Product-led growth strategy is floundering. There, we said it. Too many salespeople are using it, and the sales cycle isn't moving fast enough. There's excessive bloat that hinders all movement down the funnel. This doesn't mean that product-led growth is ancient history. On the contrary, it just needs an update.
First and foremost, you need a smarter approach and innovative tools to be more versatile and move faster.
And the best way to do that? Tailored Demos.
What is a tailored demo?
As it stands, demos come too late in the process.
You:
- Start with a discovery call
- Learn what the prospect wants
- Set up a follow-up call
- Then position your product based on the limited information you have about their use case.
Call. Talk. Negotiate. Repeat.
Problem is, much of the first demo call addresses common features, with the prospect’s specific questions being saved to the very end.
Let me check, and we’ll take that off-line.
Sound familiar?
Tailored demos are designed to challenge this status quo.
They’re a visual product story template that leverages your product to facilitate productive discussions with prospects, customers, and partners.
They allow the client to see and understand your product better—make it more tangible—to enable quality conversations as early as possible.
Why you need tailored demos for your business
According to the product-led growth strategy, your product is your main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers.
Prospects will go to your website, sign up for a free trial, and test-drive the features. Meanwhile, you keep your fingers crossed, hoping they'll upgrade to the paid version.
On the other hand, we have revenue operations and enablement that tries to align, enable, and hold accountable revenue teams (Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Partnerships) to accelerate revenue growth.
While both are fantastic market strategies, there's one major problem: when prospects click on the 'Book a Demo' CTA on your website, they want to see the product.
Yes, prospects want to know more. But it's the solution they're interested in and what it can do for them. Naturally, when you delay this, your prospect loses interest—they may even get annoyed and drop your product altogether.
Moreover, simply talking about the product and claiming it solves problems isn't enough. You have to show your product in action to form an emotional connection that sticks and encourages conversion.Tailored demos make this achievable. They focus and facilitate conversions by giving prospective and current customers and partners visuals and values to move them forward and accelerate deals.
Demo-Driven revenue acceleration strategy is the future
Tailored demos are a part of the demo-driven revenue acceleration strategy, where you offer customized product demos to lead discovery, build authentic connections, and make your product value more tangible across the customer lifecycle.
Interestingly, this strategy is a combination of product-led growth and revenue operations. Remember, we mentioned you need an updated approach to drive sales cycles? Demo-led revenue acceleration is exactly that and more.
Here, you present your product as the best possible solution to solve pain points as early as possible. This way, you can generate genuine excitement to carry the conversation forward.
Think about it: your product is your best asset, so why not leverage it to make sales and boost revenue?
Besides, prospects today have tons of resources at their disposal. Demoing early gives them unique information that they otherwise cannot find by doing a Google search.
Let's not forget that even your customers want the product at the forefront. It's like killing multiple birds with one stone!
When should you use tailored demos?
Tailored demos are personalized micro-demo and discovery demo templates that can be the facilitator of discovery and enabler of revenue across the customer lifecycle.
Wondering what we're talking about? Stay with us, and we'll explain in a bit.
Micro-Demos help create a before and after situation
Micro-demos are visual product tours that show off your products solving specific problems important to customers. These aren't the typical 30-minute generic product demos customers expect.
Instead, they aim to give value in the form of product and get value in the form of insights.
As previously established, the best customer experience you can provide on the call is through your product. But to facilitate the discussion, you have to know how to leverage it correctly—something that micro-demos make possible.
These demos create a menu of high-level problems your product solves. Suppose you're on an introductory call with a prospect, where they mention a common pain point.
Thanks to micro-demos, you'll already have a visual template ready that shows your product solving it.
What better way to sell your product, right?
Micro-demos create an effective 'Before and After' situation that helps you win your prospect’s trust and facilitate productive conversations.
Of course, you don't need to display all the problems your solution solves—just the common ones your target customers usually face to take the conversation forward.
Your aim is to give prospects some value while simultaneously elevating your product. So after identifying the problem that's obviously painful for them, you can dive in deeper on that specific menu item and pull up that specific visual story.
The direct benefit? It'll make the discovery phase much more tangible for the prospect. They'll understand your product better, creating trust and authenticity between you and them.
With micro-demos, you gather insights earlier and facilitate more effective sales.
By showing prospects tangible evidence your product solves common problems early, you save the big questions for the full demo, allowing it to remain focused on the questions specific to that prospect’s use case.
Tailored demos facilitate discovery
Using micro-demos gives you a decent amount of discovery, including identifying your prospect's persona and the core problem. Your next step is to use the insights you got when doing a micro-demo and make your product demos as tailored as possible.
Tailored product demos are what we call discovery demos, which enable you to have more relevant conversations with your client. These demos help you uncover what's needed from your product to win the deal.
The whole point of discovery demos is to facilitate discussions—and not to launch into a full product story. You combine discovery and demo and leverage them to work in your favor.
When you ask prospects and current customers and partners relevant questions based on your collected insights, it gives them the impression that you actually care about solving their problems. This will help you deliver an experience that's completely different from the demos of your rivals.
Demoing also kills the need for any presentations and sets the stage for you to partner with prospects to discover how they can gain the most value with your product.
Moreover, you can do as many discovery demos as you want to ensure the demo is exactly tailored to your prospect’s requirements.
Every time you carry out a discovery call, you can have the insights from the last call visually shown in the demo, which will make your product more specific as per the use case.
This will allow customers to finally see your solution can genuinely help them and that it's worth giving it a shot. Think of the whole process as a funnel, where you start broad and then narrow it down to make the demo more tailored as you progress.
How can you leverage tailored demos
Let's take a look at how you can leverage tailored demos to make your Marketing, Business Development, Sales, Partnerships, and Customer Success teams more efficient and effective.
- Marketing can use demo templates to drive leads via public demos and deliver crucial insights to sales.
- Sales Development can do better lead qualifications and deliver more insights to AEs. They can use micro-demos on outreach campaigns, live chats, and first calls to create value-based visuals.
- Account Executives can build credible connections with prospects and understand what it takes to seal the deal.
- Pre-Sales Engineers will have more time to focus on developing effective PoC strategies and on accelerating deals.
- Channel Sellers and Partners can use tailored demos to speed up their deals, whether it's to create a new partnership or sell it to a third party.
- Customer Success can visualize what success looks like on an upgraded plan. This will help them uncover growth and upsell opportunities as well as train new customers.
As you can see, controlled micro-demo and discovery demo templates enable revenue teams to boost revenue significantly. They can be a real game-changer to take your business to the next level.
A Concept That Gives Way to Progressive Demoing
Tailored demos allow you to use your best asset—your product—early on in the sales cycle to build trust and facilitate authentic conversations.
Yes, you can use public demos and screenshots, but that tangible element would still be missing.
These demos add that value, which not only generates excitement but also lets you get granular to provide your customer with the best possible user experience and initiate collaborative selling.
Demostack lets you create a custom demo environment that looks and feels exactly like your product.
Use it to test out new strategies and solve any key problems in your demo ops to facilitate progressive demoing—all the while having a lot more control over your demos and insights over moving deals forward.
