Demystifying the Demo Solution Landscape
Nick Capozzi:
All right, we are excited about another fantastic session here at Demo HQ. Day. It is such a pleasure to introduce these 2 gentlemen talking about the mystifying demo landscape with Gilad Avidan, the Chief Product Officer at Demostack, and Kerry Sokalsky, the Founder and President of Presales Mastery.
It's hard to be a buyer when it comes to demo solutions it's a crowded landscape. There are lots of new tech and tons of various types of terminology. So understanding what goes into the space is easier said than done in this session. We're going to break down the various types of demo technology who plays where and what used cases are best suited for each one.
Gentleman, I'm gonna leave it to you.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Awesome. Thanks, Nick. I've been great to see you. Yeah, I've done worse, too. That's good. So it's a super exciting time like Nick mentioned to be in the demo solution space in a small hector. And Chris White and I publish the Pre-Sales Buyers Guide back in April. I think there were fewer than 10 vendors in this space, and of those all, maybe one or 2 had only been around for about a year. Or so now there's north of 25 vendors so lots more out there slew new products coming out, lots of new functionality that continues to really rapidly evolve, which is helping to address an ever-widening array of use cases for us in pre-sales.
But, like they've mentioned the challenge with that rapid change, is it's not really always clear what technologies are available, how they work or even which used cases they best address. And so do you like. Maybe we can start by exploring sort of 3 of the biggest challenges that these solutions tend to help with and how they're typically addressed.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah, I totally agree. And as a founder.
Just this space is so underserved for so long. It's just crazy. And now, suddenly there's this explosion in them. I really love being in this space. I do have some slides that we can. We can show just talk a little bit about the different solutions. If that's okay, we can. We can get started with that.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Go for it.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
So the way that we love to think about it is that you know there are 3 main things right now in the market products that that the challenges that are being solved. And the first one is really what I think most people are familiar with, which is the pink box product tours. So lots of tools to make these mostly step-by-step, guides you can embed on the website or share as a leave-behind after a call. Some people are sharing the top of the funnel and emails. And essentially it's like screenshots that you stitch together, and it's a cool interactive demo of your product. And that's, I think, what most people are familiar with.
And then there's a second category that got started last year, which is the demo environment cloning. And that's where you create a separate, stable demo environment that works like a clone of your production environment. So it's always on. And you can also edit it to tell a story. And then there's this third newer category that's a kind of layering edits on top of a real app. Your existing demo environment. So that allows you to give a demo with real-time data and overlay of edits on top to add some storytelling or tailoring. If you want to dive into them one by one, go deeper.
Product Tour Tools
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah, what do we do that I? And obviously, there are other use cases here, and we'll dress some of those as we go through. But why don't you? We start with the guided demos or product tours which people are probably most familiar with because most of the vendors in this space fall into the category of providing these types of solutions. So we start there.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Sure. So this is an example of what a product is so it's kind of like this guide where you have balloons on top. Some people do without balloons, so it's somebody else's product a little bit closer. I just wanted to add this example here. So people who don't know what it is.
Let's go next. So the product is the challenge. Really, how do we create these product assets, and how do we make them quickly? Everybody can, you know, make a video or slides, or something. This is kind of something a little bit, you know, taking to the next level. And you can. You can definitely share them and put them on the website. It's almost like a good way to bring the product earlier in the conversation, a good entryway into PLG.
And it can also be used to support a sales motion that you can leave behind the way that the tech works is actually quite straightforward. You take your production environment, or it could. It could even be in a different product altogether, and you have something to take screenshots of. These are like HTML screenshots, so you can edit the text and stuff from the side later, and you can take them one by one, and you almost lay them out like a slideshow.
And all these tours look kind of like slideshow editors. And then, when you have that you all those slides which are screenshots, and you edit them to make it like. Tell a little bit more of a story. You can stitch them together and edit them to make them kind of go into each other almost like an animated slide deck. You can add balloons and guidance on top and there are a lot of different options actually in the space. So it is, they say I think the most the first one that that was available, maybe in like 2020, I think the first one came around. And now there's just a lot of them.
Obviously, the big ones are on top, but lots of different options, different price points, and different feature sets, and I think anybody can find something that they like here in this category.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah, there's certainly options, not just in the vendors that are out there, but also the approaches. Some of the vendors are taking towards this right? So you know, maybe screenshots. It may be together videos, even in the different sorts of tour guidance that each step has, they can include images and videos. So it really does, as you said, help a lot of more enterprise organizations that otherwise wouldn't be able to put themselves out there and sort of product. Let growth motions get the product into prospects' hands faster, which really is what we want to do. We want to align with your expectations, which is, to show me a product today.
Too often. Unfortunately, those demos call to action or getting demo called actually buttons on the website. What do they typically do today? They lead into a qualification call, and then they lead into. If you pass that well, maybe we're gonna go have discovery first, and then we'll decide we're going to put you on a demo with someone to show you live product. Not terribly aligned with what buyers are expecting. So these tools really let you push out the products top of the funnel Really, really, effectively. They have a whole slew of other benefits as well. Things like getting better organic stakeholder discovery. We know that today buying organizations or buying committees keep getting bigger latest numbers. I saw from my partner that the average buying committee is north of 20 people in some cases these days, but often we're only taught them to a minimal subset of that, and the ability to share these assets or have the prospects share. These assets internally give organizations the ability to understand who else is actually on the buying team before they've been introduced to them.
The other benefit is really helpful. And these different tools address this to different varying degrees in getting analytics in terms of what's being viewed. So not just who's viewing something, and how long they're spending, viewing it. But what particular screens are they? Are they spending the most time on it and what that does is facilitate the pre-sales teams having much more meaningful conversations when they do finally get to a live conversation, because we understand more about exactly what that buyer is looking for, and what's important to them, and can come to the table, having much better prepared to address those particular concerns
So lots of really interesting things that these tools can start to serve us.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO Demostack:
When you're a seller and you go into that next call, and you already know 5, 6 other names that have looked the at the asset, and you know exactly what each of them is looking at, and it's all you know. Going back into your salesforce, or whatever CRM you're using. That's just like making. Do that much better at the next call.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah, the only thing I think, is worth calling out is there's a fairly obvious, or maybe it's not obvious commercial side benefit for pre-sales or it. And that is, you know because these particular solutions tend to focus mostly on top-of-funnel use cases. Very often we're finding marketing is involved in the purchase, and the marketing budget is often being involved in actually funding these solutions where we're in a typical situation where pre-sales often don't have their own unique budget. Some of the largest organizations get access to other budgets like marketing. The 10 stuff lots help get these tools actually implemented a lot.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah. So I guess sometimes this would be more of a product marketing purchase that pre-sales uses versus like, how to do. How do you see that? Usually?
Demo Environment Tools
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah. Great. So what we, when we take the next step and take a look at the next one, which is what you refer to the clothing technology. I know there are a couple of different approaches to how that's done. Can you walk us through a little bit of sort of what that looks like?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Sure. So the second type of product in this space that that this is starting to be. You know it's all pretty new. So to start, maybe in 21 was as is cloning. And that, really, you know, speaks to. I have a demo environment, but I need to take it and scale it. I want it to be up all the time. I want it to be fast. I want to scale it to more people. I want to edit some of the details there, and I really want to take control of that demo environment, and the tech. There is a little bit more complicated in-depth way that it works. And we're gonna go a little bit more in-depth with that, just because I think it's a little bit requires a little bit more explanation than the first one is that you take your production environment, and then you go ahead and create a clone of it, and that clone is acting like your real demo environment, and well we’ll get into that in a second, but it looks, and it behaves like your real environment. But it is disconnected from the real one, so it's almost like a snapshot in time of the real thing.
But it's disconnected. So that's why we call it a call, and then you can apply edits on top because it's always there. It's static and stable. You can edit it and change it, and you can, you know, tell a much better story because of it. And there this one is, you know, speaking as a CPO. I can tell you that the technology here in this space is, is the most complex, because you're essentially what you're doing is you're simulating a back end. You're running the app with a simulated back. End. It's pretty hard to do, and that's why I think there are a lot of us players in the space. I would have to collect fewer players in this part of the market.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
And so we'll get a little bit more into the tech in a second here. But you know what would you say? Are some of the main benefits of using cloning over, say, a product tool?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
To me, it's If I'm a seller, or if I'm in pre-sales, and I'm doing a demo, I want to do it with the real product. It needs to feel like the real product needs to look like the real product I need to be able to pivot from screenshots. I mean you. You can work on screenshots and work on on slides that are extremely high fidelity if you put in enough work, but it's still. It's never going to feel like the real product. Not all the buttons are gonna work. You want it to be real, and you want it to feel real. And I think most sellers that I talked to would never try to demo on a live call from slides. And this gives you the ability to really expand the number of people in your order, even outside of your org that can do a live demo because you can give them a copy of your environment where once it's it's always on it always works. It's always the same, and 2.
They can't break anything because it's a clone. So if your product you can make a should send an email by mistake, delete something by mistake, or you can make a transaction and spend money on somebody by mistake. You can't really give that to your You know partners overseas the demo. But with this, you can do that, and that's like a superpower. It's amazing.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah. The a huge benefit there. I do want to call it that. So you know, there's a couple of offices we need to the other one in a second or after this, about sort of live Demos and enhancing them. That's a huge point, but I want to get back to the demo environment challenge as well. It's called the obvious that a lot of the Times priceless doesn't even know in the demo environments. And we're at the mercy of a cloud team or somebody else. And so often those groups don't necessarily work at the speed of sales where we need to spin up a new instance immediately, because we're going to demo, you know, tomorrow or the next day, or even things like persistency of your demo models. If you're doing complex proof of concepts, or you're building a customized demo, and you need to show that again 3 months from now, because you've got 6 and 9 12 on sales cycles, and they get spread out a lot of the time. There's a persistence issue where there's only so much space that each Demo can take up on the demo environment. So it's. It's only the latest ones in the last 2 weeks, and then they get flushed.
And it's almost impossible in some cases to even bring them back later on. So there are a whole lot of challenges around the fact that we only sometimes own the demo environment. And the nice thing about cloning is, it removes all of those variables. Because now yeah, it's just there. We're using the vendor's download environment which has none of those challenges.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah, that's right. You want to go a little bit deeper into the tech just for a time. Let's explore how the tech actually works. So this is actually really interesting. And to really get it and get a good intuition on what can, and can't be done with the clone. Let's take a step back for a second and look at web apps and kind of how they work. And this is gonna be really high level, so we can get through in a couple of minutes. So the way a web app works are like it's different from a phone app where you download an app on the web. You just type in a URL and all the data that you need to show that app and use it
Kind of gets downloaded on the fly. The app is kind of bootstrapped from all of these from this back end. And what's the back end a back end is like a group of servers where you're getting all of the stuff that you need. So if it's like e-commerce, app. Then the static files are gonna be the logo, the fonts, the HTML, and all the different designs for the website. These are always the same until the up gets updated, but it's just static files. And then, when you want to like after the uploads you want to like, get the list of all the products, or do a search or buy something, or do all of that stuff out of the logic layer that's gonna be your API, and you're gonna be making requests back and forth from this API to be doing things.
And then you also have all these third-party services, that you know, like nobody is really building their own app completely these days. If you have a map, it's probably Google maps or map box or something like that. If you have a. If you have your credit card billing, you're talking to stripe You're talking to something else like that bi tools. You know most of our you know most of customers in the space. You know, people in the space your product is complex. All these types of stuff you're using partners and API, and all this stuff, you know, in the back end. So the back end is actually really complex. But the front end is always the same. It's a web browser that's just downloading all these files and making these requests.
So that's how we like a web app works at a really high level. So how do you kind of make a calling of this? So it turns out it's actually the approach itself and a high level is really simple. The cloner is a proxy that sits between the front end, the browser right, and all the servers of the back end. So every time you make the web app makes its request, like, for example, for the logo. It goes through the corner. Then the back end returns the logo, and the corner just takes that request and response and saves it into the clone. You can think of it as reference traffic, or a sample of traffic. Almost like. If you, you know, hear a conversation and a different language, you can take all the requests and responses and kind of have a reference of how different things are set in that language. So it's almost like the same thing here. When you get a sample for every request. What the back end would have responded? Then you can almost simulate that, because when you go then in playback.
This is when you're showing your demo the web app works exactly the same. But in the thing, it's thinking that it's talking to the real back end. But actually, it's talking to the cloner when the Webex makes a request, the corner. Then, instead of going to the real back end. It's looking at the reference traffic, and the phone, and sees if it has seen that request like that during the calling process and if it has, it returns the response. And there are lots of details in this. But essentially, for example, if you want to make a report, you want to show a report in the call.
What you do is like when you're calling, make sure to make that report, make sure to do that search, make sure to do, perform that action, or go to that page, or do whatever all that reference traffic is, say during cloning and then in playback, you have that available. But if you want something that you didn't do, then you won't have it available. So that's like the other part of that you can never have like a perfect, all-encompassing clone. But the stuff that you did phone you have that forever, and it's always going to be the same.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah. And I think there's been said, too, but a benefit of not necessarily cloning all the functionality, because to your point earlier about providing other folks in the organization, account Execs, Pd. Or etc., the ability to demo themselves. We often can't do that unless we're going to put guard rails around what they're able to demo. And so by not including certain things. And we actually removed certain elements that we don't want them to be able to click on. We effectively put those guard rails in place and expand the capacity for the ability to demo live products. Yes. So what happens after we've done all the cloning is. Is there a second step that we can take?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah. So so once you have all that, all that data in there. Then what you have is your web app working like it would in the real world. But it's inside a clone, and then you can apply a layer of edits on top. So we have a demo stack, for example. But there are 2 in the space that we have an editor where you can kind of make those edits. And then, when the data is being fetched, or just before it's displayed the failing on the type of edit. You'll be able to see that. So, for example, if you take a chart and you change it all your web up around that chart is working the same way that it normally would. But that chart is going to be exactly like you wanted it to be so. This is how you can kind of over, you know. Kind of make. Make those edits on top on top of the clone.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
and there's also obviously more stuff to that. But that's the main part again.
Yeah. And so An obvious benefit to these sorts of things is that now you can create a bunch of different clone demo environments for different personas, for different verticals, all with their own data, set their own sharps, etc., to help you start to tell much more effective stories. They're going to resonate better with the audience because they're seeing stuff that applies specifically to them.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
For sure.
Storytelling Tools
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
So this is what cloning is. But there is a third approach that we talked about earlier that it's really exciting. It's probably the newest technology in this space. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, and how it works?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah. So there is a new, new kind of a new player. And it's kind of like, almost like a middle ground between them in some ways, and there is no like official name to it. But we call it here a live demo storytelling, and really what that is is, we call it internally. We call it overlay, but we'll talk about them in a second. So the idea here is that you can layer edits on top of your real app or your real demo environment in production. So if you're if you want to download something that has real-time data, you know. Car is moving around a map or whatever it is. That's real-time you want to. Do you want to ask them your question and Google it for them live? Then you want to demo that, and you can't really use a phone for that, because the data is in real-time. It's updating all the time.
So this kind of solution will allow you to almost add a layer of edits on top of a live product with something like an extension or an app that takes your real app and kind of recognizes when there's text or images on the screen that need to be edited and then applying those that it's as a layer on top. I think I have a little graphic here. It's very simple, but really what it is is running an app and having almost like a mask on pop or an overlay. And this is a new space. So yeah, even here, Salio really started doing this, I think.
Last year. And we're also now launching a product called Overlay because you're overlaying, you know edits on top. So over down the stack, live or overlay is what we're calling this product and it's really, it's really an interesting kind of thing because with cloning you couldn't really do anything that's with real-time data. And this kind of allows you to do that which I think is really cool.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Yeah, I'd say, because cloning, you have to sort of pre-populate the data ahead of time and it’s a little more static. Maybe you can talk a little bit about these sorts of different use cases like, when would we use cloning versus the overlay?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
Yeah. So there is. There is an overlap between these 2 things because both are solutions that you would use on a live demo. And when I'm thinking of living down, I was like, what am I showing on the zoom Call right? I'm: sharing I'm screen sharing something. What am I showing? And it really comes down to whether is it an environment challenge or is it a storytelling challenge. If it's an environmental challenge meaning. You want to scale up your environment to 100 AEs, but your advantage. You can't do 2 Demos at the same time. For example, if you have something like that, and I know that there are plenty of people that have that problem. If you have a problem like that. Then you have to use something like a phone because then you can take all that complexity and kind of hide it away inside the call.
Take the call and get to go to market. Let them do whatever they want with it with overlay. There are 2 advantages. One is that you can show real-time data. Your app is always up to date. You don't need to worry about that. It's showing real-time stuff. You can search for anything you want. There are no guard rails there, you know, for new cons to it, right like you said. Sometimes you do want those cars, gr, but If you don't want them, then they're not there, because it's just edited and overlaid on top. The second advantage is that it's a lot easier to set up. It's much, it's, it's it takes a little bit of setup to make a clone work correctly because you're simulating the back end. So you need to teach the corner
How the back end works, and with overlay. You don't need to do that because it's again. It's just edited on top. But you can really use it to tell a cool story and lots of products. Their demo. I need storytelling more than it needs an environment. So that's when we have the 2 options.
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Are we finding that this is a sort of, an either-or type of situation for these 3 types of technological approaches for organizations? Or are there situations where it makes sense to have a solution that can accomplish multiple different ways of sort of skating this cat?
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
the way I see it is that you want all of them. It is something you can start with one. You can continue to the others but in the end, it's. It's great to have something where you can combine all 3, and I'll. I'll give you an example. So say somebody is on the website. They want to sign up for a demo, you know. Maybe until they can talk to a rep. You give them some tours to try out. Maybe in the scheduling email, you send them a tour. Then, when they go like. In the meantime, what you wait for is a demo. Look at these tours and see kind of where you're interested.
Also, by the way, the first rep that's gonna talk to you. We're also gonna get analytics on exactly what you looked at, so we already know what you're looking for. So we got some free discovery off of that. Then on the first call, You're You want to scale that as much as you can, right? You want to have a lot of people to be able to take that first call, then you use a clone for that because then you have like a quote. It's always the same. It's like the golden demo. You do that. Use that analyzer for discovery, or just to kind of to gauge interest. Do all of that stuff. And then, you know, sometimes you want to show an integration. You don't want to call on the integration you want to show like a little edit on top that you use overlay. Or maybe there's part of your app, or you're showing real-time logs or something that's happening in real-time, and it's really impressive, Those kinds of demos, and you can show that sometimes you want to be able to kind of switch between the different demos on the call life, you know. Lots of lots of lots of companies. Their demos are like a few different demos combined into one showing different packages or different products kind of working together. It's an integration with Salesforce. You want to be able to show that, too, and kind of hopping in between them is pretty complex. And then, after the call is done.
You want to share a leave behind right? So that's when you can go back to a tour or you can send them a shared sandbox as lead behind, which is another big advantage of calling. You can create a sandbox. That's basically the phone. It's safe. You can share it and add a layer of guidance on top. So if you have all 3 combined, that's when you get it gets real, really interesting, and powerful
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
Awesome summary. Yeah, I love the leave-behind option for the sandboxes as well to right, instead of sending either just the Powerpoint deck or even the guide to tour again. Now we're actually getting their hands on the keyboard, but in a very controlled manner, with one of the client’s sort of demos love that summary. Thanks so much.
Nick Capozzi:
Gentlemen. Have you ever been to a party, and you don't want to go and talk to anyone because you are gonna interrupt a great conversation they're having? I feel that's what I'm doing right now.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
You're happy.
Nick Capozzi:
Well, I just wanted to say quickly, just some quick housekeeping. Here we are about a minute away from starting the next session with Jamal Rhymer and Chris White. We're gonna be talking about the dynamics between account executives and sales engineers, which is a key one if you're not following Galad or Carrie on Linkedin, I suggest you remedy that because obviously, they are great followers. And of course, if you want more great content like this definitely follow the Demostacked Linkedin Page.
Kerry. Anything you want to wrap up before we wrap up this session?
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
I want to want to think, I think, Gilad, for summarizing these new changes so well, I think hopefully, we gave everyone a good sense of sort of where the tech is and where it's going, and it at least a high-level summary of what used cases might be addressed. With each of these different approaches. But again the market continues to change very rapidly. So stay on top of what's going on, and follow both of us and hopefully, this is something that's coming to every pre-sales work in the near future.
Nick Capozzi:
Where else can our attendees find you, Kerry?
Kerry Sokalsky - President, Presales Mastery:
I can find myself on Linkedin. That's probably the best place for presales mastery.com
Nick Capozzi:
Fantastic, and collide anything before we wrap.
Gilad Avidan - Co-founder, CPO at Demostack:
If you want to take a quick screenshot. We have this full slide summarizing everything. We also share it later. This is just one slide explaining all the space, the tech, the used cases, and the key players, I think, super valuable as a starting point.
Nick Capozzi:
This is great. I have a feeling this might be a few LinkedIn posts for maybe the entire demo stack team tomorrow. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Attendees appreciate you. We're gonna end this session and go right into the next one so very exciting day here. Demo HQ Day at Demostack.
Thanks. Guys.
