It is easy to place a “schedule a demo” button on your product website, but the experience of a product demo takes more than screen sharing or recorded videos to be effective. That is because your prospects are people, which means emotions are a big part of their decision making process. Successful product demos not only showcase product capabilities, but also caters to the emotional needs of users - answering their questions and solving their problems.
How can you create product demo experiences that address both the logical and emotional needs of your prospects? These simple design thinking strategies may help you get started.
Starting product demo design by understanding pain points
One advantage of a custom-built interactive product demo is that it may be able to adapt to the different needs of your sales teams and clients, unlike screen recordings or pitch decks. This means some of the pain points of your sales teams and prospects can be taken into consideration when designing the demos. What are your prospects looking for? Is there anything else beyond the features of your product? What might be some of the possible ways for sales team members to follow up? In order to better focus the UX design of your demo, it helps to have answers to some of these questions.
Instead of diving straight into the product features, learning about the pain points of your sales teams and prospects can help you plan modules that may be necessary for your product demo. If you’d like to help provide a more contextual communication channel between your sales teams and prospects, maybe a “commenting” module can be considered. If certain parts of your product require emphasis or additional information, it might help to include a module that offers such information at certain interaction points. Or perhaps narration can be built in so the demo can be better utilized as a leave-behind?
As a major step forward in the sales process, you'll want to make sure your product demo can truly empower your sales teams and prospects.
Mapping out end-to-end product demo experiences
Being a crucial part of the sales/buying journey means the demo experience needs to be carefully crafted. On one hand, the demo needs to faithfully showcase the features and benefits of your product. On the other hand, your prospects are having direct interactions with your brand before they make buying decisions, and it is in your best interest to make the best of such engagement. Where and how do you start your demo? What to do or say during the demo? How to follow up after the demo? Answers to these questions might help you get started on planning the whole experience.
Allowing your product demos to offer that authentic product experience is going to help your prospects take in the potential benefits of your product, especially if it has many moving parts or solves complex problems. Think of it as an interactive story and your prospects being the heroes. With the help of your product, they get to build castles and slay dragons. There might be obstacles along the way, so it’ll be important to make sure that the demo environment offers enough guidance so they can easily enjoy the plot and achieve their goals.
Custom-built interactive demos are a great way to offer such experiences as they can be highly modular. Based on your sales teams’ and prospects’ objectives and needs, you can create different reusable modules. Unlike screen recordings or direct access to your product, you wouldn’t need to invest time and energy to polish recordings and figure out the best way to share them. Sales teams wouldn’t have to request IT to scrub sensitive data; you’ll be able to mix and match reusable modules to build product stories as well as offer interactive experiences that are relevant and more purposeful.
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Moving into 2022, it seems easier now than ever for sales teams to create product demos with the rapid development of various demo creation tools, However, it’s never just about simply showing how things work; it is about establishing trust and optimizing customer engagement, which requires strategic design and meticulous execution. Let your sales teams focus on sales, as our team of experts are waiting to help you build the tools that will help deliver results.
