Interactive demos vs. product videos: why revenue teams are switching over

This Plot report analyzes over 110,257 web sessions and 150 deals across anonymized data to measure the impact of interactive demos on conversion rates and time to convert. ‍Our approach is simple. We’re comparing the performance of prospects that engage with an interactive demo against the overall average from our dataset.

In summary

Based on our dataset, when prospects engage with an interactive demo, their…

• Website conversion rates improve by 7.9x (3.05% vs 24.35%)
• Deal conversion rate improves by 3.2x (3.1% vs 10.1%)
• Time to convert shrinks, with sales cycles reducing from 33 to 27 days

Methodology

1. With Factors.ai, we built anonymized funnels to measure how prospects progress from website sessions to form submissions to deal conversions (from CRM data).
2. We then compared this data against prospects that were exposed to Storylane demos to measure the impact of interactive demos on conversion rates and time to convert.

1. Website conversion rate

In our sample, website visitors that engaged with an interactive demo achieved a website conversion rate (sign-up, form submission, etc.) of 24.35%. That’s nearly 8x greater than the dataset’s average website conversion rate of 3.05%. Big.

Prospects that engage with interactive demos naturally demonstrate higher intent than casual visitors. The data clearly shows that interactive demos have a significant impact on conversion rates. Prospects that test-drive the product through interactive demos are consistently more likely to sign-up as compared to those limited by static content.

2. Deal conversion rate

Sign-ups are great, but do interactive demos impact bottom-line revenue metrics? According to the data, the answer is a resounding yes. Prospects who engaged with interactive demos along their customer journeys achieved a deal conversion rate of 10.1%—3.2x more than the average (3.1%) rate in our sample.

Interactive demos don't just drive sign-ups — they substantially impact pipeline and revenue outcomes. It’s easy to see why. Demo automation eliminates friction between prospects and products with on-demand product experiences across stakeholders.

3. Time to convert

In this case, time to convert measures how quickly a deal is closed—from first touch to deal won. Again, the data confirms what makes intuitive sense: by enabling prospects to explore products independently, interactive demos reduce the usual back-and-forth of emails and calls and streamline the sales cycle.

On average, deals that otherwise took 33 days were closed in just 27 days when interactive demo touchpoints were involved. This means that nearly an entire week is saved for both buyers and sellers per deal. As you might imagine, this really starts to add up over time.

At its core, the purpose of demo automation is to minimize the friction between prospects and product. 

Interactive demos help buyers understand a software without jumping through hoops of contact forms, calendar links, and qualifying calls. That being said, lead gen forms continue to remain essential to most B2B sales processes. A prospect submitting their details to talk to sales or try out a product is one of the strongest signals of buying intent.

Between these two viewpoints lies the question: Should you gate your interactive demos? 

On one hand, gated demos generate leads but hamper engagement due to the added friction of forms. On the other hand, ungated demos maximize engagement but don’t directly incentivize form submissions.

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In this edition of The Plot, we analyze over 500,000 demo sessions to compare gated, partially gated (Gated mid-way through the demo), and ungated demos based on the following metrics:

• Engagement Rate: Rate of viewer that click on an interactive demo or CTA
• Conversion Rate: Rate of engaged users that convert to leads (i.e. submit in-demo lead gen form)
• Time Spent Per User: Number of minutes/seconds spent on demo per user

The goal with this analysis is to convey the value of each approach, so you can make an informed decision with your own demos. Let’s dive right in.

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Summary Statistics

• Sample Size: 535,763 demo sessions across 50 Companies
• Average Engagement Rate: 14.7%
• Average Conversion Rate: 15%
• Average Time Spent: 1 min 29 seconds

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1. Engagement Rates

As intuition might suggest, there’s a strong correlation between accessibility and engagement. Gated demos result in the lowest (albeit, still quite impressive) engagement rate of 9.20%. This means that nearly one in every ten users are willing to submit a leadgen form for demo access.

Given the relatively frictionless experience, ungated demos achieve more than double this engagement rate at 19.40%. Partially gated demos fall in between the two with an engagement rate of 15.50%.

If engagement is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data is clear: Avoid gates. Assuming that your demo is relevant and persuasive, there’s a good chance users signs-up for next steps after the fact anyway. 

Additionally, with Storylane’s account reveal, you’ll identify anonymous companies viewing your demos anyway. While this won’t be at a user-level, it’s certainly worth the 2.1x improvement in overall engagement. 

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2. Conversion Rates

No real surprises here either. Gating a demo right off the bat leaves prospects with no choice but to submit the lead gen form. This results in a whopping 43% of engaged users converting to leads. Sounds good, but may not necessarily be all that helpful. Here’s why:

Interactive demos give potential buyers a chance to see if they’re a good fit for your product before making a decision to sign-up. Ruling out this possibility with a leadgen form may result in a large volume of unqualified, low-intent “leads”.

For example, a visitor may land on a homepage and come across a gated interactive demo. Interested to learn more, they may submit the lead gen form and spend a couple of minutes on the demo before realizing that this is not what they’re looking for. 

By this point, however, they’re in the CRM and are likely to receive the full brunt of marketing and sales efforts. This is ultimately irrelevant to the prospect and expensive to the GTM team.

There’s a dramatic drop off in conversion rate for partially gated demos (4.99%). This is likely because users bounce off once they realize that they have to submit a form half way through the demo for the full version. 

Ungated demos also experience a significant drop off (0.30%) in conversion rates, since the ask (form) is placed after the offer (demo).

All in all: If lead generation (albeit possibly unqualified) is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data strongly points to gated demos.

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3. Time Spent Per User

This one is a little more interesting. Unlike the previous two metrics, time spent per user takes a U-shape when comparing gated, partially gated, and ungated demos. 

Gated demos achieve the highest average time spent per user at 2min 26s. Ungated demos take second place with 1min and 22s. While partially gated demos achieve the lowest average time spent at 44s. 

Here’s my theory on why this is the case:

Gated demos win out by a large margin because they incur a sunken cost (a lead gen form submission). Personally, if I share my details for a gated asset, I care about the asset a little more than I otherwise would. After all, I’ve paid for it with my data.

It’s also more likely that a user submits a lead gen form only if they’re sure they’d find the gated asset relevant, further explaining the 1.7x time spent per user as compared to ungated demos.

The reason partially gated demos fare poorly in comparison to even ungated demos is probably behavioral. I wouldn’t be thrilled if a movie I’ve been looking forward to all week is interrupted by a paywall at the climax. The sentiment here may be similar — an unexpected gate that results in users bouncing off the demo.

That’s not to say partially gated demos don’t work — they’re possibly a great solution if you’re looking to optimize for engagement AND leads. If this is your choice, we recommend gating the demo around the 5th step.

Want to know how long your next demo should be? Say less.

Interactive demos are immersive, educational, and well...a lot more fun than regular old product images and videos. But how much is too much?

• At what point does an interactive demo go from engaging to excessive? 
• How does the length of an interactive demo impact its completion rate? 
• And what’s the perfect number of steps for an interactive demo? 

When I initially analyzed the data, I realized that answers to these questions largely depend on the nature of the audience, business, and industry. A complex product built for specialized customers probably warrants a lengthier demo than a relatively non-technical product.

Accordingly, to start with, I examined 34 demos across 9 industries to benchmark the average number of demo steps against completion rates.

• Step count: The number of steps contained within a demo (across flows)‍
• Completion rate: The rate at which engaged users complete the final step of a demo

Note: Interactive demos have a wide range of use-cases — each with its own “ideal” range of steps. To maintain hygiene, I’ve limited this analysis to marketing demos. That is to say, I’ve only considered demos that are placed on websites (homepage, product pages, solutions pages, etc) as marketing assets. In upcoming editions of The Plot, I’ll look into how step counts differ across other use-cases as well.

Okay, enough talk. Let’s get into the numbers.

Summary Statistics

• Number of Demos: 34 demos | 5,409 demo sessions 
• Number of Industries: 9 (Sales Tech, Marketing Tech, Product Tech, Finance Tech, HR Tech, Education Tech, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Data Tech)
• Average Demo Step Count: 21
• Minimum Step Count: 5
• Maximum Step Count: 88
• Average Completion Rate: 26%
• Maximum Completion Rate: 72%
• Minimum Completion Rate: 0%

Step Count vs Completion Rate

An aggregate analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between a demo’s step count and completion rate. Less is more: As the number of steps in a demo increases, the completion rate decreases.

More steps means more effort. Expectedly, this translates to fewer people completing the entire demo. A tweet (in most cases) is easier to get through than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings trilogy. The logic here is no different. Especially since the majority of website traffic is still at the top of the funnel, brevity makes all the difference between completion and cessation.

• The top 10% of demos achieved a completion rate of 64.02% with an average step count of 9‍
• The bottom 10% of demos achieved a completion rate of 1.39% with an average step count of 37

Average Step Count, By Industry

Now that we’ve established that shorter demos usually outperform longer ones, in terms of completion. Let’s explore how step counts vary based on industry.

Even across industries, the trendline is clear: lengthy demos result in lower completion rates. 

The top 3 industries (Product, Marketing, and Sales) achieve an average completion rate of 41% with an average step count of 11.

The bottom 3 industries (Cloud, CyberSecurity, and Data) achieve an average completion rate of 10.7% with an average step count of 43.

Interestingly, there is a positive correlation between an industry’s technicality and demo length.

Cloud Computing, Cyber Security and Data Technology typically sell to highly technical buyers, which may explain why their interactive demos average at 43 steps. There's just a lot of material to get through.

On the other hand, Marketing and Sales products are relatively non-technical. In such cases, restricting the demo to under 12 steps seems to work best.  All in all, for marketing use-cases, our analysis recommends no more than 8-12  steps.

Learnings & Best Practices

In addition to the cold hard numbers, let's conclude this essay with a few qualitative learnings and patterns from the analysis.

• Decisive, not drawn-out: Aim to hook visitors to the larger value of your product within the first couple of steps of your demo. Avoid dragging prospects through page after page of granular detail. Remember, you don’t have to cover every little feature — only what customers care about most. 

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• Concise, clean copy: The best performing demos adopt simple, non-technical copy in their interactive demos. Persuasive, clear language helps a wider audience relate to your product. This practice applies across the board: tooltips, hotspots, media modals, and CTAs.

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• Segment with flows: Of course, it’s not always possible to compress an entire product into under a dozen steps. In such cases, implementing a “choose your own adventure” flow structure helps prospects organize their exploration, and avoid being overwhelmed by a new piece of software.