Whether SEs are scrambling last-minute or building bespoke demos for every opportunity, far too many presales teams are in reactive mode when it comes to their prospect meetings. It doesn’t have to be this way. Building a comprehensive demo program can help scale and democratize the use of demos across your organization — and save SEs valuable time in the process. 

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A demo program is a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos. This strategy ensures that your entire sales and marketing team is delivering value for prospects — with the right product story, for the right person, at the right time.  It aims to apply organizational structure and governance to the use of demos, helping your presales team amp up their productivity across the board. The ultimate goal is to drive more revenue through the use of scalable, repeatable, and measurable demos.

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Wondering how you can get started? Let’s look at how to build a demo program that works for you.

1. Identify and align with your stakeholders

Think about everybody in your organization who could benefit from better demo storytelling. That might include representatives from presales, sales, product, and marketing (product marketing, content marketing, events) teams.  The goal is to gather key stakeholders in the planning phase, and align on the best way to demonstrate value to your prospects via your product story. 

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This alignment phase should focus on not only the role of demos at each phase of engagement, it should also include key messages you’d like to convey and the core audiences you’re trying to reach. 

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Having a set of capsule stories for different audience segments will set your team up for success once you begin to build your demo content and showcase the most relevant features as part of the story. It’s also important to discuss where demos will be used — for example, on your homepage, product page, in meetings with prospects, at events, or as sales leave-behinds. Knowing this information in advance will help your presales team develop the most comprehensive and effective demo library for stakeholders throughout the organization.

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2. Organize content with content management and distribution system

Now it’s time to create and organize the demo content you’d like to produce (this includes storyboards, datasets, and the demo template itself). Using a demo creation platform with demo library capabilities can help you organize and scale content management and distribution. A library of demos can act much like a video streaming service, where the entire organization can choose what's most applicable to them in their roles, verticals, and formats. You may have a few choices that are fan-favorites and some very bespoke and customizable demos in your library that are the result of collaboration across your entire go-to-market and product organizations.

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Many of the mature demo programs I’ve seen organize their libraries based on how their team would be most likely to use the content. For example you could organize: 

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• By type: Separate shorter demos focused on a single use case from longer, more in-depth demos that address multiple use cases or the entire functionality of the product.
• By stage in the lifecycle: Prepare demos for each phase of the consideration and decision journey. 
• By vertical: Create customizable demo templates that focus on key messages for specific vertical audiences. 
• By pain point: Focus on each user persona’s most critical pain points, and build demos around products or features that address these issues.
• By sales play: If you use a sales playbook, organize your demos by the most popular plays, or plays you’d like your team to pursue most.
• By product: If you have multiple products in your portfolio, prepare a golden demo for each one.

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The goal here is to inform demo users of what’s available to them, and to distribute these demos to the right internal stakeholders for additional customization and refinement. 

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3. Implement a governance model to continuously improve your demos

Some demos can be standardized, while others will need to be bespoke. There are a whole range of demo use cases in between. A demo program can easily go off the rails without a proper governance model in place. For example, it’s important to keep track of the original template demo in your demo library, rather than the potentially dozens or hundreds of copies your users could customize. Role-based access control (RBAC) can ensure that the right users have access and/or editing capabilities for only the demos they need.

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You should also think about governance in terms of measuring the performance of your demos and continuously improving them. Take into account demo presenter or user feedback, prospect feedback, and demo analytics to refine and focus your demos over time. You can track metrics such as which demos win the most opportunities in sales, or convert the most leads on your website for marketing. Demo analytics can reveal how your website visitors or buying committees are interacting with your demos. Keep the most successful demos and refine or retire those that aren’t working. As new features or products emerge, update your assets accordingly. 

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If you haven’t built a demo program already, consider this: How much time could you save if your team could reuse and share the assets and intelligence it already has? How many more deals could be converted with the use of proven, winning demos that can be customized on-demand? With the right preparation, organization, and measurement in place, your demo practice can become a well-oiled machine, saving SEs the time and toil of building bespoke demos for every opportunity — and helping your sales organization win more deals. 

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Thank you to Paul Vidal, VP of Customer Success at Reprise.