What is demo automation:
A guide for B2B SaaS companies
What is
demo automation:
A guide for B2B SaaS companies
What is demo automation:
A guide for
B2B SaaS companies
Burnout is rampant, especially in sales and marketing. A 2022 Gartner survey found 90% of sales reps burned out, echoed by a 2020 Blind survey that states 80% of marketers are feeling the same. The reason: they’re juggling a lot, not to mention being bogged down by non-value-add, mundane tasks. No wonder marketing automation is one of the software categories with the highest traffic number on review sites like G2.
In fact, demo automation was the most viewed page of all new software categories added to the G2 platform in 2023. And we get why: creating and managing demos takes up a large part of your marketing, sales, and sometimes, even the design teams’ day-to-day responsibilities.
In this article, we explore how demo automation works, plus how different teams can leverage demo it to improve their internal processes.
What is demo automation?
Demo automation is the process of using software to create ‘hyper-personalized’ interactive product demos at scale. It streamlines the demo creation and management process — giving your marketing and sales teams the bandwidth to focus on higher-impact activities.
But the best part is that demo automation also elevates the buyer experience, enabling them to explore your product at their own pace — a low-friction, low-commitment alternative to the traditional buying experience.
Burnout is rampant, especially in sales and marketing. A 2022 Gartner survey found 90% of sales reps burned out, echoed by a 2020 Blind survey that states 80% of marketers are feeling the same. The reason: they’re juggling a lot, not to mention being bogged down by non-value-add, mundane tasks. No wonder marketing automation is one of the software categories with the highest traffic number on review sites like G2.
In fact, demo automation was the most viewed page of all new software categories added to the G2 platform in 2023. And we get why: creating and managing demos takes up a large part of your marketing, sales, and sometimes, even the design teams’ day-to-day responsibilities.
In this article, we explore how demo automation works, plus how different teams can leverage demo it to improve their internal processes.
What is demo automation?
Demo automation is the process of using software to create ‘hyper-personalized’ interactive product demos at scale. It streamlines the demo creation and management process — giving your marketing and sales teams the bandwidth to focus on higher-impact activities.
But the best part is that demo automation also elevates the buyer experience, enabling them to explore your product at their own pace — a low-friction, low-commitment alternative to the traditional buying experience.
Burnout is rampant, especially in sales and marketing. A 2022 Gartner survey found 90% of sales reps burned out, echoed by a 2020 Blind survey that states 80% of marketers are feeling the same. The reason: they’re juggling a lot, not to mention being bogged down by non-value-add, mundane tasks. No wonder marketing automation is one of the software categories with the highest traffic number on review sites like G2.
In fact, demo automation was the most viewed page of all new software categories added to the G2 platform in 2023. And we get why: creating and managing demos takes up a large part of your marketing, sales, and sometimes, even the design teams’ day-to-day responsibilities.
In this article, we explore how demo automation works, plus how different teams can leverage demo it to improve their internal processes.
What is demo automation?
Demo automation is the process of using software to create ‘hyper-personalized’ interactive product demos at scale. It streamlines the demo creation and management process — giving your marketing and sales teams the bandwidth to focus on higher-impact activities.
But the best part is that demo automation also elevates the buyer experience, enabling them to explore your product at their own pace — a low-friction, low-commitment alternative to the traditional buying experience.
Demo automation
✅ It’s quick, scalable, and cost-effective
✅ Ensures a consistent experience across all demo
✅ Offers in-depth data on how prospects interact with your demo
✅ Provides a dynamic experience that can be personalized for each individua
Demo automation
✅ It’s quick, scalable, and cost-effective
✅ Ensures a consistent experience across all demo
✅ Offers in-depth data on how prospects interact with your demo
✅ Provides a dynamic experience that can be personalized for each individua
Manual demo creation
❎ Demands significant effort and resources
❎ The demo quality varies depending on who created it
❎ Offers little to no insights on prospect behavior
❎ Provides a static experience with no personalization options
Manual demo creation
❎ Demands significant effort and resources
❎ The demo quality varies depending on who created it
❎ Offers little to no insights on prospect behavior
❎ Provides a static experience with no personalization options
Demo automation and live sales demos: How they work together
While demo automation is a great ‘sales enabler’ — helping you not only ship your demos but also improve lead engagement — it’s not a replacement for human interactions. Rather, it goes hand in hand with live sales demos.
For most sales-led organizations, the live sales demo is the only channel through which prospects can get any type of product-related information — whether that’s an overview of the platform or pricing inquiries.
Not only does this lead to a sub-par buyer experience, but the only way for you to scale is by increasing the number of demos you give — which means you also have to hire more sales representatives.
However, by using automated demos as your first point of interaction with prospects, you can give them a commitment-free alternative to explore your product during the early stages of their buying journey.
Plus, the automated demo also doubles as a lead qualification tool — you can score people based on how they engage with your demo, and prioritize high-value interactions.
The result? You get to scale your business (and close more deals) all while running a lean sales team, and giving customers a friction-free buying experience.
How does demo automation help SaaS companies?
So far, we’ve seen how demo automation can help SaaS sales teams reduce their workload and become more efficient, but that’s not all. Demo automation offers a lot more benefits that extend far beyond time savings.
Beyond sales efficiency, let's check out how demo automation impacts other aspects like the buyer and partner experience.
Sales enablement
As cliche as it sounds, empowered sales teams make for happy customers and bigger profits. And one way to improve the “seller experience” is by enabling your sales reps with the content they need to engage customers.
But demo automation takes it a step further — it not only helps you engage customers but also refine your strategy so you can engage the right customers in the right ways.
Let’s see how this works —
Lead qualification
To start with, prospects who explore your demo are already familiar with your product and its value proposition. So if they take that next step and make contact, it means they’re seriously considering your product — they’re warm leads, eager to take the next step.
Even better — you can use the live demo or sales call to answer prospect questions and understand what they (really) care about.
Data-backed demo strategy
Pre-recorded demos and sales decks — while efficient — come with limited data to measure their effectiveness in holding your audience’s interest. Demo automation, on the other hand, gives you quite a bit of insight into user behavior (and intent).
For instance, if a particular demo section consistently gets high engagement, it might indicate a popular feature. On the flip side, if users frequently drop off at a specific point, it could mean you’re losing their attention there and need to fix it. This gives you a “continuous feedback loop” that ensures your demos remain relevant.
Buyer enablement
According to a 2023 Survey by Product Led, 91% of companies are planning to invest more in product-led growth (PLG) strategies — with the most popular option being free trials and freemium models (75%).
This means buyers have to not only discover your value proposition by themselves but also do it within the free trial period — typically 14 days — to convert. What if we told you demo automation can help you guide users to the time-to-value faster?
Demo-powered onboarding sequences
Place demos at key points in the user onboarding journey to give them a peak into how your product works and how they can reach that AHA moment (where they realize your product’s value).
There are three ways you can do this:
Add demos to your product’s UI, so users can explore the demo first, then the platform.
Create a “demo checklist” that breaks the initial setup and time-to-value path into step-by-step chapters.
Include interactive demos in your trial email sequences — these bite-sized product lessons can help bring users back to the product.
Quick-access demo libraries
Another idea is to create a central library with all your demos — a self-service, interactive knowledge base that users can access at any time. This also comes with two other benefits:
Your customer support team is free to handle the more complex inquiries.
Your product and UX teams can identify product friction points — for instance, the more views a demo gets, the less intuitive the actual product.
Partner enablement
Here are two interesting data points from when PartnerStack surveyed 1000 partners —
Partners who complete a training program earn six times more
60% of them wanted ready-to-use marketing assets
And how convenient is it that demo automation can help with both?
Structured product training
Starting with the partner education aspect — demo automation (particularly interactive product tours) can be a great way to standardize product training and update partners when new features are released.
Interactive product tours offer a flexible, self-paced learning experience, complete with quizzes and polls for knowledge checks and instant feedback. It's a win-win: partners become product experts, and you get more user insights.
Consistent marketing
Demo automation can also be a powerful ‘sales’ tool for partners — especially smaller firms or solo partners who have limited bandwidth. A simple way to do this is by sharing your public (or unlisted) demo library with partners.
Some demo automation platforms even come with a “partner role” where they can clone your product tours and demo environments to share with their clients. This not only helps them nurture their leads and close deals but also ensures consistent messaging between in-house and partner communications.
Demo automation use cases
We’ve seen how demo automation supports different aspects of the buyer experience. Now, let’s explore how (and where) different teams can use demo automation.
Demo automation for marketing
The marketing team is probably the one team that benefits most from demo automation. Not only does it speed up the process — allowing marketers to create and update demos faster — but it also reduces their dependence on other teams like design or video production.
Demo automation is a must-have tool for product-led marketers as well — because even if you aren’t creating sales enablement content, you’ll still be using on-demand demos to educate buyers.
For example, you can —
Increase product awareness by embedding interactive product tours directly into your website and landing pages.
Drive feature adoption by making interactive tours a part of your launch campaigns.
Improve demo bookings by giving website visitors a peek into your product before asking them to sign up for a live demo.
This way, you can make the demo experience interactive for buyers even without a sales rep present.
Demo automation for presales
You must be familiar with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). MQLs are leads who show initial interest and SQLs indicate a lead is ready to engage with sales.
Demo automation gives you the pre-sales version of this — Demo Qualified Leads (DQLs). By gating or semi-gating demo access, presales teams can analyze prospect engagement metrics to determine a prospect’s intent and gauge if they’d benefit from a live demo.
Presales teams can also build their own library of interactive demos to showcase the more technical aspects of a product or address common questions by prospects.
Demo automation for sales
Like with partners, one of the biggest benefits of demo automation for sales teams is using it as an asset to bring new hires up to speed. And according to a 2023 G2 report, 44.9% of sales teams find “decreasing new salesperson ramp-up time to full productivity.” to be an important priority.
Apart from training new team members, here are some other ways that sales teams can leverage demo automation —
Adding them to your email sequences
You've probably already got a steady stream of automated emails nurturing leads and driving cold outbound campaigns. By linking interactive demos from your emails, you can give prospects a low-commitment, low-friction option to explore your product.
Plus, demo opens are a good indicator of interest, so you which leads are warm and can be converted quickly.
Championing your ‘champion’
In most cases, the person who explores your product or gets the live demo is not the only decision-maker. Most buying committees include at least 3 to 5 other people. You can share a set of automated demos (personalized to your prospect’s use case) in the post-demo follow-up email — something they can pass along to the rest of their team.
How does demo automation work: A step-by-step guide
Once you’ve laid the groundwork — who your target audience is, which part of the funnel the demo will sit in, and how you’ll position your product (or feature) — you can get started putting it together with your demo automation software.
Here’s what that looks like —
Get your visuals in place
The first step to creating your automated demo is gathering your visual assets. This includes product screenshots, filler slides, and brand elements. Some demo automation software solutions (particularly AI-powered ones) even allow you to record your actions directly using their browser extension and generate one-click interactive demos.
This is also a good time to build your brand library — add your logo, intros and outros, and more to the demo automation platform so you can reuse them for future demos.
Demo automation and live sales demos: How they work together
While demo automation is a great ‘sales enabler’ — helping you not only ship your demos but also improve lead engagement — it’s not a replacement for human interactions. Rather, it goes hand in hand with live sales demos.
For most sales-led organizations, the live sales demo is the only channel through which prospects can get any type of product-related information — whether that’s an overview of the platform or pricing inquiries.
Not only does this lead to a sub-par buyer experience, but the only way for you to scale is by increasing the number of demos you give — which means you also have to hire more sales representatives.
However, by using automated demos as your first point of interaction with prospects, you can give them a commitment-free alternative to explore your product during the early stages of their buying journey.
Plus, the automated demo also doubles as a lead qualification tool — you can score people based on how they engage with your demo, and prioritize high-value interactions.
The result? You get to scale your business (and close more deals) all while running a lean sales team, and giving customers a friction-free buying experience.
How does demo automation help SaaS companies?
So far, we’ve seen how demo automation can help SaaS sales teams reduce their workload and become more efficient, but that’s not all. Demo automation offers a lot more benefits that extend far beyond time savings.
Beyond sales efficiency, let's check out how demo automation impacts other aspects like the buyer and partner experience.
Sales enablement
As cliche as it sounds, empowered sales teams make for happy customers and bigger profits. And one way to improve the “seller experience” is by enabling your sales reps with the content they need to engage customers.
But demo automation takes it a step further — it not only helps you engage customers but also refine your strategy so you can engage the right customers in the right ways.
Let’s see how this works —
Lead qualification
To start with, prospects who explore your demo are already familiar with your product and its value proposition. So if they take that next step and make contact, it means they’re seriously considering your product — they’re warm leads, eager to take the next step.
Even better — you can use the live demo or sales call to answer prospect questions and understand what they (really) care about.
Data-backed demo strategy
Pre-recorded demos and sales decks — while efficient — come with limited data to measure their effectiveness in holding your audience’s interest. Demo automation, on the other hand, gives you quite a bit of insight into user behavior (and intent).
For instance, if a particular demo section consistently gets high engagement, it might indicate a popular feature. On the flip side, if users frequently drop off at a specific point, it could mean you’re losing their attention there and need to fix it. This gives you a “continuous feedback loop” that ensures your demos remain relevant.
Buyer enablement
According to a 2023 Survey by Product Led, 91% of companies are planning to invest more in product-led growth (PLG) strategies — with the most popular option being free trials and freemium models (75%).
This means buyers have to not only discover your value proposition by themselves but also do it within the free trial period — typically 14 days — to convert. What if we told you demo automation can help you guide users to the time-to-value faster?
Demo-powered onboarding sequences
Place demos at key points in the user onboarding journey to give them a peak into how your product works and how they can reach that AHA moment (where they realize your product’s value).
There are three ways you can do this:
Add demos to your product’s UI, so users can explore the demo first, then the platform.
Create a “demo checklist” that breaks the initial setup and time-to-value path into step-by-step chapters.
Include interactive demos in your trial email sequences — these bite-sized product lessons can help bring users back to the product.
Quick-access demo libraries
Another idea is to create a central library with all your demos — a self-service, interactive knowledge base that users can access at any time. This also comes with two other benefits:
Your customer support team is free to handle the more complex inquiries.
Your product and UX teams can identify product friction points — for instance, the more views a demo gets, the less intuitive the actual product.
Partner enablement
Here are two interesting data points from when PartnerStack surveyed 1000 partners —
Partners who complete a training program earn six times more
60% of them wanted ready-to-use marketing assets
And how convenient is it that demo automation can help with both?
Structured product training
Starting with the partner education aspect — demo automation (particularly interactive product tours) can be a great way to standardize product training and update partners when new features are released.
Interactive product tours offer a flexible, self-paced learning experience, complete with quizzes and polls for knowledge checks and instant feedback. It's a win-win: partners become product experts, and you get more user insights.
Consistent marketing
Demo automation can also be a powerful ‘sales’ tool for partners — especially smaller firms or solo partners who have limited bandwidth. A simple way to do this is by sharing your public (or unlisted) demo library with partners.
Some demo automation platforms even come with a “partner role” where they can clone your product tours and demo environments to share with their clients. This not only helps them nurture their leads and close deals but also ensures consistent messaging between in-house and partner communications.
Demo automation use cases
We’ve seen how demo automation supports different aspects of the buyer experience. Now, let’s explore how (and where) different teams can use demo automation.
Demo automation for marketing
The marketing team is probably the one team that benefits most from demo automation. Not only does it speed up the process — allowing marketers to create and update demos faster — but it also reduces their dependence on other teams like design or video production.
Demo automation is a must-have tool for product-led marketers as well — because even if you aren’t creating sales enablement content, you’ll still be using on-demand demos to educate buyers.
For example, you can —
Increase product awareness by embedding interactive product tours directly into your website and landing pages.
Drive feature adoption by making interactive tours a part of your launch campaigns.
Improve demo bookings by giving website visitors a peek into your product before asking them to sign up for a live demo.
This way, you can make the demo experience interactive for buyers even without a sales rep present.
Demo automation for presales
You must be familiar with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). MQLs are leads who show initial interest and SQLs indicate a lead is ready to engage with sales.
Demo automation gives you the pre-sales version of this — Demo Qualified Leads (DQLs). By gating or semi-gating demo access, presales teams can analyze prospect engagement metrics to determine a prospect’s intent and gauge if they’d benefit from a live demo.
Presales teams can also build their own library of interactive demos to showcase the more technical aspects of a product or address common questions by prospects.
Demo automation for sales
Like with partners, one of the biggest benefits of demo automation for sales teams is using it as an asset to bring new hires up to speed. And according to a 2023 G2 report, 44.9% of sales teams find “decreasing new salesperson ramp-up time to full productivity.” to be an important priority.
Apart from training new team members, here are some other ways that sales teams can leverage demo automation —
Adding them to your email sequences
You've probably already got a steady stream of automated emails nurturing leads and driving cold outbound campaigns. By linking interactive demos from your emails, you can give prospects a low-commitment, low-friction option to explore your product.
Plus, demo opens are a good indicator of interest, so you which leads are warm and can be converted quickly.
Championing your ‘champion’
In most cases, the person who explores your product or gets the live demo is not the only decision-maker. Most buying committees include at least 3 to 5 other people. You can share a set of automated demos (personalized to your prospect’s use case) in the post-demo follow-up email — something they can pass along to the rest of their team.
How does demo automation work: A step-by-step guide
Once you’ve laid the groundwork — who your target audience is, which part of the funnel the demo will sit in, and how you’ll position your product (or feature) — you can get started putting it together with your demo automation software.
Here’s what that looks like —
Get your visuals in place
The first step to creating your automated demo is gathering your visual assets. This includes product screenshots, filler slides, and brand elements. Some demo automation software solutions (particularly AI-powered ones) even allow you to record your actions directly using their browser extension and generate one-click interactive demos.
This is also a good time to build your brand library — add your logo, intros and outros, and more to the demo automation platform so you can reuse them for future demos.
Create a storyboard
Video producers swear by storyboards, calling them a great way to visualize scenes and plan out shots. They can do the same for demos as well — helping you map your demo's structure and identify where to incorporate interactive elements or calls to action.
Create a storyboard
Video producers swear by storyboards, calling them a great way to visualize scenes and plan out shots. They can do the same for demos as well — helping you map your demo's structure and identify where to incorporate interactive elements or calls to action.
Set the narrative
Once you have all your visuals ready, the next step is stitching them together and establishing a flow that leads viewers to your AHA moment — the point where the viewer experiences the product's value firsthand.
This is also where you add your core interactive elements — hotspots, tooltips, and CTAs — to add context and guide users through the product experience. Most demo automation platforms also come with readymade CTA options and lead capture forms that you can easily drop into your demo.
Leverage branched narratives
Feel like your demo is getting long? Use conditional branching and let viewers decide which features they’d like to explore. Not only does this make for a quicker demo experience, but it also ensures each viewer gets a relatable and relevant "aha" moment.
Add your flourishes
Here’s where you add that little bit of personality to your demos — branding, AI voiceovers, and other optional interactive elements like quizzes or polls — to make your demo engaging and memorable. Plus, by aligning your demo experience with your overall brand identity, you can both improve brand recognition and also differentiate your demo from that of your competitors.
Add your flourishes
Here’s where you add that little bit of personality to your demos — branding, AI voiceovers, and other optional interactive elements like quizzes or polls — to make your demo engaging and memorable. Plus, by aligning your demo experience with your overall brand identity, you can both improve brand recognition and also differentiate your demo from that of your competitors.
Add an easter egg or two
Easter eggs — those delightful digital surprises — which were a big part of early internet culture, are now making a comeback. Even some (serious) B2B brands have leveraged Easter eggs to showcase their personality, delight users, and create a buzz on social.
And if you’re considering joining the trend with an easter egg or two, why not start with your product demos? Even something as simple as a little bit of trivia that pops up when they click a hotspot can make for a fun interaction.
Distribute the demo
Once you've polished your demo, it's time to share it with the world. Here are a few ways to get more eyes on it:
Put it on your website: Make it easy for people to find and watch your demo by adding it to your website—on the home page, as well as feature pages.
Make it a soft CTA in your emails: Add a link to your demos in both onboarding sequences and outbound emails to engage prospects.
Set up a demo library: Organize your demos in a central place and make them easy to find for your team and prospects.
Make demo distribution a game:
Test and optimize your demos
Keep tabs on key demo automation metrics to see what's working and what needs improvement. Most demo automation platforms come with a whole lot of intent data that can help you figure out how different customer segments interact with your demos.
Also, as demos closely mirror the actual product experience, you might benefit from your UX Research team’s expertise in understanding user behavior. Combine that with your demo performance metrics and it gets a lot easier to create engaging product demos.
Some demo automation metrics (and how they help)
Demo completion rate
Measures the percentage of viewers who watch the entire demo
How it helps: It indicates the overall effectiveness of the demo in capturing and retaining viewer attention.
How to make it better: Prioritize personalization and interaction over generic, feature boilerplates. You can also A/B test different formats to find out what holds your audiences’ attention.
Demo drop-off rate
Measures the percentage of viewers who abandon the demo before completion
How it helps: It pinpoints areas of the demo that are losing viewer interest.
How to make it better: Find out why people drop off — is your demo too long, irrelevant, or overly complex? Depending on the reason, you can streamline navigation, optimize pacing, and experiment with different formats.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Quantifies how demo automation contributes to overall sales and revenue generation
How it helps: It demonstrates how demo automation compares to other marketing campaigns and channels.
How to make it better: Calculate the cost per lead and conversion rate of different demos—so you can double down on the ones that bring the most ROI.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
1. How does demo automation differ from pre-recorded demos?
Pre-recorded demos are static video presentations that offer a one-size-fits-all view of a product. Essentially, they're scripted screen recordings that walk viewers through product features in a linear fashion.
Demo automation, on the other hand, is a dynamic process that involves creating interactive demo experiences.
While it can also include pre-recorded content, it uses elements like hotspots and branched (non-linear) narratives to transform the viewing experience into an active exploration of the product.
2. Can automated demos replace live sales demos?
It depends. Automated demos are ideal for product-led growth models, where self-service exploration drives product adoption.
For sales-led teams, on the other hand, automated demos work better in tandem with live demos. The automated demo can be used to provide initial product information and qualify leads, which the sales team can join the conversation in the later stages when the lead shows an (actual) interest in signing the deal.
3. How does demo automation contribute to sales efficiency?
There are two main ways in which demo automation supports sales teams. First, it eliminates repetitive work by allowing you to create hyper-personalized demos with just a few clicks.
Second, it gives you super useful data on prospect behavior — the features they like, at which points they drop off from a demo, and such — that can help you optimize future demos and increase conversion rates.
4. Which types of companies should invest in demo automation?
Demo automation can benefit pretty much any SaaS business, but it's particularly great for:
High-growth companies that wish to maintain a consistent demo experience while scaling their acquisition efforts.
Product-led growth companies using self-serve models to drive product adoption
Companies with complex products that want to simplify the product experience and empower buyers through hands-on experiences.
Small sales teams who wish to work faster (and smarter) by shipping demos quickly and without depending on other teams.
5. What are the different approaches to demo automation?
Here are the three popular approaches to demo automation:
Interactive product tours: The most popular demo automation approach, these are guided walkthroughs that include interactive elements like hotspots, non-linear narratives, and AI voice-overs.
Sandbox environments: These are simulations of your actual product where prospects can explore features, test functionalities, and understand the product's capabilities without affecting the actual product.
Live demo automation: A subcategory of the live sales demo, here sales teams showcase live product versions pre-populated with dynamic data. By providing reusable demo environments, this approach allows your sales team to set up custom live demos quickly.
Distribute the demo
Once you've polished your demo, it's time to share it with the world. Here are a few ways to get more eyes on it:
Put it on your website: Make it easy for people to find and watch your demo by adding it to your website—on the home page, as well as feature pages.
Make it a soft CTA in your emails: Add a link to your demos in both onboarding sequences and outbound emails to engage prospects.
Set up a demo library: Organize your demos in a central place and make them easy to find for your team and prospects.
Make demo distribution a game:
Test and optimize your demos
Keep tabs on key demo automation metrics to see what's working and what needs improvement. Most demo automation platforms come with a whole lot of intent data that can help you figure out how different customer segments interact with your demos.
Also, as demos closely mirror the actual product experience, you might benefit from your UX Research team’s expertise in understanding user behavior. Combine that with your demo performance metrics and it gets a lot easier to create engaging product demos.
Some demo automation metrics (and how they help)
Demo completion rate
Measures the percentage of viewers who watch the entire demo
How it helps: It indicates the overall effectiveness of the demo in capturing and retaining viewer attention.
How to make it better: Prioritize personalization and interaction over generic, feature boilerplates. You can also A/B test different formats to find out what holds your audiences’ attention.
Demo drop-off rate
Measures the percentage of viewers who abandon the demo before completion
How it helps: It pinpoints areas of the demo that are losing viewer interest.
How to make it better: Find out why people drop off — is your demo too long, irrelevant, or overly complex? Depending on the reason, you can streamline navigation, optimize pacing, and experiment with different formats.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Quantifies how demo automation contributes to overall sales and revenue generation
How it helps: It demonstrates how demo automation compares to other marketing campaigns and channels.
How to make it better: Calculate the cost per lead and conversion rate of different demos—so you can double down on the ones that bring the most ROI.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
1. How does demo automation differ from pre-recorded demos?
Pre-recorded demos are static video presentations that offer a one-size-fits-all view of a product. Essentially, they're scripted screen recordings that walk viewers through product features in a linear fashion.
Demo automation, on the other hand, is a dynamic process that involves creating interactive demo experiences.
While it can also include pre-recorded content, it uses elements like hotspots and branched (non-linear) narratives to transform the viewing experience into an active exploration of the product.
2. Can automated demos replace live sales demos?
It depends. Automated demos are ideal for product-led growth models, where self-service exploration drives product adoption.
For sales-led teams, on the other hand, automated demos work better in tandem with live demos. The automated demo can be used to provide initial product information and qualify leads, which the sales team can join the conversation in the later stages when the lead shows an (actual) interest in signing the deal.
3. How does demo automation contribute to sales efficiency?
There are two main ways in which demo automation supports sales teams. First, it eliminates repetitive work by allowing you to create hyper-personalized demos with just a few clicks.
Second, it gives you super useful data on prospect behavior — the features they like, at which points they drop off from a demo, and such — that can help you optimize future demos and increase conversion rates.
4. Which types of companies should invest in demo automation?
Demo automation can benefit pretty much any SaaS business, but it's particularly great for:
High-growth companies that wish to maintain a consistent demo experience while scaling their acquisition efforts.
Product-led growth companies using self-serve models to drive product adoption
Companies with complex products that want to simplify the product experience and empower buyers through hands-on experiences.
Small sales teams who wish to work faster (and smarter) by shipping demos quickly and without depending on other teams.
5. What are the different approaches to demo automation?
Here are the three popular approaches to demo automation:
Interactive product tours: The most popular demo automation approach, these are guided walkthroughs that include interactive elements like hotspots, non-linear narratives, and AI voice-overs.
Sandbox environments: These are simulations of your actual product where prospects can explore features, test functionalities, and understand the product's capabilities without affecting the actual product.
Live demo automation: A subcategory of the live sales demo, here sales teams showcase live product versions pre-populated with dynamic data. By providing reusable demo environments, this approach allows your sales team to set up custom live demos quickly.
Manual demo creation
❎ Demands significant effort and resources
❎ The demo quality varies depending on who created it
❎ Offers little to no insights on prospect behavior
❎ Provides a static experience with no personalization options
Set the narrative
Once you have all your visuals ready, the next step is stitching them together and establishing a flow that leads viewers to your AHA moment — the point where the viewer experiences the product's value firsthand.
This is also where you add your core interactive elements — hotspots, tooltips, and CTAs — to add context and guide users through the product experience. Most demo automation platforms also come with readymade CTA options and lead capture forms that you can easily drop into your demo.