The Ultimate Guide to Demo Automation

Demo automation is revolutionizing sales and marketing. It is rapidly changing how businesses show their offerings to prospective clients, making the sales process more efficient and effective. Traditional product demonstration methods are labor-intensive and often fail to showcase all product capabilities, so businesses are steadily shifting to automated demos.

A Gartner report illustrates that sales reps typically get only 5% of a customer's time during their B2B buying journey on the Internet. That’s why companies rely on Demo Automation to optimize this limited time window.

In this blog post, we will provide an exhaustive guide on demo automation and its implications for modern go-to-market teams. We'll share insights on why and how businesses must embrace automated product demos and how to leverage demo automation.

What is Demo Automation?

Demo Automation simplifies one of the most pivotal elements in the sales process—the product demonstration. This innovative solution automates the laborious task of creating and presenting product demos at scale, thereby saving the sales team considerable time.

At the core, demo automation is a process that automates the creation of interactive product demos for different prospects. These software tools allow clients to interact with a product at their convenience, thus providing flexibility in moving ahead in the sales cycle. The benefit of demo automation isn't confined to its time-saving element. In fact, using the best demo automation software can greatly enhance the effectiveness and impact of your product demos.

By reducing the sales team's involvement, these demos let prospects explore the product at their pace and on their own time, fostering a sense of satisfaction and control in the buying process.

Who Should Use Demo Automation?

Demo automation is a valuable tool for sales solution engineers, sales development reps (SDRs), pre-sales teams, account executives (AEs), product marketers, and account-based Marketers. These individuals and teams regularly interact with prospects during the start of the sales cycle and need to prove their product's value effectively, quickly, and without overstretching their resources. With the use of demo automation software, AEs can save time and personalize demos for every prospect they encounter, making it a crucial tool for them in the middle of the funnel.

Customizable, interactive, and scalable automated demos allow them to cater to diversely ranging prospective clients, tailor their demos to their unique needs, and foster a dynamic, user-centric demo experience with the help of AI technology.

What are the benefits of Demo Automation?

Automated demos also free up time for solutions engineers and marketing teams, providing a consistent experience for customers and reducing the costs associated with creating and giving demonstrations. Here are the detailed benefits of automated product demos:

Shortens Sales Cycles

One of the most significant advantages of demo automation is its potential to shorten sales cycles. The traditional sales process often involves numerous interactions, meetings, and demonstrations, leading to elongated and complex deal completion processes. Automated demos, being readily available and customizable, allow prospects to interact with the product right away, providing a seamless and efficient buying experience with time savings.

​This approach allows prospects to experience the product earlier in their buying journey without having to wait to schedule live demos and sync calendars with solution engineers. 
​An interactive and comprehensive automated demo, therefore, provides an efficient means to nudge the prospects further down the buying journey.
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1. Improves Response Time

Automated demos can drastically enhance your business's response times. In the pre-automation era, the task of setting up a live demonstration involved several steps, including scheduling, setting up the demo environment, and preparing the sales rep for a flawless presentation. This all took time and would often extend beyond the optimal window for engagement with the prospect.​

Automated demos, being instant and on-demand, eliminate these delays and offer prospects immediate access to the interactive product demo. This immediate response substantially enhances the user experience and can significantly increase prospects' interest and continued engagement with your product, which is undeniably beneficial for conversions.

2. Reduces Manual Errors

An important albeit often overlooked benefit of demo automation is the reduction of human-induced errors. Human error in a live product demo can include forgetting to showcase an important feature, accidentally skipping over key value propositions, or unchecked technical glitches leading to malfunctions. Such errors can reduce the effectiveness of the demo, potentially undermining the overall customer perception of your product.​

Demo automation, however, significantly reduces the chances of manual errors. Because the demos are pre-built and thoroughly tested before being made available to prospects, they ensure consistency and accuracy in every run-through. Every value proposition, product feature, and key benefit is accurately represented and demonstrated without fail every single time the automated demo is accessed through the use of the demo automation platform.

3. Personalization and Customization

In today's hyper-competitive market, personalization is key to engaging prospects and fostering relationships. Prospects appreciate content, including demos, tailored to their needs and interests. Demo automation proficiently addresses this need for personalization and customization. An automated demo, using a template, can be designed to adapt to the user's input dynamically, hence catering to their unique needs and offering a fully personalized experience with customized pricing options.

Automated demos can be custom-built based on various criteria, such as the prospect's industry, role, or specific use case that they are interested in. It can highlight unique benefits most relevant to individual prospective users, ensuring a higher level of interest and engagement.

Whether it's a sales representative wanting a precise overview of features or a technical expert looking at detailed backend processes, demo automation enables you to cater to these varied expectations without any added effort. This flexibility of content and presentation not only delights your potential customers but also ensures they see your product and its benefits and capabilities in the most relevant context to them, making it an essential tool for customer support.

How Automated Demos Reduce SaaS Sales Cycle and Simplify the Process?

Automated demos play a crucial role in the SaaS sales cycle. They can prove instrumental during stages like prospect discovery, lead qualification, mid-funnel nurturing, and buyer enablement. 

Automated demos allow clients a non-committal way to explore the product from the comfort of their convenience, leading to self-qualification. This approach eases the burden on sales representatives, allowing them to focus on genuinely interested and qualified leads matched to the product's features and benefits.

In the subsequent sections, we'll explore these stages further and illustrate how automated demos can optimize them.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the initial phase of the sales cycle. Here, potential customers or prospects are identified. At this stage, an automated demo proves to be a potent tool for engaging and initiating purposive conversations.

Automated demos are interactive and thus can effectively establish an initial connection with prospects. When used in conjunction with a well-articulated sales pitch via email or other communication means, these demos can help prospects gain clarity about the product's relevance to their context and drive attention to your product's unique features and benefits. With the use of demo videos, the sales cycle shortens as prospects are able to see the product in action and make quicker decisions.

A key strength of automated demos during the prospecting stage is their ability to provide immediate access to how your product works without hefty paperwork or elaborate scheduling processes. 

Prospects can take a mock run of what to expect from the product. Based on their interactive experience, they can decide whether to delve deeper into a potential purchasing journey, hence making part of the qualification decision by themselves in the pipeline.

Qualifying

Qualifying is the subsequent stage where prospects' fit to your targeted persona is analyzed. It also involves deciding which leads should be pursued further versus those that aren't worth the investment of resources.

Automated demos can play a significant role here. It can give you insights about the leads based on their interaction with the demos, like dwell time, completion rates, and points of interest within the demo. Such data can assist sales teams in gauging the level of interest, understanding, and potential requirement of the lead. Also, it enables you to qualify your leads based on their genuine interest in your product without requiring extensive sales interventions.

Trial Stage

During the trial stage, prospects engage more intimately with the product. Here, they evaluate its features, functions, and usability to see whether it could potentially meet their needs. Additionally, it's the stage where the prospect assesses whether the investment in the product would provide a return worth their time and money.

Automated demos greatly facilitate this by providing a safe and guided playground for interested leads to play around with the product. They allow them to take a walk in the product, test its functionalities, and see how it would likely perform in real conditions based on the problems they wish to address. These actionable insights are critical in making or breaking the deal and can easily be accessed through a browser using TestBox, a demo automation software.

Earlier, companies needed to set up a sandbox environment for every individual lead to have their trial experience. This was often time-consuming and cost-intensive. With automated demos, you can simulate a similar experience while ensuring high scalability, reducing costs, and capturing valuable user data.

Post-Demo Follow-ups

The importance of follow-ups post-demo cannot be overstated in the sales process. They aid in keeping up the conversation, nudging leads down the funnel, and gently reminding them of the product's key benefits. Automated demos provide an efficient way to sustain momentum and keep prospects engaged after the primary interaction.

As mentioned before, automated demos are interactive. Hence, they can effectively revisit the key concepts and benefits that were discussed during the product presentation.

Automated demos as leave-behinds enable internal champions to share product details with other stakeholders easily. The ability of these demos to provide an all-around, comprehensive view of the product makes this process smoother and faster, facilitating faster purchase decisions.

Why Leverage Automated Demos?

With the increasing demand for product-led growth, prospects want to explore and understand the product in the early stages of the buying journey. Due to scheduling challenges, they often prefer instant demos over waiting weeks. 

Here are some of the significant reasons to go for automated demos:

1. Diverse prospects need diverse demos

A 'one-size-fits-all' approach only works when it comes to product demonstrations. Different prospects have varied needs, profiles, roles, and pain points, necessitating different types of demos. Here's where demo automation software comes into play, offering high flexibility and customization.

With demo automation, you can customize the demo based on your prospect's specific needs. This could involve altering the flow of the demonstration, focusing more on certain features over others, or catering to a particular use case. 

For example, a sales representative might be interested in a product's specific functionalities that improve their productivity. At the same time, a technical expert would be keen on understanding the product architecture and back-end processes. Automated demos can cater to these diverse needs without rebuilding the entire demo from scratch every single time.

2. Save time

Time is a critical factor in the complex world of sales. Sharing a product demo instantly instead of coordinating calendars for a live demonstration can improve the overall speed and efficiency of the sales process.

Automated demos offer instantaneous access to the prospect, giving them the flexibility to interact with the demo at their convenience. Prospects can understand how your product works instantly and don’t have to dwell on the unavailability of salespeople or the lack of a suitable time slot for a live demonstration.

With automated demos, you can also save substantial setup time. As these demos are pre-built, you don't have to spend time creating a new demo for each prospect. You can reuse and customize pre-existing demos to fit different prospect profiles.

3. Personalization in a product demo

Building a connection with your prospect can significantly improve the chances of conversion, and personalization is the key. Today's prospects appreciate curated content that considers their specific needs. It shows that you understand their challenges and have a potential solution that caters specifically to them.

The automated demo allows such personalization at scale. Since you can create multiple flows inside a single automated demo, you can tailor separate flows for different prospects or customer personas. These personalized flows can precisely draw attention to the most relevant features based on the viewer's profile.

Personalization goes beyond just addressing the viewers' names. It involves displaying screens they are interested in, highlighting specific features beneficial to them, and speaking the language they are most comfortable with.

Automated Demos Vs. Live Demos: The Difference

While both automated and live demos serve the same purpose - showcasing your product and its functionalities to the prospects - how they are executed and their impact varies.

Providing a choice between automated and live demos or a combination of both allows your business to cater to various prospect preferences, ensuring an enhanced product experience.

5 Tips to Make Automated Demos Work for You

When used strategically, automated demos can have a significant impact on your sales process. However, it's crucial to ensure they are tailored to suit your business specifics. Here are some tips to help you make automated demos work effectively for you:

Tip 1: Keep it Short and Sweet

Prospects' attention spans could be improved, especially in today's fast-paced digital world. Therefore, keeping your automated demos short, concise, and clear is crucial.

The idea is to leave your viewers manageable with a few details but to provide an overview of your product's key features and benefits. Stick to the essentials that your prospects need to understand about your product and how it can solve their specific pain points. This selective representation ensures that vital information stands out, is easily remembered, and contributes to decision-making.

Tip 2: Map the Demo With the Problem, Solution, and Benefits

Every good product demo follows a clear structure: It starts by identifying a problem, proceeds to introduce the solution (i.e., your product), and finally highlights the benefits. Mapping your demo based on this flow makes it more meaningful and relatable for prospects. Automated demos make implementing this structure smooth and effortless, making it a valuable tool for product marketing.

The problem communicates to your prospects that you understand their challenges. The solution introduces your product as a potential game-changer. The benefits part convinces them of the tangible value they can expect upon choosing your product. This straightforward and intuitive narrative effectively communicates what your product does, why it is relevant to your prospects, and how it offers remarkable advantages over other options.

Tip 3: Personalization is the key

Personalization brings relevance to your demos. A demo tailored for each prospect's unique requirements showcases your product's value proposition in relation to their specific context. Therefore, it strongly resonates with the prospects, heightens their interest, and prompts more robust engagement.

Automated demos provide tools to adapt the journey dynamically based on viewer inputs at various stages. At the outset, you can modify the demo to greet viewers by their names or roles. Inside the demo, you can offer choices for navigation of features based on their interest, allowing them to explore based on their priorities.

Tip 4: Leverage Storytelling

Stories have always been powerful tools for capturing attention and engaging an audience. Even in product demos, weaving a compelling narrative around the prospect's challenge can significantly boost the demo's effectiveness.

Automated demos provide the perfect space to implement storytelling. You can use visuals, dialogues, and scenario-building to create a demo that not only informs but also emotionally engages your prospects.

The key is to focus on the customer's journey—commence with the problem, proceed through the process of exploring a suitable solution, and conclude with the benefits of choosing your product as their problem-solver.

Tip 5: Focus on the Speed

Speed is vital when it comes to demonstration, especially in sales environments where time frames are often tight. Faster demos reduce friction in the buyer journey and enable quicker decision-making. In this context, the facility of automated demos to deliver instantly accessible, on-demand demonstrations is highly beneficial.

The focus on speed extends to the demo creation process as well. Choose a demo automation tool that enables rapid, intuitive, and easy creation of demonstrations. A handy, user-friendly tool allows for creating demos in minutes that can be customized seamlessly as per prospect needs.

How To Use SmartCue to Create Automated Demos?

If you’re looking to create automated demos for your software, SmartCue can be a real time-saver. SmartCue is an interactive automated demo tool that uses interactive features like screen recording, text edit, zoom, and pan to help you create demos. 

SmartCue offers a plethora of features for crafting an automated demo: 

• Users can choose from a wide array of templates for creating demos based on use cases such as email marketing, self-service demos, product tours and more. 

• It offers a Chrome extension that captures your steps and creates automated texts.  

• After the recording, you can edit the texts, zoom & pan to help you create demos for your software. 

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create automated demos using SmartCue: 

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Step 1: Install the SmartCue Chrome extension and log into SmartCue. 

Step 2: Next, create your new showcase. 

Step 3: On the dashboard, click on ‘Capture New’ to start the screen recording. 

Step 4: Record your screen and perform the software's walkthrough steps. As you click on each step, the tool will record it as a different step. 

You can edit each element of your recording, such as the overlay text, add descriptions or change the styling of text to personalize the demo. Here are a few examples of brands using SmartCue to showcase their product and workflows. 

Above all, SmartCue is easier to set up and takes minimal steps to record your product tour. You can easily trim the recording, remove all awkward pauses, add text and graphics, apply transitions, and add captions to make your videos accessible. 

Sign up for SmartCue’s 14-day trial to get hands-on experience and explore the products’ features in depth.

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Conclusion

Whether it's shortening sales cycles, eliminating manual errors, or providing a platform for personalization and customization, demo automation caters to modern businesses' diverse needs and varied prospect expectations.

Remember to keep your demos concise and clear, map them with problem-solution benefits, personalize them for each prospect, leverage storytelling to engage viewers, and focus on creation speed. 

SmartCue is interactive demo creator software that helps create custom demos with a click. Users can record a product walkthrough, highlighting the workflows' features and benefits. The platform also offers easy screen recording and video editing features after the demo. 

Want to give it a try? Try SmartCue for free for 14 days and check all its features

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between live demos and demo automation?

Live demos involve sales reps manually showcasing products in real time, whereas automated demos use software to create and display product demonstrations instantaneously on demand. Automated demos offer flexibility, scalability, and customization, while live demos provide real-time interaction with sales reps.

How does demo automation improve the sales process?

Demo automation improves the sales process by reducing manual errors, improving response time, and shortening sales cycles. It offers instant, personalized demos that provide convenience to viewers, enhance their experience, and increase the probability of conversion.

What are the key features to look for when selecting demo automation software?

Essential features to consider in a demo automation software include ease of use, integration with existing systems, customizable capabilities, in-built analytics, and secure sharing. The ability to add video clips and dynamic text tokens and offer branding options can also be beneficial.

Can demo automation be customized according to specific needs and requirements?

Yes, demo automation can be customized to cater to specific viewer needs. Customization can involve altering the flow of demonstration, focusing on certain features, adding or removing product highlights, and more, based on viewer profiles or specific use-case scenarios.