What is a guided demo? 

Guided demos help prospective customers understand how a product works and how it can benefit them, making it an essential tool for marketing and sales teams. Guided demos can be tailored according to a prospect’s use case, and this makes it easier to keep them relevant and up-to-date. 

Guided demo benefits for SaaS companies

Guided product demos are allowing SaaS companies to showcase their products and their capabilities in their narrative to prospects. When you use a guided demo, you get to unlock faster growth because it allows you to:

• Makes your product accessible: when you have an interactive demo embedded on your website or sent via email, you can reach a larger audience. 
• Convey the value of features: going through an interactive demo of your product’s features makes it easier to consume this information. 
• Experience product in real-time: rather than building a sandbox environment for prospects and dedicating engineering resources and time to keep it updated, create an interactive demo that lets users get a feel of using your product in real-time.

Why use an interactive demo platform?

When you use a demo creation platform, you get to create guided product demos can to show your product in all its features and functions, or be used as a way to engage potential customers. 

An interactive demo platform helps you build a custom, guided demo for each stakeholder involved in the decision-making process. This means you can tailor the demo to their specific needs and interests. This will let you deliver a product experience that will show prospects how their business will benefit from your product. 

How to build a guided demo in 10 minutes

Guided demos are versatile enough that both marketing and sales teams can benefit from them. Marketing teams can use guided demos and embed them on the website to get more marketing qualified leads. 

Sales teams can shorten their sales cycle by sending across quick guided sales demos to prospects and key stakeholders involved in the buying process. 

Demo creation doesn’t have to be a tedious process – with a platform like Storylane, it is interactive and fun! Here’s how you can quickly start building a guided demo in Storylane:

Download Storylane’s extension

 Kick-start your demo creation process by downloading the Storylane extension and pinning it to your extensions tab. 

Capture product screens

Once you have downloaded the extension, select the screenshot demo option. This option will help you build guided product tours quickly. 

To begin, give your guided tour a name (for easy identification). With that, you can start capturing product screens based on the features you want to highlight. 

Pro tip: if you have product screens you want to add to an existing demo, upload these screens manually to any guided demo. 

Design the demo flow 

To guide prospects through your product demo, you need to add tooltips such as hotspots, audio clips, or walkthroughs, to name a few. 

When you have picked the widgets you want to use, add text that is crisp and conveys the point quickly. You can also choose to change the color of the buttons and tooltips, text size. 

You can add a custom image like a  product logo or a welcome image at the start of the demo. If you want to add a video (url from youtube, vimeo, wistia, vidyard) to give a brief introduction of your product or to explain a certain feature, you can choose to add it at any step of your demo flow. 

Pro tip: Add a pop-up lead form to capture a lead’s information such as email and name in your demo flow. Storylane lets you embed custom lead forms from Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot. 

Personalize guided demos

To deliver a personalized demo experience, you can add text tokens such as “first and last name, and company name” so that they can relate to your product and how it can fit into their workflows. 

Share demo with prospects

The final step is to share your guided demo with prospects. You can embed the guided demo on your website. You also have the option of sharing the URL of a guided demo directly with your prospects. 

Along with this, you can choose to share your demo via an email campaign through Hubspot, Marketo, or Pardot. 

Pro tip: When you’re sharing a particular guided demo, you can create multiple links to share with different prospects. 

Want to try building a quick guided demo to see how this works? Check out this interactive guided demo below!