There are few software solutions where you can get away with not showing your product to the buyer before they speak with someone. It’s basically a requirement today to give your potential customers a taste of your product.
Here are 6 ways to do that:
– Create a professional demo video(s). This is best if your product doesn’t evolve much but is not great if your product is continually changing as they are more expensive to produce/edit. Note: these are not the often corny, animated explainer videos that try to convey your software benefits. They are actual videos of the product in action.
– Screen record product experts showing your product. They may be a little less polished but they are an excellent stop gap solution if you need them in a quick and cost-effective way. The nice thing about having a product expert create them is they generally can convey important details to the prospective buyer. People also often prefer to hear from a peer.
– Build a sandbox environment. Some solutions are a little more complex and require ample data for them to be understood and usable. Getting a prospective customer’s data into this can prove difficult e.g. proprietary info, private credentials or a cumbersome onboarding. Instead, give them an environment they can toy around with that has dummy data that has relatable business context.
– Give them a free trial. This is a common one but not always viable. If you can get people to actually sign-up for your product, and then use intelligent nurturing, product walk-throughs and other adoption drivers, you have a higher likelihood of converting them to a customer.
– Run a live group demo. This is a bit different than getting people to convert on the coveted “request a demo” form. The reason I give this one a pass vs. “request a demo” (which I explain later) is that, while they are giving up their PII to get the info, a group setting allows them to be a bystander vs. talking to a rep. I’ve found the conversion rate to be higher at multiple companies for this kind of offer vs. “request a demo”, too.
– Last but not least, publish interactive product demos. There are a number of tools out there that help you create these. Their technology allows you to replicate your software and then create interactive tours of how the product works with prompts for functional testing. I’m most familiar (and a fan of) Navattic but there are other solutions like Tourial, Arcade, Supademo and others.
P.S.
I’ve not included the traditional “request a demo” form as an option here because that’s not showing the product before your customer is ready to talk. You can certainly include that alongside these other tactics but equipping your prospects with the information they need before they talk to sales, which is generally only 5% of the total time spent in the buying process, is a more solid marketing approach today.
