Click on “Ask for a Demo’.
It’s the CTA on every B2B SaaS website.
But what happens after the click?
How do companies educate, and delight prospects?
In many ways, the demo is almost taken for granted within the marketing process.
Marketers are focused on messaging, value propositions and content to attract and engage.
The demo belongs to sales.
But that’s the wrong approach.
The demo should be a coordinated effort between sales and marketing.
A demo is a golden opportunity to encourage, inspire and showcase your product in the right way.
If marketing isn’t involved in this crucial process, that’s a mistake.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. For b to b marketers and salespeople, the demo is the holy grail. If they can convince a prospect to do a demo, the world is their oyster. Once prospects see firsthand a product's value, it's only a matter of time before a purchase happens or so the theory goes. In some ways, a demo is a marketing channel managed by the sales team. To get into the value of demos and how to do them right, I'm talking with Kerry Sikalski, president of presales mastery, which does demo performance for b to b software companies. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Carrie.
Kerry Sikalski: Thanks, Mark. Great to be here.
Mark Evans: Why don't we start with looking at the state of the demo? Where are we at, and how do you see the alignment between sales and marketing? At the end of the day, a demo is something that happens because of marketing activity. And if a demo is successful, then you get a sale, which ties back into marketing performance. How are demos being used within the b to b software world, and where are the areas for improvement or where areas where companies can optimize how they do demos?
Kerry Sikalski: Great great question and multilayered for sure. So it it's an interesting time for for presales right now in that there's a a whole slew of venture capital dollars being invested into tooling for the space. For a long time, presales has been sort of the neglected portion of sales in terms of investment in really good solutions to help automate and make presales professionals more efficient in their job. And when for most b to b organizations, presales is sort of the secret sauce that really is gonna determine whether or not a sale happens or not. We've been, you know, criminally under serviced to this point. So this is an exciting time that now the tooling space is starting to grow. I think what one of the things that the new solutions that are coming to the space has really enabled is a big push on really pushing product led growth into the enterprise space. A lot of b to b sorry. A lot of SMB organizations have really led in terms of product led growth by allowing their prospects to sort of trial their software. Right? You know, get on the website, sign up for a demo or a trial, you know, get into it, start using it without any, you know, formal training or any sort of gatekeeping, and it becomes a function of how, you know, how effectively can we convert those trials into paying customers. In enterprise, that's a lot harder to do. Enterprise solutions are typically much more complex. They're more difficult to use. They they require formal training before you're gonna do it. And in a lot of cases, they're just not conducive to providing sort of a free trial sandbox for people to use. But when that's the sort of buying behavior that more and more people are becoming accustomed to, I think in a lot of ways influenced by the fact that if you think about how you buy most consumer type of apps or technology today, that's how you buy. Right? You buy you wanna you wanna, you know, trial a new software, you're gonna go download that app, or you're gonna go to the website and try a free trial, which almost all b to c type tools allow you to do. And so buyers are taking that expectation to the b to b world. And so what's really nice is that there's a whole slew of sort of demo automation type tools now coming into presales that are starting to make it more realistic for enterprise software companies to satisfy this sort of product led growth requirement in terms of, a, from the consumer's perspective, get me access to the product much sooner in the sales cycle and without having to go through tons of qualification and discovery and talking to three different salespeople or have five different calls. And as well from this from the software company's perspective, it makes it easier for them to now sort of let the client self qualify rather than having to, put, you know, expensive sales resources on doing that, for each individual prospect that comes through the door.
Mark Evans: If you look at every single b to b software website, this one of the main CTAs has asked for a demo. Obviously, they wanna have conversations. They want prospects to connect with presales or sales right away so that they can get them into the pipeline. What I'm wondering about is whether there's a lot of thought that goes into what happens after the click. The CTA is great, but how much what kind of workflows, what kind of processes, what kind of communication tools that companies are implementing when it comes to the post click activity. Are a lot of companies unprepared or just not structured properly? You know, what are best practices in terms of making that demo experience or that demo flow as seamless and as delightful as possible?
Kerry Sikalski: Excellent question. I I I think, unfortunately, too little is being done after the click. In fact, I think probably in a lot of cases, too little is done even before the click. Right? Because ideally, we don't just want people to click on show me a demo. We'd like to capture something from them in terms of what they're looking for as part of that demo. Right? And so I think there's sort of two paths that organizations are taking after the click right now. One is to funnel them into sort of an auto demo where they can basically view a demo or download a a demo to watch on their own versus the other path, which is they're gonna push them to some sort of salesperson who's then gonna go through the normal qualification process before actually allowing them to get a demo. The get a demo button is kind of like a red herring. It's like, oh, good. We got you, you know, we got you caught. We're gonna really in the same way we would normally do by, you know, cold calling you or email you in the first place. So I think those are sort of the two main paths I'm seeing. But I think, you know, ideally, that button's clicked, and then there are some qualification questions that come up after that. There's a couple really cool tools around demo automation that support these sort of self-service demos. And all of those tools, ideally, are are do a good job of trying to segment those sort of auto demos by persona, by industry, by, critical business issue, that sort of thing. So they have multiple examples of demos they can serve out to that audience. The goal is find out which one is most appropriate for the person clicking that button and then make sure that gets delivered as as as soon as possible so you can sort of have that instant gratification the buyer is looking for or the prospect's looking for.
Mark Evans: I see demos that or the post ask for a demo click happening in two ways. One is that you could see and envision a world in where people are build your own demo. So come to this demo form. Tell us what you're interested in. Tell us what your pains are. And then automagically, a demo will be created that will be customized or personalized to their pains, goals, needs, what have you. And the second part of the process is that communications flow. So once you know what people are struggling with, what they're looking for, then you can personalize the whole drip marketing campaign around them specifically. Actually, what what happens is you almost have this sort of enhanced nurturing impact or, you know, this this nurturing tool on on steroids. Yeah. Is that happening right now, or is that kind of thing that people are actually gonna have to strive for as we get into personalization and really producing marketing that's that's relevant and on target?
Kerry Sikalski: I I I can't tell you if it's happening ubiquitously. I will tell you there. I mean, the the nice thing is the way that the these demo automation tools work, there's sort of two approaches. There's one where they're just building multiple assets based on a certain like I said, persona industry, you know, critical business issue, whatever. And it's either the sales rep's job to determine what their right fit is, or hopefully, they've automated that through, like you said, the the marketing team or the website to ask those questions and automatically serve up the right one. So it's not that it has to be created on the spot. It's that it's already there. It's a function of based on the questions and the answers that are asked to those questions, we know which one to serve out. There's another organization, in the demo automation space that, takes a somewhat different approach. They're almost like the equivalent of a a video choose your own adventure, where, basically, they will query the audience on what issues are most important to them. They'll have them actually order them in order of priority, and then they will auto stitch together a set of sort of video snippets into a longer demo and serve that out to them. I think what's really exciting about all of these tools in in in this particular subcategory is not only are they gonna support, like you said, a much more personalized sort of marketing drip campaign and that kind of stuff, they provide really interesting data. So they'll actually report back on who's accessed those particular demo assets and what portions of the demo assets they've been on. So how long did they spend in the demo asset in total, and then how long did they spend on each screen? So if I know they spent a lot of time, for example, on a particular dashboard, I now know when I'm reaching back out, well, maybe there was a particular, you know, report on that dashboard that's resonating with them, and that's something I should concentrate on in my messaging. I can all they also do things like if they're shared, so they'll provide this at the a link to the asset. If you wanna share that with someone else in the organization, before you log in to view it, you've gotta add your email address. And so now all of a sudden, someone goes to click on that button, says, I wanna see the demo. They answer their questions. They get the demo, and they say, this is really cool. I want these other three people in my organization to see this. And they send them an email with the link. Now when those new three new people click on it, they enter their email address. And now all of a sudden, I, as an organization, have four people that I can reach out to in that organization instead of just the one. So it helps these organizations go really broad inside the organization, which we all know is a key success given that everything is, you know, a, you know, a team buy and a buy by committee in most most b to b software sales. So really cool functionality there.
Mark Evans: That sounds extremely cool, and it sounds like demos advanced demos. Demos what they should be because most demos are pretty boring right now or pretty traditional. You fill out the form. You click submit. A salesperson calls you or sends you a series of emails, and then they give you the demo. Not terribly inspiring. It doesn't deliver a lot of value, not personalized at all. So I can definitely see why a whole lot of low hanging fruit when it comes to the demo landscape. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is that in the b to b software world, marketing and sales, for the most part, operate in silos. Sales complains that marketing doesn't give them good enough leads. Marketing complaints that sales can't close deals, and then there's internal bickering and fighting about who's to blame. One of the things that I'm wondering about when it comes to demos is how much implements or involvement should marketing have in the whole demo process? And you might think that sales would say, no. This is our world. We should control it. You guys stay out. You've done your job getting people to take a demo from from that point on. It's up to us. But I'm wondering whether they should in fact work together and move forward in lockstep to make demos more effective.
Kerry Sikalski: It's an interesting question. I think that one thing I think marketing could probably do enhance the process is find ways to be a little bit more personalized in terms of the value messaging that gets delivered out to prospects. Right? Every prospects thinks they're ultimately unique. And whether they are or not is up for debate, but everybody thinks they're unique. And while a a lot of websites, for example, are gonna show sort of generic value props or try and go as broad as possible, ultimately, most buyers are unsophisticated buyers. They don't buy software as a general rule, and people aren't generally very good at envisioning what a particular software solution is going to mean to them based on a generic demo or through generic messaging. They really need to see their specific problems represented in the software and how it's gonna address their workflows and their processes, their reporting, their data, etcetera, to truly understand that that's the right solution for them, which is why you ultimately end up getting, you know, those second, third demos or proof of concepts where you've actually configured the software to be specific to those prospects. Right? Because ultimately, they need to see that. And so maybe where marketing can add a little bit more value is finding ways to differentiate the message upfront so that the value props more closely align to more specific challenges that individual prospects have versus sort of a broad set that in general, overarchingly apply, but aren't necessarily as specific as they could be. The other thing I can think about is one of the things that I coach on my clients in terms of improving their demo performance is we really need to be storytellers when we're giving a demo. Right? Everybody wants to and and and there there's a there's a big reason for this. Right? Yeah. Stories there's a lot of science behind the impact of stories, and I'm sure you probably know this even more than I do given that, you know, your background. But stories really improve people's memory of what they're being exposed to. Right? If you hear something in context of a story, it's gonna be more memorable than if you just hear a generic statement. When you can tell stuff in the context of a story, whether it's something that happened to another prospect or a client that you have or something that you as a salesperson experienced, you can relate that to the prospect. They're gonna relate to that more effectively, and they're gonna take it back with them. So they're going to they're gonna actually respond to that better. I think, in general, marketing is much better at telling stories than sales are. And in a lot of cases, they're usually exposed to more information around those stories. And so we're one one area I think where marketing might be able to help sales is in helping them actually improve how they tell stories, whether it's getting more more stories from existing clients, right, and crafting better messaging around that or just, you know, wordsmithing even existing stories in a much more effective way.
Mark Evans: That's an interesting concept because I see storytelling within the b to b software world as a virtuous activity. So a lot of marketers don't have enough exposure to prospects and customers for whatever reason. They're not in the field. They're not talking to customers on a regular basis. Meanwhile, sales is talking to prospects all the time. Customer service or customer success are talking to customers on a regular basis. And all that has to be fed back into marketing. And then armed with that knowledge, marketing then can feed those stories, can package those stories back into sales so that demos can be more compelling. They can resonate. They can make an impact because you can picture that experience. You can paint that experience for us prospect. And I think that's one of the reasons why marketing and sales, if they can collaborate, if they can work together, they can make the demo experience powerful, personalized, customized, and really enhance or accelerate the sales process. So I think there's huge potential for a unified approach to demos as opposed to simply being the realm of sales.
Kerry Sikalski: Yeah. Totally agree.
Mark Evans: When we look at the way that marketers assess their own performance or quantify what they do, obviously, the MQL has been the king of the hill. And increasingly, it's being eviscerated because there's not a lot of value when you really look at it in terms of m MQL. Somebody who downloads an ebook and provides an email address, well, that's just an expression of interest. That's not really signal buyer's intent. Some marketers will rally around the MQL. Some of them will move upstream and go to a sales qualified leader or an SQL. And I'm wondering how demos and the number of demos and the performance of demos and how demos convert into sales can be tied back into marketing performance. Because when you think about it, a good b to b marketer really is about conversions, whether the conversion happens right away or whether it happens after a demo. But if you can get people to convert and if demos are part of that conversion formula, then it just makes sense that marketers should be able to quantify their performance based on the number of demos or the effectiveness of demos. Do you agree with that? And how do you tie that into the quant quantification game?
Kerry Sikalski: I think one easy way to do it is it would be it'd be very interesting to see if you're if companies are not already doing this. I think a bunch probably are. The the percentage of both MQLs and SQLs that advance to a demo. Right? And then from a demo, actually, advance to a sort of a generic or intro demo into a more structured or customized demo. Right? In a lot of cases, you gotta do both because there are a good chunk of salespeople out there that use the demo as a crutch. Right? Where, ultimately, they're not even interested in, you know, qualifying pre demo. They're just like, great. You wanna see a demo? I wanna show you a demo. It's not on me. It's on my, you know, my my solution engineer or my sales engineer to do it. I'm gonna show everybody that wants to see you on a demo, and that should never happen. Right? They should always be qualified. Not because we don't wanna waste time on people who aren't gonna buy, which is absolutely true, but even more so because in in the demo world, right, the the the gospel is you should never ever be delivering a generic demo. Right? It should never happen. There should never be a spray and pray harbor harbor cruise, like, you know, show me everything you got and hope that something sticks kinda demo. It's just not effective for anybody. And so you should always be doing proper discovery ahead of time to make sure that you're focusing on what's important to the client or the prospect. And so I think that measuring sort of the transition or the or the progression rates from from MQL, SQL into those different demo steps is but I I know that most sales organizations are tracking sort of the funnel progression in each of those steps because if anything, they're just a great way to find out where you're you're getting stuck. I don't think in in a lot of cases, there's a situation where if the demo doesn't win the deal, it was a bad badly qualified deal for marketing or anything like that. It could just be there's lots of other things that are happening, in that demo. Mean, that didn't go demo go wrong. Or when we got to deep discovery, we our solution wasn't a good fit for some reason or if there wasn't budget. But you're not gonna necessarily find that out right up front. And even if there is no budget, it still doesn't mean you're gonna qualify them out and not do a demo. So I I I think there's a lot there that you can unpack to track that. I'm just I'm not sure how marketing should necessarily be tracked based on the demos outside of sort of what percentage of of what they're throwing over the fence actually turns into what sales deems is a qualified prospect to show a demo, both a generic and a customized demo?
Mark Evans: At a high level, I think that if you're going to assess the performance of marketers, obviously, you're gonna look at what the website does, number of downloads, number of unique visitors, you know, number of total visitors. And if the CTA is one of the major CTAs has asked for demo, then you have to add demo requests into the marketing assessment mix. I think there's a lot of thinking. If companies aren't already doing it, they should be thinking about how to embrace demos as a way as a as a KPI. I'm curious about getting some insight into what you do at Presales Mastery, the kind of companies that you work with. What kind of things are you trying to help them with? Is it simply improving how salespeople do demos, or is there more to it than that?
Kerry Sikalski: When when we think about improving sales, the the most effective thing in terms of uplift of sales success, in terms of win rates, and sort of attainment to quota. Coaching is you know, there's lots of studies that show the coaching is the single most effective thing you can do. Alright? And so I do one on one coaching with anyone in the organization, primarily the presales organization, that is delivering demos to prospects. And I work with them usually over sort of three month engagements where I'm coaching them on actual demos that they've delivered to live prospects. So I'll take a recorded demo that's been delivered to a prospect, upload it into my online coaching platform, provide a a a a very detailed set of feedback around what they've actually delivered in the wild. Right? So I'm coaching on real behavior that happens in the field, not something that's in a simulated sort of internal training environment. I also have a 95 metric sort of demo best practices framework that I score every individual against on every demo that they do. And so what that allows me to do is really sort of objectively identify where each of the skill gaps might be for every individual and track progress over time as they improve. So it really moves the dial in uplifting in a fairly fast, fairly quick manner, the the overall level of demo delivery and execution by whether it's a presales person or an account exec.
Mark Evans: So where can people learn more about you and presales mastery?
Kerry Sikalski: Best place is to go to our website. It's presalesmastery.com, or feel free to reach out to me, Carrie Sikolsky, at LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out at any time. I'm, I'm having a chat about, about helping you win more business through better demos.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for your insight, Terry, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.