How to Use Product Demos Throughout the Enterprise Buying Cycle

The enterprise tech buyer behaves a lot differently today than they did even five years ago. According to Gartner, sales reps only get about 5% of the prospect’s time, since many buyers prefer digital self-evaluation and self-education. Even so, many enterprise products are complex, and require more explanation than a free trial or freemium product allows. Enter the product demo.

Product demos belong in every enterprise go-to-market (GTM) strategy, at every phase of the buyer journey. Let’s look at how demos can be used in the awareness, consideration, and decision phase.

Interactive demos to drive awareness
Marketers and product marketing teams — are you using interactive demos on your website? Forrester research shows that 60% of buyers will go to a vendor’s website before accepting an online or in-person sales meeting. Interactive, click-through demos are a powerful way to prequalify prospects and drive interest in your solution — whether they’re used on your homepage to give a product overview, or on your product page to describe specific features in more depth.

In addition, creating a library of product feature demos and embedding them into marketing emails can further engage buyers and help them explore critical features specific to their use cases and needs.

Live demos in the consideration phase
Once prospects are ready to talk to sales, live demos can play a critical role in closing the deal. According to a study from Bain & Co. demos are one of buyers’ most widely used sources of information during the consideration stage: 72% of respondents said the vendors they ultimately chose outperform the rest of the field by using demos and trials.

Product demos show not only how your solution works, but how it will work in your specific prospect’s context — including use cases, technical environments, for certain personas, and more. What’s even better? If you use an interactive demo in your prequalification process, the sales team can leverage user session data to understand exactly what the prospect viewed, and what they may want to see next. This powerful discovery tool can help sales AEs or presales engineers tailor the live demo even further to the prospect’s needs.

Demo libraries can also serve as a sales enablement tool for your reps or channel partners. Sales reps can use demos from the library as templates for further customization, reducing the time it takes to build a personalized product demo from scratch.

Demos to drive enterprise buying decisions
In the decision phase, it’s still time for the demo to shine. According to our recent survey of sales practitioners, the majority of enterprise sales teams (86%) have lost a deal to a committee decision at least once in the last month. Converting these losses to wins means empowering your champions with the right information to educate larger buying committees.

That’s what interactive demos do best. Instead of the typical PDF or demo video recording, an interactive demo can guide buying committees through the best features within your solution, making it much easier for your champion to help you close the deal.

Product demos for the entire GTM team
As we’ve seen through the examples above, you can use product demos throughout your buyer journey to help prospects discover what matters most to them. The good news is that Reprise, a demo creation platform recognized as a leader by G2 in the demo automation category, can meet the needs of your entire GTM team. A demo creation platform makes it much simpler to create and leverage all types of demos, regardless of your technical ability. In our latest eBook, we show you proven, data-backed examples of how to incorporate demos throughout your sales and marketing strategy.

Want to learn how product demos can bolster your enterprise sales and marketing success? Get a demo.