What is a Demo Sandbox Environment and How to Create One?

A beach day, bucket and shovel, and lots of curiosity can provide a safe playground for kids to explore their curiosity.

In a similar fashion, a controlled demo sandbox environment can provide a safe way for your prospects to explore your product, with no strings attached!

Which leads us to the question:

What is a Demo Sandbox Environment?

A demo sandbox environment is a controlled product environment that sales teams can use to showcase a software product in action. A demo sandbox environment helps prospects explore the product, without affecting the live, functioning parts of it. It also provides a strong business case for adoption.

This is especially true in case of SaaS companies, where a demo sandbox is a powerful sales tool. Such an environment helps buyers explore the tool in a controlled manner and get a first-hand experience of the various product features. 

An open sandbox can help you push the deal forward once the prospect has experienced a product demo and are convinced of the product’s capabilities. It also gives the sales team the rare opportunity to show the product in a real scenario and close the deal. 

Benefits of a Demo Sandbox Environment

Beyond giving a controlled first-hand look and feel of your product, a demo sandbox environment has multiple other benefits. Some of them are:

Customizable Product Demos

A customized SaaS sales demo environment lets you create personalized demo experiences for different prospects, highlighting a particular use case that’s relevant to them. So instead of stuffing your product demo with all your product features, you can highlight only a few that are useful for the prospect. You can also personalize the demo with the prospect’s name, company, and other delightful elements. 

Educate Prospects 

Creating a demo environment for your prospects provides a safe playground for them to explore the product and familiarize themselves, without worrying about breaking anything or getting lost. Such a safe environment will allow them to experiment with different functions on their own and move further into the sales cycle if they are satisfied with the outcome of your product. 

Buyer Enablement

Because you’re able to provide a look and feel of your actual product and show its value to the prospect, it helps them become a champion for the product and easily get internal buy-in from the decision makers at their organisation. 

‍Engagement Data to Create Better Demos

With advanced analytics features with a demo creation platform like Storylane, you can now easily measure which demos were viewed the maximum, which are the top features, the completion rate for the demo, conversion rates, etc. 

Onboard New Customers

A sandbox environment is not just meant to show product demos to a prospect. Once you have a current customer, use a sandbox environment to onboard them and train them on product usage. Sandbox environments can help you create interactive product demos and tutorials. Remember, a smooth product onboarding experience will help you reduce churn and save you from embarrassing moments of running into bugs or unexpected errors. 

Limitations of a Traditional Sandbox Environment

While a traditional sandbox environment has many benefits, one of its biggest limitations is it takes a lot of time to create a sandbox environment manually. Here’s an example: 

Groundswell’s sales team used to manually create a sandbox environment that would typically take them six weeks. But this became a challenge for their small sales team when they wanted to scale up. 

Moreover, the manual sandbox environment came with other limitations such as:

• Inability to customize the production environment for different user personas without having to build up demos from scratch
• Inability to callout specific features or data in the product
• Inability to tell a compelling story of what their product can do and give their prospects an actual product experience

That’s when the team decided to look up an interactive product demo tool and they found Storylane to be the perfect fit for their requirement. 

How an Interactive Demo Environment Solves the Problem

While testing the capabilities of Storylane, the Groundswell team created different demos for their various buyer personas, without any coding or involving their sales engineering teams or developing teams. 

They could also easily customize the demo environment and update it with new features as and when they launched them in real time, without creating demos from scratch.

And you can do the same for your product too!

Also Read: How Groundswell Tailored Demos To Different Personas Using Storylane 

How do you Create an Interactive Demo Environment?

Building a demo environment demands time and effort, along with having engineering resources involved  in its creation and maintenance process. This makes it all the more important to have a no-code demo editor in your toolkit to set up an interactive sandbox environment for your demos in minutes.

An interactive demo environment allows your sales team to create a specific scenario and show your product in action in solving your prospect's problems.

Below are the four steps to create an interactive demo environment on Storylane:

Step 1: Capture Essential Parts of Your Product

‍Storylane’s Chrome extension lets you easily capture all your product pages and stitches them together to build an interactive guided demo. You can also upload screens manually for mobile or desktop applications.

Learn more about building an interactive demo on Storylane

Step 2: Customize Demos with a No-Code Editor

The next step is to customize the product screens as per your requirements. Worrying about coding skills? Not anymore! 

With zero coding involved, you can alter any element on the product screens, swap images, rearrange screens, blur sensitive elements, add auto-personalization features, and more.

If you have multiple buyer personas, you can personalize the demo for each of them using Storylane’s product tours option, where each buyer can choose their own adventure. Other personalization tokens include text, date/ time, and images. 

To make your demos memorable and truly interactive, you can also add widgets from the multiple options available. 

Step 3: Publish and Share Demos

Once you create your demo, you can securely share it across your email campaigns, social media channels, or embed it on your website. 

In all these cases, you can give a chance to your prospect to experience your product and how it can fit into their existing workflow.

Step 4: Analyze, Optimize, and Improve the Product Demo

Publishing an interactive demo experience is just one aspect of it. By utilizing demo analytics, you can uncover the entire picture of how your prospects react to your demo, while also using the engagement data as a critical metric to score and qualify leads. 

Staying Ahead of the Demo Sandbox Environment

A demo sandbox environment provides a prospect with a quick insight into how your product works in real-time to solve their problem, enabling them to experience its value. When you create a demo environment, they can dive deeper into your solution and immerse themselves in the actual experience.

By creating a sandbox environment for your product demos using an interactive demo platform like Storylane, you can customize the product experience for your prospects without the added complications of investing engineering time and effort into this. 

Ready to create your first demo sandbox environment on Storylane? Get started for free now!