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In my last article, I laid out the benefits of a demo program, or a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos. However, many presales leaders already find their teams stretched to capacity. As a result, they may struggle with the concept of dedicating the up-front time to building a well-organized demo program. If you’re a skeptical leader, or might have trouble convincing sales leadership or the executive team about the need for a demo program, this article is for you.
Here are three of the most impactful ways to make the business case for a demo program to your leadership team (or your sales peers).
1. High-performing demos drive more revenue, faster.
I’d venture to say that most enterprise sales teams don’t have the capacity to measure the success of specific demos, but if they did, they could increase their win rates and drive more revenue. We spend so much time post-gaming sales tactics that worked well, yet too few resources are dedicated to refining and improving the assets that get us across the finish line. It’s time we got more intelligent and programmatic about our demos, rather than simply reacting to inbound requests. With a demo program in place, it’s easier to measure and improve upon your existing demos, and understand those with the most impact. For example, which homepage or product demos are driving the most qualified leads? Which live demos are converting prospects most frequently? How are buying committees interacting with your leave-behinds, and how does that inform your follow up conversations? With a demo program, it’s simple to answer these questions and more.
2. SEs will gain back more capacity (and you’ll scale sales capacity, too).
According to the 2024 Presales Landscape Report, SEs spend a whopping 21 days per year cleaning and maintaining their demo environment. In addition, many are building demos from scratch for every meeting (whether they’re qualified or not). Given the high demand and short supply of SEs, a well-organized demo library can pay dividends in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Creating and then organizing a demo library by use case, vertical, sales play, product, or otherwise can help your SESs gain back valuable time. Instead of creating bespoke demos for every opportunity or contending with an unreliable demo environment, SEs can focus on creating a demo library that is scalable and reusable for stakeholders throughout the organization. While this may take some up-front planning and preparation, you can say goodbye to that last-minute demo scramble and show up well-prepared to every prospect meeting.
3. Knowledge-sharing builds a consistent story.
With a demo program, onboarding and enabling sales reps with the right resources becomes much easier to do. While presales prepares the templates for the demo library, sales reps can customize the finer details of their presentations, including logos, text, and imagery. Using this process, the story stays consistent (and the margin for error becomes much lower). Plus, in a controlled and trusted demo environment, there’s far less risk of demo failure. What’s more, employing a level of governance and control over your demo program makes it easier to ensure that your team is staying accurate and on-message. This is especially important as new features or products emerge. In addition, sales teams can pull from tried-and-true scripts and referenceable customer stories that apply to a prospect’s specific pain point or use case.
If you haven’t started building a demo program, these are three great reasons to start today. A strategic demo program can help your presales team operate more efficiently and effectively, so they can focus more on the things they’re uniquely qualified to do, like engaging with technical prospects or handling complex RFPs. Demos are one quantifiable area where the proper organization and planning can positively impact both team capacity and the bottom line. In fact, Reprise customers experienced an 80% reduction in SE hours spent on demo creation, and a 50% decrease in their sales cycles.
Thank you to Paul Vidal, VP of Customer Success at Reprise.
In my last article, I laid out the benefits of a demo program, or a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos. However, many presales leaders already find their teams stretched to capacity. As a result, they may struggle with the concept of dedicating the up-front time to building a well-organized demo program. If you’re a skeptical leader, or might have trouble convincing sales leadership or the executive team about the need for a demo program, this article is for you.
Here are three of the most impactful ways to make the business case for a demo program to your leadership team (or your sales peers).
1. High-performing demos drive more revenue, faster.
I’d venture to say that most enterprise sales teams don’t have the capacity to measure the success of specific demos, but if they did, they could increase their win rates and drive more revenue. We spend so much time post-gaming sales tactics that worked well, yet too few resources are dedicated to refining and improving the assets that get us across the finish line. It’s time we got more intelligent and programmatic about our demos, rather than simply reacting to inbound requests. With a demo program in place, it’s easier to measure and improve upon your existing demos, and understand those with the most impact. For example, which homepage or product demos are driving the most qualified leads? Which live demos are converting prospects most frequently? How are buying committees interacting with your leave-behinds, and how does that inform your follow up conversations? With a demo program, it’s simple to answer these questions and more.
2. SEs will gain back more capacity (and you’ll scale sales capacity, too).
According to the 2024 Presales Landscape Report, SEs spend a whopping 21 days per year cleaning and maintaining their demo environment. In addition, many are building demos from scratch for every meeting (whether they’re qualified or not). Given the high demand and short supply of SEs, a well-organized demo library can pay dividends in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Creating and then organizing a demo library by use case, vertical, sales play, product, or otherwise can help your SESs gain back valuable time. Instead of creating bespoke demos for every opportunity or contending with an unreliable demo environment, SEs can focus on creating a demo library that is scalable and reusable for stakeholders throughout the organization. While this may take some up-front planning and preparation, you can say goodbye to that last-minute demo scramble and show up well-prepared to every prospect meeting.
3. Knowledge-sharing builds a consistent story.
With a demo program, onboarding and enabling sales reps with the right resources becomes much easier to do. While presales prepares the templates for the demo library, sales reps can customize the finer details of their presentations, including logos, text, and imagery. Using this process, the story stays consistent (and the margin for error becomes much lower). Plus, in a controlled and trusted demo environment, there’s far less risk of demo failure. What’s more, employing a level of governance and control over your demo program makes it easier to ensure that your team is staying accurate and on-message. This is especially important as new features or products emerge. In addition, sales teams can pull from tried-and-true scripts and referenceable customer stories that apply to a prospect’s specific pain point or use case.
If you haven’t started building a demo program, these are three great reasons to start today. A strategic demo program can help your presales team operate more efficiently and effectively, so they can focus more on the things they’re uniquely qualified to do, like engaging with technical prospects or handling complex RFPs. Demos are one quantifiable area where the proper organization and planning can positively impact both team capacity and the bottom line. In fact, Reprise customers experienced an 80% reduction in SE hours spent on demo creation, and a 50% decrease in their sales cycles.
Thank you to Paul Vidal, VP of Customer Success at Reprise.
In my last article, I laid out the benefits of a demo program, or a top-down approach to building, centralizing, sharing, and analyzing your demos. However, many presales leaders already find their teams stretched to capacity. As a result, they may struggle with the concept of dedicating the up-front time to building a well-organized demo program. If you’re a skeptical leader, or might have trouble convincing sales leadership or the executive team about the need for a demo program, this article is for you.
Here are three of the most impactful ways to make the business case for a demo program to your leadership team (or your sales peers).
1. High-performing demos drive more revenue, faster.
I’d venture to say that most enterprise sales teams don’t have the capacity to measure the success of specific demos, but if they did, they could increase their win rates and drive more revenue. We spend so much time post-gaming sales tactics that worked well, yet too few resources are dedicated to refining and improving the assets that get us across the finish line. It’s time we got more intelligent and programmatic about our demos, rather than simply reacting to inbound requests. With a demo program in place, it’s easier to measure and improve upon your existing demos, and understand those with the most impact. For example, which homepage or product demos are driving the most qualified leads? Which live demos are converting prospects most frequently? How are buying committees interacting with your leave-behinds, and how does that inform your follow up conversations? With a demo program, it’s simple to answer these questions and more.
2. SEs will gain back more capacity (and you’ll scale sales capacity, too).
According to the 2024 Presales Landscape Report, SEs spend a whopping 21 days per year cleaning and maintaining their demo environment. In addition, many are building demos from scratch for every meeting (whether they’re qualified or not). Given the high demand and short supply of SEs, a well-organized demo library can pay dividends in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Creating and then organizing a demo library by use case, vertical, sales play, product, or otherwise can help your SESs gain back valuable time. Instead of creating bespoke demos for every opportunity or contending with an unreliable demo environment, SEs can focus on creating a demo library that is scalable and reusable for stakeholders throughout the organization. While this may take some up-front planning and preparation, you can say goodbye to that last-minute demo scramble and show up well-prepared to every prospect meeting.
3. Knowledge-sharing builds a consistent story.
With a demo program, onboarding and enabling sales reps with the right resources becomes much easier to do. While presales prepares the templates for the demo library, sales reps can customize the finer details of their presentations, including logos, text, and imagery. Using this process, the story stays consistent (and the margin for error becomes much lower). Plus, in a controlled and trusted demo environment, there’s far less risk of demo failure. What’s more, employing a level of governance and control over your demo program makes it easier to ensure that your team is staying accurate and on-message. This is especially important as new features or products emerge. In addition, sales teams can pull from tried-and-true scripts and referenceable customer stories that apply to a prospect’s specific pain point or use case.
If you haven’t started building a demo program, these are three great reasons to start today. A strategic demo program can help your presales team operate more efficiently and effectively, so they can focus more on the things they’re uniquely qualified to do, like engaging with technical prospects or handling complex RFPs. Demos are one quantifiable area where the proper organization and planning can positively impact both team capacity and the bottom line. In fact, Reprise customers experienced an 80% reduction in SE hours spent on demo creation, and a 50% decrease in their sales cycles.
Thank you to Paul Vidal, VP of Customer Success at Reprise.
