Design interactive demos and allow website visitors to get a taste of your product by accessing a data pre-filled environment that looks and feels like your software. Offer people a tangible product overview they can easily access without the friction of a typical sales-led demo process.
📓 Product-led growth: A business strategy using the product as the primary medium for user acquisition, conversion, and retention. A PLG company allows its users to educate themselves about the product without the guidance of a salesperson.
📓 Interactive demos: A pre-designed, preset, or pre-filled environment that looks and feels like an actual SaaS platform. The environment allows website visitors to:
These interactive demos are no-code, requiring no involvement from the engineering team for setting them up.
► Quick note: The terms “interactive demos” and “product tours” can be used interchangeably.
❌ Sales-led companies rely on demo calls.
According to the 2022 State of the Product Demo by Navattic, it takes 3+ days between a demo request and the actual demo. 🤯
That’s way too much.
Your B2B customers have B2C experiences with other companies, and they expect the same speed/agility when wanting to try your product.
❌ PLG companies offer free trials/plans, allowing people to test the product immediately. However, you may encounter challenges such as:
Interactive demos provide a pre-filled data environment, enabling people to engage with the product immediately.
They are perfect when the product is hard to visualize without pre-filled data. They offer people the opportunity to poke around without having to add anything. Moreover, you can adjust your interactive demos depending on the use case.
👉 For sales-led companies: Interactive demos (or pre-filled product tours) are great for getting people acquainted with your product on the spot while waiting for the demo call with your sales rep.
👉 For PLG companies: Interactive demos allow users to test your software without having to add any data.
Here’s what an interactive demo looks like:
► Quick note: You don’t have to ditch demo calls when providing interactive demos. You can have them both and let people choose how they want to experience your product.
✅ According to the 2022 State of the Product Demo by Navattic:
By offering interactive demos to your website visitors and prospects, you’ll access growth opportunities, such as:
Being a finance automation platform, the Ramp team understands why their leads may be reluctant to introduce their data only to test the product. So setting up an interactive demo was the perfect solution, allowing the company to showcase the value of its product without creating more friction for its leads.
To access Ramp’s interactive demo, people must add their work email address.
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That’s an excellent gated example as it doesn’t require too much effort from the website visitors while allowing the Ramp team to:
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At the end of the tour, people are asked to try the real product. Also, they can access other demos focused on Ramp features, such as:
Dooly published four interactive demos, showcasing major features such as:
Website visitors can access these demos by clicking on the call to action button. No form filling is required.
Building a new category is difficult, especially when trying to showcase the value of your product. To ensure that prospects won’t have trouble understanding what the product does, Front decided to offer a gated product tour.
To access the interactive demo, people have to pre-fill a long access form, including fields such as the work email, the company size, the phone number, and more.
No form filling is required to access Citrix’s interactive demo. The click-through demo includes platform elements such as:
People can choose which part of the product they want to experience. Like in most cases, Citrix’s interactive demo is accompanied by brief feature explanations.
Egnyte provides multiple features and sells security solutions to different buyer personas.
No wonder why the company offers 16 ungated product tours, allowing people to choose which part of the product they want to experience. This way, Egnyte can showcase all of its use cases, connecting with different types of prospects.
PageUp offers several interactive demos. To access them, people have to fill in a long registration form adding information such as the company’s name, the number of global employees, and more.
The PageUp team uses interactive demos for demand generation and nurturing campaigns for outbound marketing sequences.
❗Recommendations from Navattic, an interactive demo platform:
📒 Decide whether to gate or ungate your interactive demo.
📒 If you choose to gate your demo, create a user-friendly form. Although you want to qualify your leads and get as much information as possible, making people’s product experience as frictionless as possible. Stay away from long forms and include only the necessary fields.
📒 When creating an interactive demo, make sure to showcase your product functionality in 5 to 15 steps. Keep it short, making sure people won’t get bored, and walk through the entire tour.
📒 Focus on value when designing your demo. Ask yourself when (which steps) you’ll incorporate the “aha” moments unique to your product.
📒 Remove unnecessary transition steps. To get from point A to point C inside your platform, people have to access point B. If point B doesn’t carry any value, you can easily skip it when designing the interactive demo and take people directly to point C.
📒 At the end of your demo, add a CTA that encourages people to try the actual product. This CTA can be anything from trying the free trial to booking a call with a sales rep. It all depends on your type of company (PLG or sales-led).
📒 In case you’ve built several product tours, you can add a second CTA, giving people the option to continue the tour.
📒 Explain your features by adding brief explanations and tips.
📒 Use checklists to allow people to jump from different features without leaving the page.
