these demos at scale. So you want to see what you don't want to make sure that it is standardized. And then you can measure that you know what people are showing and when and how and it connects to your system of record, your CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, right? So that's all the importance of delivering that at scale.
You go from few to many throughout these steps.
Step 4) Tying it back together and measuring the impact. So once you have that standardized and people enabled on it, you want to measure and then, yeah, and then you essentially get into a loop where you iterate, right? When you measure impact, you can go back and say, okay, this demo was better or this demo was worse, and now you're optimizing it. And that's where you start getting the actual impact of the demo versus it being just black box and nobody knows about it.
Dan Katz: So just to operationalize that Jonathan, to make it really specific, for example, let's say someone delivers a demo to a prospect that demo activity is pushed up into the CRM and over time, what you're going to be able to see is which demos are having the biggest impact on deals, which reps or SEs are delivering the most successful demos, and then, using that information, you can optimize and tweak and enable and get better.
Jonathan Friedman: Exactly. The example I give is, how Gong transformed a space, right? Before that, you didn't know what people were saying. You had to look at CRM notes and hopefully they wrote something that makes sense, or they wrote something at all, and you have to fight on them. And then the Gong came along suddenly. I didn't know what my people were saying before. Of course, that doesn't make sense, right? But once you had that, also a whole industry came up with okay, I can coach them, I can train people, I can get them to ramp faster. Okay. Now, if I know what they're saying, can I have keywords, can these keywords go to the product? How does the product involve? So you open this kind of, you open, you turn over a rock and there's a whole ecosystem universe behind it. And I'm seeing the same thing happen here. Gong told you what people are saying. With Demostack and demo technologies in general, you can know what people are showing, right? And that's where it comes.
That's where it's cool. And this slide, we have some of our kind of shaping on like the technology we build around it. So we have pieces that will build demos so you can build any asset you want. And we have a library where people can discover demos, find the scripts, all the stuff they need to actually give a demo.
The delivery is important. I think we're pretty much alone in there where you can actually have assets that are shareable. So we have a demo browser. We can actually show. All the demos and one piece. You can show better demos. You own the experience of presenting, which is important. And the final piece is the analytics that need to be heavy.
So you can actually know what the difference is between a good demo and a bad demo if you can iterate back. And so these are the features that we built around or the feature domains that we built in order to enable each and every step. And once those You know, four stations are manned and you have essentially a baseball game where they pass the ball. That's like when a sales transformation happened and we have crazy use cases, right where I couldn't believe the results myself. We have some here.
[These are just really tiny pieces of them, but we're talking about reductions and we're talking about close rate increases, right? Sales length in half we heard from Hunters here when so it's when we talked about the CAC improvements and we talked about top line improvement and we have infinite infinite amount of these really and customers that that I just can't imagine a world without it because again, it was a stage that was completely unmanaged and will always be painful.
So either you manage it or you don't, if you decide not to at least make a decision, we're not going to, and we're okay with the pain, but guess what, your competitors will probably do it. And then. You probably will have to like right now gong is a must or gong type technology is a must You just can't say you know what?
I don't care what my people are saying right now. You're saying I don't care what my people are showing. Maybe they show the right thing. Maybe they don't. We'll see. Maybe we have five people that can show it. And that's fine.
Dan Katz: You know, it's a paradigm shift. I've lived through a couple of these in my career.
Like agile and cloud, I used to do a lot of work in government and large enterprises. At the time, those were scary sounding things. People didn't understand them. People didn't want to change, but as soon as that light turns on you can see how removing the box hugging, of people managing infrastructure or trying a different way to approach projects that's not very water folly and predictive, two years out, people saw results, they saw the outcomes and things changed very quickly.
In these sales transformations are hidden revenue opportunities. So a big challenge for a solutions leader, I think, is supporting partners who want to get product in their hands so that they can show their prospects and their customers your product and showcase it in the best way.
And so I think. The technology that you're talking about, Jonathan, can make that a much easier task where you're unlocking a whole other revenue area that was really difficult to get out previously. And I'm wondering, if there's other hidden revenue opportunities that you've seen or you can think of.
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, there are a few and it connects to what we heard in the previous sessions. Regarding partnership, there's a lot of talk about how the old playbook has died and partner enablement is the big thing. How are you enabling your partners? If you don't know what they're showing, you don't enable them to show any product even early, right?
We don't, again, we're talking about maps of the product. A lot of people can show a map of the product. You don't need to be the best product expert in something to be able to show a map of it. And so enabling these partners, putting them in the place where you can measure activity and results and all of that.
So that's. That's huge. And really untapped. I'm actually surprised at how it's coming in. I see innovative kind of partnership people coming in and doing that. Another two, I have two other examples that I didn't hear in the other session. One is M&A.
A lot of companies get bought and sold. A new company gets bought by a bigger company. And they paid a certain price. The whole price is usually built on the fact that the existing sales team at the buyer, take that new product and sell it in some capacity, right? But guess what? That takes integration, takes time, right? I'm talking years, months at the fastest, but usually years of integration time and ability. Hey, but is there a way to start showing the products together from day one? Of course there is, right? You can put in a playbook and connect these two products artificially.
And the managers that made this big acquisition need to make it work. The company that was purchased is a small company, and there's a CEO and that needs to make it work because, the whole integration is the most important piece. Massive use case, untapped.
But actually now we've seen a few customers of ours that were smaller or bought. And now they're in this big company and they're like, the big company immediately starts selling the new product because they have a demo ready. That's a huge point. One more that I think wasn't covered, I think is big, is RFPs.
RFP, everybody's favorite subject, right? Yeah, people love RFPs. It's really great to get one. You're so happy to see when you're back, especially a long one. And that has a lot of security questions but all jokes aside, like when you have that, like when you send an RFP, everyone is yes, I have everything I can do.
How powerful is it? If you can say we have a feature link to demo a feature B linked to demo B, right? How much could you stand out versus the competition doing that? And how many of the next demos that you'll actually have when you have a touch point with the customer? How much more of that would more be like interesting conversation versus, Oh, show me analytics here.
Click, click analytics, show me you have this and then that you're right. So you can actually automate a lot of that and also show a show. Don't tell a picture is worth a thousand words. All these things explain why. Why a showcasing product is actually much, much better. So these are other use cases besides the obvious ones.
Of course, we have all the obvious ones, but those are ones that people don't think are actually very powerful, especially in this environment.
Dan Katz: Fantastic. I want to go back to this phrase, ‘ kill the demo’, which, seeing that you're my boss, it's a strange thing to hear if we're a demo company.
So can you tell me a little bit what you mean by that? Cause I, I really thought that's what we did.
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, no, don't worry. I'm not suicidal. But I do, I really believe in killing the demo. And when I say, and when I say killing the demo it means to me, it's the old world of what demos are thought of.
And I heard that kind of coming out of the session. So people came to the same conclusion. I think I'm saying it in the most edgiest way and luring it out. And what I mean with that is essentially killing that demo as a stage. And a lot of people are also about discovery.
Discovery is not like the first stage. You finish discovery and you're done. Never ask a question again. And right. Discovery is like a thing that you want to understand. Even after you sell to a customer, you still want to understand more. And why are they doing and what's behind what they're doing? The more you can understand, the better it is.
So with demos also that you don't what happens now, right? There's all these means of like you ask you click requested them on the website. The last thing you're gonna get is a demo, right? You're gonna learn and talk to three different people until you get that. And it's very frustrating. And then people say, Oh, it should be much simpler.
On the other hand, as a seller, you don't know what to show someone that comes along because your product can do so many things for different people and different circumstances. The balance of that is essentially not thinking about the demo as a stage. Again, we're talking about maps of the product and you can have simpler maps and earlier in the stages and more complicated maps down the funnel. And
It means that everyone can show their product across every stage, even after the sale. CSMs, when they need to enable it, need to show a product, need to reveal something, need to show something about the product. In my point of view, and that's where killing the demo comes from, if you have this big reveal, you talk, and then we are going to have the best SE sitting there now for an hour and showing the demo. That's where things go wrong.
Dan Katz: It's like the waterfall versus agile thing, right? It's like you're building up to this big reveal versus delivering on a very frequent basis, like throughout the whole part, whole process.
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, correct. It's a waterfall and everything that's wrong with the waterfall will hurt you here. And that's why SEs feel pressure and burnout, even the good ones, the great ones, right? There are five great SEs in every company, but how crazy is it that they are the only ones that can really show something and it's okay if they can show in depth, right? But if you can qualify your pipeline before that show product, which is by the way every server you do you see that's what the buyer want.
They want to see the product earlier. Don't resist it give it to them But again, like showing product showing a product map is what you want If I want to go to Disney World, you can't bring all of this need to me to see right there Actually, maybe the first map you want to show me if Disney World is that top zoomed up map just with the parks, right? It doesn't help me navigate at all. It helps me see oh, there's this park and that park. And so I'm excited. Okay. Now I want to see okay what is there? So there's a more zoomed up map where you can see the different parts of the different parks. Okay. There's way more to it. Wow. This is exciting.
I want to start, I want to start planning my trip. And then when I get to actual Disneyland and I'm in the, I'm in the gate. Great. Yeah. Now I want the detailed map and I want to understand if I'm going right or left and where I buy tickets and all that stuff. But the map complexity and what you want to highlight is very different in each stage.
And if you don't want to show me Disneyland, because there's a lot, there is a lot in Disneyland and different families, adults without kids will experience it differently than if you have a toddler or if you have a teenager. All true, but you can always show me something that will get me more excited to come.
And kind of that deeper progression helps me understand. And then when I get to actually the field, I'm much, much more informed and much, much more excited to go in. And even if it's a hot day, I won't be like, okay, nevermind. I am still excited because I have all this knowledge they got beforehand.
So that's the basics of killing the demo. All right.
Dan Katz: I feel much, much better now. So if I had to just repeat that back to you, killing the demo is killing the demo as a point in time as a big deliverable and instead weaving the demo through the fabric of not just the sales process, but like the entire customer journey.
Jonathan Friedman: Exactly. And actually, and I guess that's part of our name, right? And it's you need to look a little bit deeper, but it's Demostack. We talk about everything that helps a demo, everything that supports a demo happening. And again, it's like a big thing that we saw before with many different moving pieces, a whole.
It's a whole process, but it's throughout your revenue stack. It's not one point in time. Don't use it as a big reveal. It pisses people off. If, and especially if you're bigger companies, I hear it all the time. They're losing to the smaller, nimbler companies because guess what? Until your guy gets SE to, to come in and do a deal, a demo, that company has seen three other competitor demo and they're gone.
And even though you have all the features, they're never going to see it on time. So it just doesn't work. And I think before 2021 to 22, we just could buy our way through it. We could hire more SEs invest more in marketing. So lose more leads that are all gone. Now there's no more coverage for this.
Dan Katz: So, I'm going to take a look at this one first this is from Todd, it says, I am an SE leader and my sales leader doesn't really care about demos, just closing deals. I don't know if anyone in the audience ever feels that sentiment. There are very few of us and I want to get demos in the hands of more sellers higher in the funnel.
How should I engage with her to show the impact and convince her it's important to show product earlier?
Jonathan Friedman: Great question. And I would say, before that you didn't have a really good chance because you couldn't measure it. If you can measure it, it's yeah, it feels it's needed.
Why do you need to measure it? So I think you come to the, you come to the CRO and you say Hey, we're going to do an experiment for one quarter, we're going to touch an area we've never touched before. Guess what? We optimize how many lifts SDR makes, right? If they make a hundred versus 110 that they're supposed to, we like, no, that's not good.
You're not getting your compensation, everything we optimized, right? How many more opportunities are there to optimize in those stages? versus a stage we've never ever touched. So I want to do an experiment. I'm going to measure, we're going to take a group of people and go to a funnel they're going to demo earlier.
That's group A, and we're going to AB test it with. B, which is going to do the exact thing we've always done. So that keeps everything suddenly you have a control group and we're going to help that, from the SDR today we're going to have way more people, we're going to take complexity down, demo complexity down because these people higher up cannot do the complexity of the whole product. We're going to take complexity down so they can actually do it. And we're going to have more people demo earlier. It makes sense that it will do better. But the proof is in the pudding. First you have to convince them of the logic of it. More people doing it, showing earlier.
Sounds like it could work. Demo complexity needs to go down to facilitate that. And then AB test, let's see within a quarter, compare it in your Salesforce. The results we've seen in one quarter is amazing. And, I think some people here talked about this and we do lots more and, it's a no brainer, right? Wrong! We made a, okay. There's, it's a clear experiment that the CEO can get behind and understand. And guess what? It ends up a lot of time being the biggest go to market initiative of the year and guess who wants to go to the board and show that they optimize win rates and increase them by 10,%
Dan Katz: Totally.
So Ed has a very related question here that I'd like to address. This is how you go about empowering AEs to take a more hands on approach towards demoing. A lot of them act as qualifying machines and PO signature finders. So I think there's a bit of a top down bottom up approach here. That I've seen to be really successful with our customers. I think there needs to be a leader, a revenue leader that says, this is what we are going to do. This is somebody who sees the value and is basically directing that team of sellers to.
Learn how to demo right? It's now going to be a part of your job to learn how to showcase our product because it's going to make you more money.It's going to make the customers have a better experience. So that's the top down. I think the bottom up. There's really a role for SEs as partners and peers to help enable your AE counterparts. It doesn't have to be scary. You've got their back and you can support them in learning how to showcase the product.
And it's even easier if you're using a technology platform like Demostack, Jonathan any thoughts there on that one?
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, I think it's all Ed. Great question, right? And that's like the main thing that we're saying in the early days of Gong, it was hard to convince salespeople to use Gong. They're like, Oh, you're going to sit over my shoulder.
You're going to scold me if I say something wrong. And now actually the best salespeople come in and the first technology they want to buy is something like Gong to train, to get better, to get coached.
I think it's all about empowerment. If a sales person believes that they are empowered, they don't have to wait five days to get SE time. They are empowered to show and again, show it talking about is not as the demo, but actually as a map of the product.
That's where it gets very interesting. That's where you can empower them to actually make more money and making more money is why salespeople are in the business, right?
Usually 50% of their paycheck is based on that. If that can be more money for their families and to pay rent, they get very interested. But I don't blame you before that, before, the last two, three years, there wasn't any technology to enable that. So really, you had to find some of them that were cowboys and could do it.
You can do it on scale. But my argument now, this has changed. There's technology. Now there's really no excuse. And companies are, have, have been doing it, are going to do it more and it's going to be like gone. And gone in the early days were like only a few did it. Now it's a given. You're not going to be able to say I don't know what other people are showing.
It's just going to change. And so the AEs will change with that time, with time too.
Dan Katz: So I'm going to take one more question. We're running out of time here. And apologies in advance, cause I'm going to butcher your name, Zhigar. I hear you. That you, we should create micro demos for features.
And every time someone says demo, you can send them a link. Who's creating all of this? How much time are we dedicating? Who's the owner? How are they managing all these micro demos? Sounds like we could have thousands of small demos. How do we do that? If we're trying to be more efficient and hire less SEs?
That is a fantastic question.
And I think the answer comes down to.
How do you want to showcase your product and who's going to be doing that? When I imagine a demo library, I don't imagine it broken up by features. That's a trap that we fall into a lot as SEs and sellers if we want to talk about features. We want to demonstrate features. What we need to be doing is thinking about stories, thinking about use cases and the ways that those individuals on the other side of the table or the camera can imagine themselves.
Solving their problems and being successful with the product. And so those demo stories, there's not going to be thousands of them.
Maybe there'll be tens of them. But they might cross different areas of the product. They might cross different products. But the idea is that you're telling a story that's solving somebody's challenge and problem and helping them see how easy it is to get to the other side.
To address just the maintenance and building side of it. Yes, the more stuff you create, the more you have to manage. But with something like Demostack, it actually only takes minutes to create a demo and update it. And so it's a lot less work than having a demo engineer. And I've run a team of those before creating environments and frameworks and refreshing data. These solutions like ours are designed to solve this very problem.
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah, and you hit a nail on the head. That's why these things were hard, right? Even though we talked about before why there was a problem and why it's the last bastion of unmanaged revenue because of all these issues, because it was hard, because it was the R&D.
It was where R&D came in to go to market. There were a lot of blockers. for this state should be optimized. It wasn't that people weren't thinking about it or weren't smart enough. They're very smart people in revenue to know how to get, build revenue stacks and revenue teams. It's just that their hands were tied.
And part of our messaging is until now, and yeah your objections are completely relevant and would merit. Yeah.
Dan Katz: All right, Jonathan. I think we're just about out of time here. I want to thank everybody for Spending this time with us. You're amazing.
I Love speaking to you. I'd love to hear from everyone. We'll have contact information Sent out as a follow up. Jonathan. Do you want to say any words?
Jonathan Friedman: Yeah. I really appreciate everyone taking the time here. I know you're busy people and with teams, and there are a lot of SE leaders that signed up here as well as ics.
And I'm sure you could have done a lot of other things with your time. Really appreciate you taking the time, learning about this and being part of a new revolution here. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn or send me a message. I'm happy to talk about philosophies in general.
If of course, if you wanna talk about demos stack, happy to do that too. If you just wanna be like, Hey, I wanna. I want to think about our product and why we do things also in a more philosophical way. Also happy that I love this stuff. I'm very passionate about it. So feel free to reach out to me and I'm happy to help anyone who has these issues in their company or wants to talk about it.
Dan Katz: All right. Have a wonderful evening, afternoon, day, wherever you are in the world.
Jonathan Friedman: Thank you.
