Live sales demos: All You Need to Know

What is a live sales demo?

A live sales demo is a sales rep giving a compelling narrative of the product’s features, capabilities, and benefits to a potential customer. The goal of a sales demo is to convince prospects to sign up for your product and to win the deal. 

Who gives a live sales demo?

Your sales team gives live demos of your product to potential customers. During a live product demo, your sales rep must create a compelling case on why your product works best for your prospect. To do this, your sales rep must focus on your prospect’s viewpoint — show them how your product helps them solve their problem(s). 

It’s a chance your company gets to quickly convince a prospect directly as to how your product solves their problem. 

What a typical B2B live sales call looks like

There are multiple channels through which your sales team can demo your product to potential customers. Prospects can have varied preferences — it is best to offer flexible options. Here are two channels for sales demo delivery:

• Phone call
• Live video call

No two prospects are the same. They all have individual preferences when they want to learn more about a product. Someone who prefers a live video call versus someone who likes email more might require different methods to convince them to sign up for your product. 

Typical Demo stages in sales calls

Understanding the problem in a sales discovery call 

Before jumping on a call with a prospect, it is imperative to lay the foundation of the sales demo call — determine the prospect’s problem(s) to connect with them better. 

First, cover the basics:

Who your prospect is: find out their role, responsibilities in the company, what their typical day looks like, and the challenges that they have. 

The prospect’s company: understand the type of a company it is, where it is based, the industry it belongs to, and its customers.

Narrowing down on pain points: research deep enough to get to know the problems the prospect faces. 

Context is crucial in a sales demo call 

Before you get on a call with your prospect, you should prepare for the meeting. The first step is to ensure you are acquainted with the prospect's basics, pain points, and company. 

The main goal in this stage is to show the prospect the value of your product and how it will benefit them. Start with the main pain points of the potential customer and choose features of your product that directly address those problems.

Rather than showing them how to set up features step-by-step, demonstrate the value your product will bring to their company. 

Provide proof of concept in a sales demo call

To do so, start with the why — why a particular set of features will be perfect for their use case. Go into the details of the pain points these features solve for, and the various ways it translates into a pain-killer for them. 

You need an effective way of showing prospects how your product works and will be the best fit for resolving their pain points. A surefire way to achieve this is by using a demo experience platform. 

How to create a demo experience 

Sales demo calls don’t have to be complicated. You can automate your sales demo calls and optimize your sales process with a demo creation software like Storylane in your arsenal. Here’s how: 

Set up a product demo environment in minutes

Make an educated guess about what a prospect will need and a plan on how to address them. You get immediate feedback while removing an additional step in your sales cycle.

Quickly capture your demo screen

Creating a sales demo from scratch for every potential customer is not feasible — it demands a lot of bandwidth, time, and resources. What if you could use an existing demo and make a few quick changes to whip up a new interactive demo tailor-made for each prospect? 

Storylane’s extension lets you capture multiple product screens effortlessly from your laptop and phone! So that you can send select product screens on the fly and quickly have your sales team polishing up the demo to send it to a prospect. All you need to do is install Storylane’s extension in your browser and use it to start capturing features in your product. 

Auto-link your product demo screens

Once you have captured the features of your product, you can auto-link pages in the product demo so that the prospect gets a taste of your product in real-time. Storylane’s extension can automatically link your product screens when you capture them. 

You can have elements within a demo screen linked to any page with a product demo. Storylane’s auto-linking feature delivers a seamless product demo experience to your prospects. 

Edit interactive demos to deliver a curated experience

Once you have captured the features you want to demo to a prospect, you want the freedom to edit it to show your product in the best possible way. 

A demo experience platform like Storylane will help you edit existing product demos easily — edit text, images, links, change colors, add videos or voice recordings, and so much more! 

Not only can you replace images in the captured product screen, but you can also edit the HTML code for an element and change any element in your captured demo screen. You can do all this without having to code anything with Storylane’s no-code demo editor. So you can focus on delivering a killer sales pitch and closing the deal. 

Dynamic tokens 

To make the demo environment personalized for prospects, add dynamic tokens with unique values such as text-fields and date and time tokens. 

Text-field tokens: Add tokens to your product demos in Storylane such as first and last name, company name, and more to make it more personal for your prospects.

Date and time tokens: Have your product demos synced with your prospect's time zone with Storylane’s flexible date and time tokens that will display the current date and time in your demos. 

Anonymize product demos effortlessly

Apart from creating product demos, you want to have the ability to edit these demos as you see fit. Personalizing product demos Each prospect will require a different demo with modifications specific to their use case. To tackle these use cases, here are some much-loved features in Storylane that you can use to remove any identifying information in your demos. 

Blur sensitive information

You might not want to display confidential information during a live sales demo. Storylane lets you blur or hide sensitive numbers or details. 

Search and replace text

What’s more, you can do a fast search for a word or sentence and have them replaced with different words. It allows you to make updates swiftly whenever you’re on a time crunch. 

Copy and paste elements

You can copy-paste any text or image on your demo screen without breaking a sweat. So if you want to have a particular element present in another step in the demo journey, you can just hit copy and paste it without any coding assistance! 

Here’s a quick video of how you can capture and edit demos with Storylane’s extension: 

Pitch product demos personalized for every prospect 

Every prospect who signs up for a demo wants a demo tailored to their business use case. You can edit an existing demo if you need to tweak a few things. It removes the need to create a new demo from scratch — saving you and your team time and effort. 

The ability to personalize a prospect’s demo experience tells a far more convincing story of your product’s capabilities. When you can show rather than explain your product’s abilities to the prospect they are more willing to become your customers. Your sales team will require very little time convincing a prospect to sign up. Delivering a tailored product demo allows you to show your product to prospects how you see it. You get to be in charge of the story that better connects with them.

Here’s what Punchh, a customer of Storylane has to say:

“Building a demo is no longer a once-in-two-years exercise. It has to be a continuous exercise. When companies want to market to different types of customers or different industries, they expect demos customized for them — they're not expecting the same pitch. They're expecting a pitch on how it will change their day-to-day business, improvements, and how they can be better as an organization.”

‍‍—Sastry Penumurthy, VP of Strategic Sales at Punchh

Managing published demos as a team

Handling a  team of sales reps who send product demos day-in and day-out to prospects can get messy. You need to keep tabs on demos sent to prospects and who from your sales team is in charge of those. Storylane helps you maintain a high level of accuracy to keep track of product demos sent and who has been reaching out to a set of prospects. 

Organize published demos 

When you have your entire sales team creating and sending out demos, you will need a consolidated view of demos managed by each sales rep. So that you have added clarity on the product demos handled by every sales rep and which product demos they share with each prospect. 

Multiple links for demos 

To do this, you can create multiple links for each product demo shared with different prospects in Storylane. You can tag your sales rep or the prospect to all these links — meaning less chaos and more streamlined processes. 

Create a secure demo link 

When you create a product demo that has confidential information, you can protect it by setting a password to access the demos and setting an expiration date for it in Storylane. So you don’t have to worry about someone outside your company getting their hands on sensitive data or information. 

How to provide value in different demo stages

A deal is not won after a sales call. Getting on a live sales call with prospects is just one of the essential steps to have them consider your product over the host of other options in the market. The number of times you have to send custom product demos differs according to the prospect in question. 

Show product preview during a discovery call

During a discovery call, the prospect wants a rundown of your product  — with the main focus on how a set of features will solve their pain points and how it will do so. 

At this stage, it is of utmost importance to understand the prospects' needs and suggest key features of your product. Merely presenting screenshots or using a generic sandbox account to demonstrate these features will not cut it. Prospects want to see their exact use case addressed. 

One of the best ways to do that is through a product walkthrough that the prospect can see in real-time. If they have questions about how a feature will solve a particular problem, you can show them how immediately during the call. When prospects can see how your product can work for them, half the battle is won already. 

Share demo as a sales leave-behind

The final stage in the sales process post a product demo call is sharing a sales leave-behind for the prospect. This step is underrated. To make sure the prospect remembers why they must choose your product over the competition, you need to send a sales leave-behind that will remind them of this.

You can send a summary in the form of a product demo video using Storylane that captures all the major features that apply to their business need. This will ensure that your product stays on top of their minds when they decide to move forward with a product that tackles their particular problem. 

Send demos after different POC stages

When you go the traditional route of sending presentations, docs, and slides that talk about your product to your prospect, you’re missing out on an opportunity to present again a strong case of why they need your product. 

Traditional methods are outdated and fail to deliver the essence of your product which can make you win or lose the deal. On the other hand, if you send across a product demo using Storylane, you are giving prospects an easier and faster way to see the potential of your product. 

To be able to interact with a version of your product at their own pace and in their own time reinforces the idea of how your product is a better fit for them. 

View engagement rates

As and when prospects interact with your product demos, you want to know what works and what doesn’t in your demos. You want to send demos that stick with a prospect. To do this you will need access to demo data. With Storylane, you get a consolidated view of how prospects respond to your product demos. From seeing the demo completion percentage, where prospects stop in demos, which step in the demo most time is spent on, and more, you get to shape your demos in a way that will best resonate with your prospect. 

Win your deals faster 

You can shave an entire step in your sales process by making use of product demos in your sales cycle sans any engineering dependencies. This will save your sales team hours of repetitive work, which they can use to reach out to more prospects. 

To give a prospect a nudge towards considering your product, equip your sales champion with a power-packed product demo that makes it easier for your champion to talk the prospect through each feature. It will increase the chances of getting your prospects onboarded higher. 

To build a case of your product’s capabilities, you can create product demos that can influence multiple stakeholders. By finding out everyone else involved in the buying process, you can create different versions of a product demo in Storylane that will help convince every stakeholder involved. When they can better understand how your product works and why it is a good fit for their company, they can become advocates for your product in their company. 

“Storylane has been a huge enabler for sales engineers (SE)  to accelerate our entry into the Grocery segment and save a lot of repetitive work. Our deal close times have shortened and engineering does not have to serve requests from SE teams, which makes everybody happy. Storylane was able to get us started quickly and is very responsive to our needs.”
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— Sastry Penumurthy, VP of Strategic Sales at Punchh