Increase Pipeline & Close Rates with Interactive Product Demos

Taylor Wells (00:01.188)
Hey everyone, welcome to the GTM News Show. I got Natalie here today. Hey Natalie.

Natalie Marcotullio (00:05.675)
Hey, how's it going?

Taylor Wells (00:07.292)
Doing pretty well, doing pretty well. Thanks for coming on the show. So Natalie is the head of growth and operations at Novadic, which we were just joking before I hit record about names. And yeah, some names can be challenging sometimes to pronounce, but Novadic. And I've been following their journey for a while in regards to creating a demo experience. I want to have Natalie come on and share learning successes, how.

how you can apply a demo experience on your website and kind of high level, kind of take a step back to frame the conversation for the audience. We're definitely seeing this huge push towards product-led growth, right? Where people can have a, their time to value is quicker, right? Where you're getting value, you're getting impact as quickly as possible. And the folks that create impact usually get the business as quickly as possible. And we're also seeing this push towards

towards away from folks gaining information through salespeople, and they're also, they're doing their own research, right? And so, Forrester did this study actually back in 2013, which seems like a lifetime ago, right? 10 years ago, and they said two thirds to 90% of the buyer's journey happens before a buyer talks to a salesperson. So two thirds.

to 90% of the buyer's journey happens before a buyer talks to a salesperson. So, so much of the buyer's journey is changing. People are obviously going through communities, LinkedIn, Google, word of mouth, internal, et cetera. And so, and we're also moving kind of to this show me, don't tell me world as well, kind of the product led growth and stuff like that. So show me what you do. Don't actually tell me. People wanna have that hands on. They want the instant gratification.

And Natalie, before I turn over to you to kind of jump into it, I noticed this on your profile. One of your top posts that you highlighted was, I'm gonna read the stat that you shared, was that clicking a book, book a demo, CTA, right? Like the book a demo, classic book a demo, or contact a CTA, call to action on a website, doesn't guarantee a demo. After booking a demo,

Taylor Wells (02:24.936)
They looked at the top 100 SaaS companies and we found that 35% never got in touch with us, right? So people that booked a demo never actually got in touch. And then it took on average two days for a company to respond. So yeah, we wanna kind of frame the conversation now, I'd love to hear from you, how you educate folks on this demo experience, kind of high level from a story standpoint, and then kind of give us your best case for why folks should have a demo experience on their website.

Natalie Marcotullio (02:54.822)
Yeah, first off, can't believe that stat was from 2013. It feels like I've seen that stat just slowly go up from two thirds to 80% to 90%. I think G2 last year saw somewhere around 90%. It feels like it's a more recent trend of giving buyers a better experience, making it more self-serve, but to see that since 2013, I think that data just really shows itself.

Taylor Wells (02:59.728)
Crazy, right?

Natalie Marcotullio (03:21.462)
consumer, whatever you want to call it, like consumer process, self-serve process for a while. But the data that you pointed to, the two plus days for it to get a demo request, the fact that we had a numerous amount of companies just not respond to us in that report shows that even for the past 10 years, we are not doing what buyers want. Like there's a misalignment between how buyers want to buy and how the system is currently set up. And I think that's because of a few reasons, right? I think to start in the old days, like buyers weren't, weren't as

knowledgeable about technology, right? You didn't necessarily trust that they could do their own research, could go figure it out on their own. On top of all that, like I think PLG just changed the motion of, okay, we can let buyers just get hands on first and they'll figure it out. Like, we don't have to gate everything, doesn't have to be all on us. So all that being said, I think the biggest kind of best case, and I'll back this up with some numbers, but it's just you get, you know, more conversions, faster conversions, better...

Natalie Marcotullio (04:19.982)
prospect experiences, and ultimately happy your customers if you're creating a buying process in the way they wanna buy.

Taylor Wells (04:28.94)
I love it. That's well said. And I think going back to aligning the sales process, right, to the buyer's journey. And I think we've, we've been so focused on what works for us that we've kind of missed what works for the customer. And I think even taking a step back, that's where we've seen PLG. That's why Amazon is so successful, right? Amazon is not really, they really didn't have any products, right? But they are a delivery service. They're a

and a customer service platform, delivery platform, right? And so I think getting back to what customers want, especially in the SaaS world, I think service-based businesses, this is less, I think they've had to focus so much on experience and customer relationships. I think the SaaS world where profit margins are so high and they can throw as much money as they want, you know, being hyperbolic, they can throw as much money as they want at marketing and sales to get customers. And so I think getting back to that customer experience, getting back to

and aligning that versus just what is our process. And even you hear about terminology too, like sales processes versus the buyer's process, or the buyer's journey, and making it more about them and trying to align with them. And I think even to that stat we were talking about earlier, that was 10 years ago. And I think we've been in this age of grow at all costs. And so many, especially SaaS platforms, have been able to, actually, they didn't have to.

you know, stay up with the times, right? And so I think that's what I've noticed, whereas people have been wanting this for a while and they've wanted more instant gratification. So I'd love for you to dive a little bit deeper into kind of what stats have you seen for folks that have like implemented a demo experience and what kind of rewards on the other end have they produced?

Natalie Marcotullio (06:22.418)
Yeah, to start, I think just kind of like I said, putting some stats behind that, buyers want to buy more self-serve. The biggest way we've seen this is from that research we did.

We also looked at what are the average conversion rates for Book-A-Demo CTA, or if you are a PLG, we found reports on, you know, for free trial or freemium. And we see that on average. Book-A-Demo CTA has about like 2% to 3% conversion rate on your website. So out of all the website visitors, 2% to 3% are going to that Book-A-Demo CTA. PLG's a little higher. It's gonna be like 4% to 6%.

But that is still a way majority of website visitors that means that are never seeing or getting the value of your product. Yes, maybe they're reading about it, but still it's a lot different to read than to feel something. And we've seen with interactive demos about a 30% engagement rate. So that means a third of the people on your website will be able to see your product, interact with it, get some value, and then probably be ready for the next step if it makes sense. If not, maybe they're not ready by now, but they're like, okay, I now understand why I would want this and can come back to it later.

Taylor Wells (07:23.312)
I love that. Thanks for sharing. And I love how you separated the idea of, I think, Bookademo or some sort of CTA where it's very high intent. They're probably in a sales process, buying process where they're evaluating multiple vendors. They're ready to meet with the salesperson. And if you look at that stat of like 90% of people do their research before, by the time they click Bookademo, they're already in the races. They're already...

You probably have a lot less opportunity to influence the buyer's journey I think what you said there, maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more on the buyer's journey is How you can influence it before they even get to that place where they're ready to buy What have you seen anything there even anecdotal it may not be as or a qualitative maybe not quantitative Things you've seen where it's like hey you're able to educate people

you're able to provide some value, even like make them aware of a problem that they didn't have, right? You're kind of all those demand generation, demand creation motions. Any thoughts there?

Natalie Marcotullio (08:27.934)
Yeah, I think the biggest example we've seen of this is our customer trainual did this A-B test with interactive demos versus videos. And they are PLG, they have a free trial. And essentially they want to test, you know, if we give them a little more education upfront, if we show them interactive demo versus a video, does that mean they're going to be more successful free trialers and are more people going to sign up? And I say these numbers and I realize that they're the type that sound made up, but I have seen the data myself. And they saw about like almost a 430% increase in free trial signups.

around 100% increase of those going from free trial to paid. And I think it just makes sense. They essentially got a chance to play around with the product before signing up for it versus a video. I know I have every intention in the world to watch a video sometimes, but I have two monitors. One video's on one monitor. I get a slack. I answer the slack. Suddenly the video played and I have no idea what it said.

Taylor Wells (09:20.392)
Yeah, well said. Those are pretty powerful numbers. It makes sense even going back to what I said earlier about the show me, don't tell me. People want to see it, number one, and the interactive element too where they're participating in the process versus somebody just kind of telling them. In video too, I think what's interesting, I've noticed too in a trend, if it's thought leadership and super educational and super

practitioner focused and deep dive educational, maybe you can keep somebody engaged. But if it's a product demo or even like a sales demo, it's like people, I think we're so hardwired to just kind of automatically kind of see all the BS, right? I've just like, it's so overweighted positive towards the company. So I could see how, yeah, the videos, even, you know, video demo versus interactive, super interesting. And I love to hear too kind of,

In what situations have you found, maybe what folks have you seen it be the most successful with? It's not like PLG, product-led growth, folks that have some sort of free trial or software where you can tangibly touch it and you can kind of create a version of the product on your website. What other situations or what other types of companies have you seen this be a really good fit?

Natalie Marcotullio (10:43.25)
Yeah, generally it does have to be some type of software, right? Like since it's not a video, since we are cloning your software, essentially, there needs to be some software behind it. But we do find there's kind of usually two camps. It's either you're already PLG like we talked about, you want to be even more PLG, like you want to take it to the next level. You want to put your product on your website or bring it up in your marketing cycle.

On the flip side, maybe you're sales led and you're like, I've, everyone doesn't stop talking about PLG. I get it. It's great. I don't have the engineering resources. I don't have the time. I need something like in a week, not in a year. So it's almost sales led companies we've seen taking their first steps into PLG or what we call like PLG light.

I think especially sometimes if you're more a complex or like a product that has multiple product lines, sometimes people are like, oh no, my product's complex. Like I can't show them the product, but actually these demos, we've seen a lot of customers break them up by use cases, by personas, maybe create demo centers. It's a really easy way to digest, like okay, this is everything this product does. I get it now versus, I think especially for more complex products, sometimes there's a lot of value props, you're like, but what do you do?

Taylor Wells (11:50.3)
Hmm fascinating and thanks for sharing and I appreciate you kind of breaking out as well the sales led versus product led and And the software in particular Maybe we can talk a little about service based businesses and if you've seen any emergence of that, I'd be very curious if any service based businesses are non software, but That's cool. So kind of high level what I'm hearing is obviously If you have a product led makes total sense to kind of bring it down further down in the funnel

And I see that a lot, especially, yeah, you see a lot with a lot of product-led companies, they have a demo experience on their website, even though you can create a free trial, right? You're still, once again, providing that value as quickly as possible, you get tangible, you don't have to enter your email address, there's not some sort of gating process, super efficient and quick. And then sales-led, if they're, they primarily use salespeople as their way to sign up customers, bring it down. What are some of the...

challenges you've seen with folks in a sales lead in particular. I think product lead is probably pretty cut and dry. People are probably, they're all for it, right? It's much easier to adopt. What are some of the obstacles you've seen and maybe some things you can share with the folks on what to avoid from a sales lead side?

Natalie Marcotullio (13:05.966)
Yeah, I think some of the biggest obstacles, and I'm sure some listeners are thinking this right now, is one, is this going to monopolize my sales demos? And will my sales team use it and like it? And it's funny because it's usually the marketer who has this concern. It's not necessarily the sales leader. It's the marketer comes in and they're like, oh, I really like it, but I don't think sales will like it. I think the biggest thing there, kind of what we talked about before is

If we don't give them an option, they're probably just gonna bounce as we saw 95, 96% of website visitors. It's not like if they're like, oh, you know, I really wasn't ready for a demo, but you forced me into it. Like, people are gonna find ways around it. You might as well show it yourself. But often what we see too is when the marketing team buys and adopts Novatic, the sales team instantly starts using it in outbound campaigns in the sales cycle because they're constantly asked for this by prospect. They're constantly asked for, hey, do you have a video? Hey, do you have an asset? Do you have something?

They're like, oh yeah, we're ready to go send these out because they know if they create that better buying experience, it's going to lead to more one deals.

Taylor Wells (14:07.996)
Oh, that's super cool. Any thoughts on? So obviously on the front end, you haven't seen any sort of cannibalization of demo requests or things like that. It only helps, obviously, get better demos, whatnot. But then further down the line in the buying journey of the sales process, you've seen the sales team. I love to hear more about that, like because it makes so much sense. Right. Your first sales folks are always pressed for time. They want to be super efficient.

versus getting on a call. We're seeing a lot, this almost reminds me of like, you know, one-to-one video, right? Vidyard or Loom or things like that where we're seeing asynchronous communication. Any thoughts on that of how sales folks have used these demo record, it's almost like a demo recording, right? But it's more, I presume it's more interactive than just a demo recording, right?

Natalie Marcotullio (14:57.778)
Exactly, yeah, because you are actually clicking through yourself. You're being guided, so it's not an open sandbox click anywhere experience. You are being guided through it, but you do have to engage to make it work. Like on like a video which you can kind of play in the background, you have to click. You can't just kind of zone out.

But the main way we're seeing in the sales cycle, like AEs using this, is especially for multi-threading or to show a decision maker. Because let's say, you know, if your boss is super busy, they're not able to hop on a call. So you're like, OK, I'll record this demo and send it to my boss. It's like you're going to send your boss an hour long recording that they're probably not going to watch, versus if you know your boss just cares about analytics, well, we can send them a demo, an interactive demo, of just the analytics feature. It'll take 30 seconds to go through. So it's a way to maybe help speed up getting approval,

and other members of the team without necessarily needing to get them on that call.

Taylor Wells (15:47.476)
Oh, that's super cool. I love that where you're Once again people are pressed for time I think creating That's where that time to value right? I think is a big part of it where everyone has so much competition There's a million one ways to solve a problem And the folks that can deliver that the quickest sometimes, you know going back to the Amazon situation, right? They're they're not creating any products. They're just delivering an experience faster than anyone else generally speaking

That's super cool. I love that from the sales standpoint. And even have you seen folks use, from like a sales led org, sales led company, they don't have it on their website, but they just use it in the sales process? Have you seen that?

Natalie Marcotullio (16:26.994)
Yep. Yeah, especially I think sometimes it's really enterprise companies or like we sell to a lot of cybersecurity companies and we understand sometimes they have to be very careful about what they show. It's a very competitive space. So we'll have a lot of those customers who may just use it in the sales cycle. Maybe use it also like we said in outbound cadences. Sometimes like a pre-call or pre-demo. It's like hey you're gonna drop on this demo just beforehand if you want to check it out a little bit. But usually we do find most of our customers...

maybe start with a sales cycle but eventually might put something on the website because like okay how can we even just speed up this process a little more?

Taylor Wells (17:03.324)
Totally. I love to talk about more too going back to the website. How do you create, let's say you have 20 different industries you serve and you have 10 different products. How do you kind of summarize that in a, does the tool, does your guys' all tool help kind of create that process of like, hey, you're in this industry, here's your specific. Because once again, going back to that one-to-one experience, yeah, how do you create that personalization? How do you make it?

personalize to them and that's maybe my biggest, yeah, I'm kind of thinking from a sales perspective or even from a customer's perspective, how do you make it custom to them? How do you make it unique to their situation?

Natalie Marcotullio (17:45.302)
Yeah, I think that's such a good point because what I'm not advising anyone to go do is make, you know, a

three minute long demo that shows every single one of your features on it, because then we're just getting back to the video problem of people might zone out. There are a few ways we see customers tackle this. One is we do have a checklist functionality. So it's this little pop-up. You can click on it, and then you can dive right into the part of the product that you care most about. So for example, Ramp, one of our customers, they have a demo on their website. They do expense management, which covers a lot. And so if I'm an accountant, right, I don't need to know all about every single one of the features. I just might care about the accounting features.

click on the little checklist and dive right into the part I care about.

One of my other favorite ways is, I think I referenced this before, but demo centers. So basically, it would have all your demos laid out on one landing page. And you could click into what you care about. And some of the top tier ones we've seen even have filters. So let's say filters by personas, filters by features, by use case. We've even seen customers have demo centers laid out by like, what pain are you experiencing? And what's cool about that, too, is then you get that data. And before you jump on that live call, you can say, hey, this prospect I'm about to talk to,

this pane and this pane, I'm going to tailor this demo to what demos I saw them watch.

Taylor Wells (19:00.844)
Hmm, that's cool. I love that. That's Yeah creating that personalization, especially down if you have that data and the sales process and then How to make it as custom on the front end too. So it's a user a unique experience for them I'm curious and you don't have to share if you don't want to but I immediately thought of like You know smart content, right? That's you know based upon IP addresses and stuff like that Have you is there any product roadmaps or thoughts or even discussions on like how do we?

How do we match based upon their country and geography and actually create? They don't have to click anything. It's just automatically a unique demo experience for them.

Natalie Marcotullio (19:39.51)
So we do have right now the ability to see what account is going through your demo, even un-gated. It doesn't personalize yet. We have used internal immunity to do that. So I've run a few ABM campaigns where, depending on the industry, they'll get an entirely different demo. But hopefully, that's a great idea that I'll pass along to the product team that we could actually do in product where, like you said, if it's OK, this is a specific industry, a specific persona serve up this demo.

Taylor Wells (20:05.98)
Cool, yeah, just curious. And I mean, with the cookie list world we're going to and stuff like that, it's becoming probably more hard to do stuff like that, but I'd be curious to see what, yeah, how you can ultimately create almost that, yeah, that live demo experience that you'd have with a salesperson, right? That is completely custom based upon qualification questions and discovery, but just automate it. Super cool, we've got a couple minutes left. I'd love to hear.

Have you seen anybody in the service world use these, use a demo experience or a version of a demo experience in the service world?

Natalie Marcotullio (20:37.43)
So less in the service world, but we have had a few companies that are physical products that use it for internal employee training on software. So which could, I guess, be similar to the service world where if you do have some sort of software prep... Oh, I can never say that word. Proprietary, thank you. Going back to the beginning of this call of not being able to pronounce things. Proprietary software, thank you.

Taylor Wells (20:54.992)
proprietary. Yeah, that's a hard one.

Natalie Marcotullio (21:05.262)
And anything like that where you want to either train your own internal employees on it or if you want to maybe show, part of working with your service is you get access to this and you want to show off that. But not too many services that we work with.

Taylor Wells (21:19.384)
Got it. Any thoughts on why?

Natalie Marcotullio (21:23.274)
I think the biggest thing right now is just value alignment. Like for software, they get the most value of, you know, they're going to get higher quality leads, they're going to get more free trailers, and eventually improve sales cycle win rate. Like that's just probably more enticing to software companies than potentially services right now.

Taylor Wells (21:40.828)
Hmm. Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Thanks for sharing. Awesome. And so getting started, I'd love to hear, yeah, how can folks have started maybe if they're a smaller company or a larger company? Tell me like some use cases of just like getting started of like where would you recommend folks getting started based upon their different maturity levels?

Natalie Marcotullio (22:05.462)
Honestly, no matter where you are, we recommend just starting with one demo. Typically, we say a secondary CTA on the website, maybe if you're not ready for it to be a main CTA for a specific product line or product, and just starting off with building one demo for that, seeing how maybe that specific page converts higher. If it is for the entire website, do you get the increase of free trailers, book of demos, and then expanding into that use case specific demo centers, right? Because...

Yes, that's the ultimate end goal, to have it as personalized as possible. But we find it usually helps just to start building one, kind of get used to it, understand what makes the demo perform well. It does take some tweaking and time. Like you build the initial demo, and then you look at your analytics to say, where are people dropping off? What features are most enticing? Where can I tweak this up? And then it's much easier to build demos after that.

Taylor Wells (22:55.056)
Fascinating. I'm curious what sort of resources do you recommend folks utilize, you know, because I'm thinking we're trying to reverse engineer The perfect demo experience or a version of a perfect demo experience Sales calls Recordings. Yeah processes. How do you help? Without testing, you know, obviously testing is the number one way to do it But in advance what kind of resources do you recommend folks kind of leverage to kind of start building those things out?

Natalie Marcotullio (23:23.798)
The main thing I recommend always is just make sure you are...

planning out your demo, almost like an outline to an essay or any other big presentation. And we have a storyboard builder, where what it is, it's just a Google Sheet, and you can say, you know, I wanna highlight these features, I wanna write this copy for it, get that internally approved before you go to building. We often say the hardest part is figuring out what you wanna show and the story you wanna tell, not the building part, and it's much easier to get, you know, a Google Sheet approved than it is to get the final end demo and have to redo that. So I'd say that's the biggest tip,

that planning in advance because it just makes the whole process a lot smoother.

Taylor Wells (24:03.188)
Oh, I love that. That makes sense. And I completely agree that it makes sense. This story and, you know, making sure you cover all those basis and then And I can imagine, like, you know, if you use a call recording system kind of find your best demos, figure out what those things covered and then I'm sure the tools you all have can help pull out those things that you want to highlight and make sure it's comprehensive and it's end to end and super cool. Any other anything else we haven't

Touching the conversation you're like, oh, this is really important or best practices or ways to think about a demo experience on your website

Natalie Marcotullio (24:39.874)
One final tip around building and then one best practice. For a tip around building, I've been using summary AI tools recently. Specifically, I use one called Summarize, where I take a demo recording, like you said, and then have it basically create that out, first draft that outline for me. Like, yes, I always need to edit it. It's AI. It's not perfect. But that's been helpful if you are wondering, where do I start? Just ask your best sales rep for the best demo recording, summarize it, and then you at least got a very

a little more like entry level outline that you can work with. And four, some best practices. I think the biggest thing to remember, and this goes back to that planning phase, is this should be a story. This is showing the value you're getting. This is not a how to. So for example, sometimes we see customers show the login state, which if you're making a how to tutorial, that makes sense. You have to show how to log into the product.

But if you're just trying to explain the value of the product, there's not much value add there. So really when you're thinking about how should I present this demo, don't think of it about how to teach something, someone how to do something, but what are the end results they're gonna get by doing it?

Taylor Wells (25:49.56)
That's super cool. And Natalie, I bet you all could write a book on creating the perfect demo. Because even storytelling, right? Whether it's sales led or whether it's a salesperson or whether it's a virtual experience, I'm sure there's just a lot of principles that apply to how do you take people through a story, how do you communicate the problem and the solution and everything else in between and also provide impact and whatnot. And...

Super cool. And then also eliminating, yeah, some of the things that don't make sense. Super great. Thanks so much for sharing. That's awesome. And then I love to summarize. Yeah, I think in general, first of all, I check out that tool because that sounds like it'd be super helpful just for summarizing a lot of things. But yeah, take your best salesperson, use a tool to summarize it, and then obviously edit it from there, as you mentioned, and then figuring out how to then translate that into a demo experience on your website. Super cool.

Awesome, Natalie. Well, this kind of high level, big picture, taking a step back for everyone. I think once again, when you're looking at whether you're a sales led, a service company, a software company, small, large, and everything in between, how do we get things that are tangible, interactive on the website as quickly as possible? And whether it's a free trial from a product led motion or from a demo experience, right? If you're a sales led and you don't, there's no way for people to sign up for your product and get impact from that, is how do we ultimately

match people's expectations. Because we know as consumers we want that. The data shows it. And then also obviously with Nevada and their success of seeing the time to value and reduce sales cycles, et cetera, how do we ultimately just meet customers where they're at, right? And provide that demo experience faster and custom. And then also through the sales process. Super cool too. I haven't really thought about that, how you can use it through the sales process.

Love it. Thanks Natalie for coming on. Natalie, how can folks find you online and follow you?

Natalie Marcotullio (27:43.442)
Yeah, not shockingly on LinkedIn. I post a lot about interactive demos if you want to learn more. If you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Taylor Wells (27:51.084)
Awesome, Natalie. Sweet. We'll put those links in the show notes. Thanks, everyone, for listening, and we'll see you next week. Thanks again, Natalie.

Natalie Marcotullio (27:57.046)
Thanks for having me.