Welcome!

We're overjoyed to see the wonderful ways you're using Demo Automation in the wild, so to help you all out if you've not adopted some of the great advantages that automating your demos can bring, we've listed a whole bunch here.

If you're not doing some of these, you should be because:

1. You already have the tools
2. You've not taken advantage of the all massive benefits available - YET!

We've used the fictitious company 'Metacorp' in our examples - imagine your company name there.

Impact all parts of the buyer journey

Consensus addresses the needs of each stage of the Metacorp buyer’s journey, which is absolutely crucial. Imagine you were buying a car, and the first thing the car salesperson gave you was the service and maintenance manual. Sure, there’s loads of information, but how is it useful to you in a showroom? Likewise, if you go to get your car fixed and all the mechanic does is endlessly show you videos of how cool your car would look driving along beautiful mountain roads. Sure, lovely – but what I need is something different.

It’s no different when people buy from Metacorp. At each stage of the buying journey, your buyers need to achieve certain parts of their project. So make content that serves them at the specific point they are.

The Buying Journey by Kevin Davis, with stakeholder journeys mapped around it.

https://goconsensus.com/infographic/the-definitive-guide-to-the-6-demo-types/ 

Consensus reveals stakeholder interaction at every stage, and helps each of the stakeholders learn, travel through and de-risk their purchase.

Reduce introduction / overview demos

Garin Hess, founder of Consensus says: I remember the moment I began to envision what eventually became Consensus. I was running my last tech startup, selling B2B software, and I had just finished six straight demos, back to back with no interruption. I was exhausted and thought, “I just did the same demo over and over, except that I modified it on the fly based on prospect input. There has GOT to be a way to automate this!”

… and he did. Consensus was born and now for many years has been helping presales people scale their impact by removing the need to do basic demo after basic demo, and actually start providing more value in the more meaningful stages of the buyer journey.

https://goconsensus.com/blog/stop-wasting-your-gifts-by-doing-mindless-repetitive-demos/ 

Overview demos are easy - we’ve all done them and presales love them. Unfortunately they only provide the same basic information and take up all the time of your presales teams which could be better spent doing more consultative work.

Consensus can help Metacorp specifically because the source of power is your own presales people. We’re a mainstay in the presales industry and we’re proud to lead the market in demo automation. Using our wonderful industry collaboration across the world, we support presales and sales leaders and individuals to be the best they can be, shining a light on the very best at our Demofest events, webinars and more. It’s because we know what a presales demo is (and importantly, what it isn’t) that makes us confident to help our customers exceed their customer’s expectations.

Reduce unqualified or underqualified demos

“How do we do fewer wasted demos and more qualified, high-impact demos?” You can’t eliminate intro demos – repetitive or not – and it can be hard to quickly determine which customers are unqualified until you demo. But we know what a qualified customer looks like and what goes into a highly customized, technical demo or POC for qualified customers. 

Most teams use several qualification gates through which customers must pass before they get
assigned to other resources. These include Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). There are currently no established gates to qualify customers for Presales time. To solve the problem of unqualified demos and Presales waste, implement a new qualification gate called the Demo Qualified Lead (DQL).

Without a way to qualify demos, or qualify time with Presales more broadly, you’ll always have an unnecessary level of waste, which puts focused time with qualified customers at risk. Some organizations have been successful in reducing lag times by delegating certain demos to Sales, CS and other teams. But it generally only trims the wait time down to 4 business days, and doesn’t solve the underlying problem of unqualified demos. That’s where the DQL really shines. 

Consensus is unique in providing such a detailed Buyer Matrix and Heat Map, where you discover the preferences and importance ratings of each of the stakeholders. If people are engaging with the demos and also if they’re sharing with their colleagues then you’ll get to see it, in detail!

• See how Trintech reduced unqualified demos by 89% with Consensus

https://goconsensus.com/customer-story/how-trintech-reduced-unqualified-demos-by-89-with-consensus/

• See the case for the DQL

https://goconsensus.com/blog/making-the-case-for-the-demo-qualified-lead-dql/ 

At least one key qualification for the DQL is whether or not someone engages with either an interactive video demo or other short introductory demo that you delegate to Sales. If they're not willing to meet that criteria, you should evaluate whether they are really qualified enough to merit time with your Presales team.

Reduce follow up demos

My colleague wasn’t able to attend so could we arrange another demo? - How many times have you heard that at Metacorp? Certainly we know that follow up demos take up valuable time because those meetings would be more productive discussing value and benefits rather than going over simple functionality.

Metacorp is a global company with thousands of people interacting with customers every day, so having a library of content they can dive into makes a massive difference.

You can use the Consensus Demo Library to provide easy access to a set of pre-recorded FAQ demos, which allows anyone in your organization to send highly detailed, incredibly useful demos tailored to the specific questions, instantly. Plus, all stakeholder interaction is tracked in Demolytics.

Increase consultative activities

By eliminating the need to repetitive overview demos and FAQ demos, the Metacorp presales reps are freed up for real value-based consultative work. We’ve see this time and again and now have a recommended method which Metacorp could follow to achieve swift results; allocating a hybrid approach for low cost products protects Cost to Acquire Customer (CAC), and allows for a higher attach rate for presales reps to deals over an agreed threshold.

Consensus helps massively here because we can free up time for presales at every stage: Need, Learn, Buy and Value.

• See how Oracle saved 12,800 total presales man hours through the use of automated micro demos

• Fortune 100 management company gained 580 FTE hours  through demo automation

https://goconsensus.com/customers 

Addressing the presales activity gap

For different reasons, you may see an increased demand for Presales resources from the Sales team. It could be that Marketing is spending more and generating more leads. It could be that Sales is hiring and you don't have the correlating budget increase to hire in Presales. It could be that you're going down-market where volumes are higher but margins are tighter. Or qualification on demos is getting worse and you are spending more time on “wasted” demos. Somehow, demand is growing.

There are two questions you must answer:

• What’s causing the gap?
• What's the gap in your capacity to handle the incoming demand?

At Consensus, we understand how to help Metacorp address the Activity Gap.

It’s what the Metacorp presales people are asked to do. As a finite resource, presales individuals can only meet a certain part of the buying journey. 

Usually this is once buyers have understood what they want to change and need to see which vendor can provide these things - the 'Comparison' stage. Buyers want a demo in the 'Research' stage, but do you want presales consultants spending every waking hour demoing generalistic overviews?  As a massively authentic source of knowledge, presales can help buyers earlier in the buying journey (Change & Discontent), and later too by helping close deals (Fear & Commitment). 

But there's not enough people - hence the gap in what you need, to what you can provide. Intelligent Demo Automation helps by letting presales consultants record their demos, tuned to the exact stage each buyer is experiencing in their change journey.

What's more, now presales have time for additional valuable activities they can demo not just the main software, but also 3rd party products, professional services, upsell functionality, go through documents, quotes, customer references and a multitude of other activities - all which can be recorded and served up instantly.

Addressing the presales demand gap

At Consensus, we understand how to help Metacorp address the Demand Gap.

This is when activities are done. For example, the number of hours that are going to be required in the future because of increasing demand without linear budget increases.

In a recent trip to London, we met a presales consultant who was demoing the same thing, 6 times a day, 5 days a week. He was not happy - he knew the buyers wanted something more useful, but there was no time to spend going off-piste.

By recording the overview demo and having sales serve it up at a moment's notice whenever a buyer needed, this person was then able to offer a more customized service to his buyers for when they had specific questions. They got to watch the demo multiple times, and whenever suited them. Plus, with multiple stakeholders involved with different requirements, they were able to pick what mattered most to them. How pleasant!

Now buyers get that demo instantly - unlike when they ask your old-school competitors…

There are lots of ways to conduct a demand gap analysis. One of the simplest is to begin by calculating your AE:SE ratio. Research from our 2022 SE Workload and Comp Report shows the median AE:SE ratio according to leaders is 3.6:1 and according to individual contributors it’s 6:1. It averages across all respondents to 4:1.

Find out more about the Demand Gap and conduct your own analysis right here!

Increase presales impact KPIs

Consensus doesn’t just provide a cool way for prospects to watch an automated demo, there is also a lot of data that can be gained from our analytics or Demolytics as they are called in Consensus. In this article we want to highlight the Sales Demolytics tab and which areas sales and presales leaders should focus on.

Did the Metacorp preales team make the impact needed? (and do many of the metrics focus on the effect each person can have in their calendar week?) 

Certainly with access to metrics like this it’ll be a huge leap in assessing not just individual impact, but the scaled impact to Metacorp too:

• DemoBoards Created: 2323

• DemoBoards Viewed: 581

• View Rate: 25%

• Recipients: 3302

• Recipients With a View: 852

• Recipient View Rate: 25%

• Total Views: 1135

• Stakeholders Discovered (Shares): 351

• Total View Time: 80:32:17

• Average View Time: 04:15

• NewTour Views: 66

• NewHotspot Views: 183