We're here to make you wildly successful, bringing your authentic voice to buyers at a moment's notice.
Helping buyers through automated demos is more than just recording and sharing your normal demos; Whilst that can be a great start we know the most impactful content creators think about when and where that content will be used, in order to be surprisingly helpful for their buyers.
Who actually creates demos, why, and when?
Over the year's we've picked up some incredible best-practices and we're sharing them here in this course.
Whilst anyone can upload content into Consensus, it's important to be purposeful in what you create so you leverage the power of scaling. Just getting everyone to record the same demos isn't a smart use of time or energy, remember; the mission is to create content that meets the needs of buyers and positions you as the ONLY option for their success. This is where you must put your best foot forwards.
For smaller companies:
Customers with less complex software may start off by having one of their SEs upload demos. They may even have multiple SEs upload multiple demos. Whilst this can work, it has no Quality Assessment stage and it's harder to understand the overall content strategy.
We view this as only acceptable for very small customers, who have a strong handle on the demo guidelines and policy, and these are followed closely by the SEs.
Mid-market and Enterprise customers
For companies with more complex solutions, often with multiple software and service offerings then getting organized is a good idea.
We've seen a number of different methods to do this, and the key to starting is to have something in place, even if it's just an Excel sheet.
Planning content makes scheduling people's time more effective and you'll be able to work with other departments, other internal stakeholders and subject matter experts in a much more productive way.
Who should record the demo?
Should all the SEs upload demos? Sure - that can work. But it doesn't for every size and complexity of company; some are more complex, have more products on different release cadences and may have hundreds of SEs so there needs to be a way to organize recording your best demos, and scale that.
"If you scale mediocre, you only ever achieve a LOT of mediocrity. Scale your best, and succeed."
In this example, SEs are asked to record demos and trained in how to use the Consensus platform but the requirement for each demo type, style, and purpose is not strategically planned. The result is each SE has to work hard, and only 1/5 of demos are worth sharing. What's worse is that demos appear in the demo library that are bad or incorrect which could lead to scaling inaccuracy!
How you should scale your SE team
Here, the content requirement is identified and allocated to the best SE at that specific function or task. Jane Seymour is best suited for this Demo. But there may also be an IT-focused demo that's needed, so better to allocate it to Tim Reynolds. This way you scale the best parts of your team.
How we manage our own content here at Consensus.
Of course, here at Consensus we use our own tools to help you, our buyers, the best we can. Organizing this wealth of knowledge is key and we plan carefully to bring you the highest standard content, exemplary in everything we do.
Making this process so effective didn't come overnight: first we used Excel to work through our content planning, but the ability for a tool like ClickUp to manage the requests, planning and work of creating exceptional content made it far more effective, and a happier place to work!
We have various stages that content goes through:
- Requested
- Accepted
- In Progress
- Recorded ready for QA
- Passed QA
- Completed
- Rejected
- On Hold
- 6 Month Review
We also categorize the content we're making into one of the defined buyer stages. This means when we're recording the videos or making the tours, we know what kind of value messages to be bringing to the audience. High value, low on product detail? Perfect for early-stage introductions like Vision or Micro demos. Deep dive into detail on setting up an integration between Salesforce and Consensus? Certainly more of an FAQ demo.
Our stages, as you read in other articles are:
- NEED
- LEARN
- BUY
- VALUE