What is a Demo Environment and How Does it Help your Sales Teams?

Let’s say you have scheduled a live demo call with your prospect with a killer sales script. But when you come to the part of showing the features live on a demo call, the possibility of technical difficulties comes in.

This may leave your prospects with questions like: will it work as promised? Are its features complete? How many bugs will there be?

This can impact your conversions!

Your prospects need an interactive experience to understand your product's features entirely.

A demo environment can help you achieve this. Creating a live demo environment allows you to fully display your product's benefits without explaining the whole process. Just let your prospects make the best out of it.

But how can you create a demo environment that works best for you? Why is it important in the first place?

Let's dig deep into what is a demo environment, its importance, and how to create one. 

What is a Demo Environment?

A demo environment is a virtual environment set up to present your product’s features in a appealing manner to potential customers by providing an interactive experience. This means you can showcase your product’s features and capabilities with demo environments before prospects access your actual product.

But it’s important to note that a demo environment is more than just your product. It includes any data you might use to make a case for why prospects should sign up for your product.

Why is a Demo Environment Important?

A demo environment is an integral part of the sales process because it helps your prospects understand how your product works and what it can do for them.

By giving them a realistic view of your product, they’ll be able to see how it fits into their business model and whether it’s worth the investment.

This is only the top layer; let's zoom in and look at the other reasons on how demo environments are beneficial to SaaS companies.

1. Move towards a product-led company

Did you know that the annual growth rate of the SaaS industry is expected to exceed 17% by 2022?

SaaS brands are popping up everywhere. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.

But with a live demo environment, you can put your brand in the spotlight and show prospects how your product can improve their existing business processes. You can use a demo environment to highlight the value your product brings and show why it's better than other competing products.

2. Makes it easy to give a product demo

When a prospect evaluates your product, they want to see how it works in real-world scenarios. A live demo environment can help you achieve this. It allows you to show them how your software will fit into their business workflows and what value it brings by showing them how it works instead of just explaining how it works.

Use cases, product stories, and a personalized product experience gives prospects a compelling view of your product than using generic messaging.

3. Share product demos quickly

Apart from creating a demo environment, you need a way to share and manage demo environments for multiple prospects. 

Demo environments can be customized and shared to prospects via a unique URL or through an email campaign tool. This lets you share personalized demo environments easily to prospects and shows you whether they have interacted with your product.

4. Helps in the decision-making process

When your prospect can get a first-hand experience of your product and realize how it solves their pain points, it pushes them to sign up for your product. 

Benefits of Demo Environments

Demo environments offer a lot of benefits to the sales team. Here are some benefits of having a demo environment:

1. Give prospects proof of concept

Prospects are looking for ways to solve problems and achieve their desired outcomes.

This is where a demo environment comes into play. A demo environment allows you to show prospects how your product solves their problem and why they should buy it.

Through a demo environment, prospects can envision how your product is the solution to their business problems.

2. Saves time for sales reps and training

When you have a demo environment set up, your sales reps don’t need to spend time trying to explain how your product works. Instead, they can focus on selling the value of your product and why it is worth buying.

Demo environments are also a great way to train new sales reps. When you have a demo environment set up, your new sales hires can use it as a training tool. This allows them to see how your product works and learn how they can use it during actual sales calls.

3. Optimize your demo script with demo analytics 

You can gather data of how far prospects interact with your product demo by understanding the areas your prospects interact with in your demo environment. This helps you to tweak your demo environment so that it sits better with potential customers.  

4. Accelerate time taken to close deals

If your sales team doesn’t have a demo environment set up, potential customers may be concerned about whether or not your product will actually work for them. This is especially true if you sell a B2B SaaS product.

Demo environments help remove these concerns by showing potential customers how they can accomplish their business goals. This will make them feel confident to invest in your product. 

5. Give your product a competitive advantage

If your prospect doesn't know that your product has their desired features, they will be less likely to buy from you. If they don't see how it will help them to solve their potential problem, they'll feel more comfortable buying from a competitor instead.

A demo environment can help minimize this risk by showing potential customers that your product does everything they need to improve their current workflow.

Stick with the best demo environment solution 

You can get countless benefits from a demo environment, but it’s possible only when you have the perfect demo environment software with your tool stack. The software you choose should include a no-code editor, rich features, analytics, and multiple use cases. Otherwise, you can’t get the maximum out of your investment. 

Storylane is the unified picture of all the features and benefits mentioned above. It helps you show off your product in the best light possible with multiple features and use cases. Moreover, you can gain insights into how your prospects use your demo to beef up the demo process with the help of analytics. 

Want to build a demo environment but clueless about where to start? Schedule a free demo, and we will show you how.