In this exclusive webinar, Clari’s VP of Sales Engineering, Brian Cody, and Saleo’s VP of Sales, Danny Garcia, discuss how Clari streamlined its demo strategy and improved sales efficiency using live demo customization tools. Learn how Clari achieved an 11% increase in win rates, reduced demo prep time, and enabled more personalized, high-impact sales conversations.
Read the full transcript below to explore key insights on demo automation, sales enablement, and revenue team alignment—directly from two leading voices in B2B sales and presales innovation.
Laura Cotton
Good afternoon and good morning, everyone. I’m Laura Cotton, and I just want to thank you for joining us today for our live session discussing accelerating the sales cycle.
We’re really excited to dive into the impact that Saleo has had on Clari sales motion with Brian Cody, who’s vice president of sales engineering at Clari, and our own Danny Garcia, who’s vice president of sales here at Saleo.
I’m going to hand things over to Danny to get us started.
Danny Garcia
Awesome. Thank you, Laura.
Brian, how are you doing today? Appreciate the time.
Brian Cody
Doing great, Danny. How about you?
Danny Garcia
Doing great. Looking forward to the conversation today.
Before we get started, is there a quick introduction or any fun facts you want to share with the audience about yourself?
Brian Cody
Sure. I’ll do a quick intro about myself and Clari and, so everybody knows this outfit is for Danny.
Saleo colors with a little Silicon Valley hoodie with the jacket. So, dressed for the Saleo team on this one.
But, Brian Cody, I run our global sales engineering teams at Clari. We have teams across EMEA and North America.
I’ve been with Clari about eight years. For those who don’t know Clari, we’re a revenue operations platform.
What we really focus on is helping customers achieve their revenue objectives. Variety of different ways that customers approach that, whether it’s a new sale, new logo growth, new product growth, retention focus, maybe they have a channel sales motions just to give a few examples. And what we really try to do is help all the personas in a revenue organization create, convert, and close, and retain more revenue all the way up from reps and SCs and CSMs to first line managers, and the leaders and operations folks really operationalize and organize their cadences and how they’re running the business to drive better standardization, better efficiency, and better growth outcomes, from doing all that.
So, I don’t know if I hit on a fun fact. I don’t know if I need to, but I guess the jacket with the hoodies is it today.
Danny Garcia
No. You nailed it. I appreciate it.
And, I can speak from experience having used Clari for a number of years now. It’s been a very instrumental platform in terms of the good market rhythm and operating rhythm that we had in other companies as well. I’m a huge fan of what you guys do and really appreciate you being on here with us today.
Brian Cody
Awesome. Happy to be here, Danny.
Danny Garcia
Let’s jump in. I know we have a bunch of different topics and things to go through.
So we’ll kind of start at the very top. Setting the stage, when you think about pre-Saleo, why Saleo, how you guys implemented it, – we’d love to start from there.
Brian, from your experience, can you describe some of the challenges that Clari and the sales team, the solutions engineering team, were experiencing before adopting Saleo and implementing it?
Brian Cody
Yeah. Absolutely.
So, for context, we’ve been a very happy Saleo customer for two or three years now. I can’t remember exactly, but it’s been amazing to work with you all.
Great people, great product. And so if I put myself back to when I joined Clari, almost eight years ago now, really what we were doing was what probably a lot of people are familiar with, especially at earlier stage start of the mid to high growth companies, sort of hacking the demo together.
We had a combination of real sort of product in the way that it actually is developed. And then we were working with our engineering team to do some specific back end work just for the demo or to drive a consistent demo experience to make our stories and narratives easy to tell.
And really what that meant for us was we effectively had a different code base for the demo or different back end for the demo. So every time there were new releases, every time we wanted to make any material changes, or we added new data to the platform or anything else like that. The first thing we do, go straight to engineering and see if we could fit into what they are actually building, take away some resources away from the road map, customer commitments, anything else like that to try to get the demo up to speed.
So we’re working with them pretty closely, using their resources. And then on the SE side, we were building a lot of the data structures manually.
And to use one example of the challenges that we were facing. One of the pieces in Clari, which used a lot of data that came from email and calendar and some of the conversations in there and married that up with CRM data, account data, even, data from other databases like Snowflake.
We were basically building, I think we had 2,500 different files at one point to support just one part of the product in AWS. And it was basically, anytime you wanted to click anything, you would have to build a new file, new response format.
I didn’t like it from the SE side, didn’t like it from the engineering side, just high resource constraints for both. And so, we got introduced to Saleo, and that changed the way in which we looked at how we’re going to be able to build our product, because we hired a demo architect, and we are looking at different ways to try to build this on our own.
We got introduced to Saleo, and we realized we could do sort of a hybrid model. We could build things on our own with the native product and the way that it worked, and then we could use Saleo to handle all the really hard stuff that was going to be challenging for us to build and especially create consistent demo stories and even build on top of those stories over time.
So that’s the high level history, Danny.
Danny Garcia
I love it. And appreciate the details around that. I know this is before my time of joining Saleo that when you guys did the evaluation itself.
But, you touched on this a little bit, could you unpack it a little bit more? What was the yes moment when you were evaluating not only Saleo, but the rest of the market in general, that you figured that Saleo would be the best partner for Clari?
Brian Cody
So this was early in Saleo days. Justin was leading the deal.
I think Jim joined towards the end. And we’re working with Justin and Dan.
And the real moment for us was, we did do a POC. Because, like many people out there, we were like, we’re super complex. I don’t know if you can handle it.
Right? We hear that all the time in our sales as well. So, we did a lightweight POC.
We targeted two parts of the platform. We probably have Saleo touching, I don’t know, 60% of the platform right now.
But we just picked two parts that would illustrate the points of, if we could solve this, we knew we could do the rest. Dan and team quickly got connected to our demo org and quickly put together; hey, here’s what we could do for you guys. Here’s our requirements. If you can replicate this exact screen, click here, and here. We’re good to go.
They showed us that, and it was amazing. So now for the rest of it, it’s just like, let’s go full run.
We know what we wanted to take over next and keep going.
Danny Garcia
I love it. And it’s interesting that you guys have built such a powerful demo and only taken over about 60% of it with Saleo as well.
It just shows that you don’t always have to boil the ocean, reinvent the wheel, take over everything. There’s a lot of things that organizations are able to demonstrate really well out of their product, but there’s other areas that it’s really difficult to do.
And, being able to figure out the strategy and work through where all those things fit together, to make the best demo experience, is really where we fit into that. So I love hearing that.
Brian Cody
And I think on that point too, just think about where the audience might be. For us, it was the real time records; and for us, that was Salesforce. Easy to create a bunch of accounts, opportunities, create some fake data. It was all the changes to those, because what we do is a lot of time series snapshots in the real product, and we show you analytics and predictions that show you, based on these changes, here’s what’s going to happen.
We have some connection to activity, things like that as well. And that was really hard because that meant, in real product, reps are changing data every single day.
We weren’t going to be able to do that. And even as we thought about, should we just automate this with scripts and Salesforce and stuff like that? Well, then the story’s going to always be the exact same.
The projection’s always going to be a % accurate. You know? There’s going to be some weird things, and then it’s like, hey. If we actually want to change the story at one point, we’ve got to wait for the product to catch up, six months to capture all the historical changes, things like that.
And Saleo is just like, nope. You want to change the way the story looks right now? Do it in an hour, maybe two, depending on how deep you’re going.
Danny Garcia
Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean, back in the sales engagement days, we would spend a portion of our day, a couple times a week, where we would actually send out emails, make phone calls to each other, get on a Zoom video to have something populated into the system before anything like this existed. And so, yeah, you had to get pretty scrappy with the way that you were delivering things and being able to showcase the value of the product.
So it’s a completely different world being able to have something like this and just inject the real live data into your product, and then everything’s going to start rendering naturally the way that it should be. As a customer of yours that’s been using you for a year or longer, can experience on their own. Right?
One of the things that you touched on earlier, when you think about some of the challenges that you were experiencing, we see that across the board. It all boils down to inaccurate demo data, something that’s just lost its context. It’s outdated as well. So you’re looking at dates from two years prior.
It just doesn’t tell the natural story or the age old saying it’s like, imagine this. Imagine you can picture this experience or this workflow actually giving you this particular output.
Those things as you know, you’re not the only one that are experiencing some of those challenges, and it’s not easy to solve for. So I’d be curious from your perspective, who all is involved or who did you bring to the table when it came to making a decision and creating an evaluation for this?
Brian Cody
So let me actually start one step ahead of that. At the time, we didn’t have any capability to help us solve the live demos.
And so this was going to be a net new purchase for us, and I didn’t have any budget for it. But then once I saw the POC, I was like, okay. We have to figure out a way to do this. So, we brought in product marketing, and we brought in representatives from product and engineering.
Those are the people that we brought in, because product marketing wanted to, obviously, your consumers are the outputs of the demos, website screenshots, interactive tours, etcetera, all that good stuff. And then given some of the inefficiencies that I just talked about, product and engineering were key folks to bring in.
So it’s really those two that were going to be the ones that helped me advocate for this internally. And then, down the road, we brought in finance and our procurement team.
I had to sell this to my leadership, to the CRO. And so what we effectively did is product marketing was like, wow. This is amazing. You could build demo data faster, better. We could take that and run with it.
Product was the easy one where they’re like, okay. Great.
I think that was maybe fifteen minutes of call. But, that was pretty easy.
And what we actually did is, again, we didn’t have any budget for this. It wasn’t a budget initiative.
This was also earlier in my days as an SE leader. So I was like, alright. I’ve got to nail this. We’ve got to get this tool in here.
What we did is we broke down,the ROI. And our ROI was really just focused on efficiency gains at first, which is get product building real product, not doing stuff for the demo, and get the SEs more efficient at keeping up pace with product to go build better demos.
And so we did two exercises on the product and engineering side. We worked with a few folks over there, and we basically broke it down to, on average, it was half an engineering head per quarter to do demo work to get us up to speed on where the product was.
So we just broke down the cost of what that looks like for a junior engineer. We came to an equation of, this is how much we’re going to save by getting half an engineer a quarter off the demo work.
We didn’t even have to go through the ROX or system.
But this is what it might do for our road map so we could develop a little bit more, but it was just the cost savings alone from that front. And then on the other side, we did analysis on the SE team and to give one anecdote to kind of paint the picture there.
One of our SEs who was one of the better ones in helping us build in the demo environment was really focused on doing that. And it took him about ten to fifteen hours to build a new dashboard.
Because, again, we were doing a lot of it on the back end, JSON level work, it was painful. I don’t need to go into it. But it took him ten to fifteen hours.
In real production instances, it was a thirty minute process.
If you’re going from scratch, I’ve just set up all my basic reporting views. I have to design the dashboard.
You’re going from zero to a hundred. It was maybe thirty minutes.
The factor of that spoke volumes for our teams internally. So, when we went to get this approved, it was pretty easy, one, having sponsors that were advocating for us.
But once we broke it down in those two areas, it was a no brainer for finance, and our CRO.
Danny Garcia
I love it. That’s powerful.
It sounds like you did a really good job navigating the different requirements of what’s going to move the needle for either side of the equation, whether it’s from product marketing or from a sales perspective. So those are two different avenues that you have to tackle at the same time.
Moving into the overall impact on the sales cycle itself at post implementation, starting from the very beginning of that process, what was the rollout of Saleo like at Clari? As you mentioned earlier, you didn’t have budget for it.
It’s groundbreaking solution for you, solving a big problem, but it’s a change. Right? And anybody in go-to-market doesn’t really love change at times.
So, what was that process like for you guys?
Brian Cody
So first thing first, great partnership overall, really worked well with both the teams.
Everybody has their own design preferences and the demo. I’m going to say that as we talk a little bit more about best practices and what we’ve learned during implementation, what we could have done better.
But once we got it deployed, I’ll start with paraphrasing our CRO right when we rolled this out. He was like, oh my god. Saleo, I love Saleo. It’s so easy. I just hit this play button, and now my demo data was, like he was coming from the old world. Right? We did this, like, migration.
We had this little overlap. So he came from the old demo environment.
We had the new one. He’s like, I just hit play, and all this data is way better. And I’m able to interact with it in ways that I wasn’t historically, game changing!
And, you know, I was a little nervous about rolling this out because it was my first really big tech buy, and rollout.
Are the reps going to adopt it? What’s actually going to happen here? Rolled it out, and there was no noise. It’s easy. You hit play. Like, log in, hit play, you’re good to go.
So, it was really great from that perspective. And, I guess as we think about what’s the impact it had on the organization.
If I put ourselves back two years ago now, we really focused a lot on solution selling. That was our theme, two kickoffs ago, especially as we become more of a platform, more offerings, more entry points, different ways to talk about all our different solutions.
So we really wanted to uplevel the entire organization on building really strong executive point of views on how we’re going to make an impact for a customer. And then for the SEs, how are you going to build a really solid demo story throughout the sales cycle? Right? As you acquire a bunch of products, you’re not just clicking through the exact same way that you used to.
You have to be a lot more agile. And so we’ve really focused on driving storytelling, making sure that we’re talking about value, not features.
And since that point, we are starting to do more and more with Saleo. We’re able to do more customizations in certain areas of the product, which they weren’t able to do before.
And so looking back at improvements to win rate, we’ve seen an 11% increase in new logo win rates since that time. I think Saleo has been a big piece of that, and it’s helped drive some of the important things, like how an SE tells a really good story based off of that executive POV that the rep and team has built.
I love it. That’s incredible. An 11% increase in win rate for new business.
Some organizations scratch tooth and nail to be able to get that as their overall average. So that’s incredible that you guys were able to see that type of lift.
One of the things that I always think about when I talk to new potential customers, or even current customers, is exactly what you mentioned earlier. At the end of the day, the data is the story that you’re trying to tell. You’re trying to enable the people on a call or in a meeting to be able to deliver the value proposition, and having the data as a backdrop and nailing the story and putting that out there for them so they can actually see that moment. If you look at it from the force management framework or anything else out there from the methodologies, you’re looking at what is the ideal state or what is the next desired state they want to get to.
That really helps you drive that story home, by having a complete data story there to be able to lean on that. So love hearing that, man.
It’s an interesting thing to think about. You had to change your strategy a little bit.
Were there any core areas that you had to change across the team in terms of, here’s how you need to think about it now that we have a data complete area to be able to go through for the solution?
Brian Cody
Yeah. A little bit.
I think, really where the team was coming from was a more rigid demo environment because of the reason that I talked about in that dashboard example was the number one thing that we wanted to unlock.
To your point on the data piece, if we could simply replicate a dashboard and a forecast, or something different, like flows to drive pipeline creation or anything else like that. If we do some of those simple things, then somebody could actually see their world and Clari a little bit more. Here’s exactly how I run a forecast call.
I know the names aren’t the same. I know our opportunity. Right? But, they could actually see the world a little bit more in there. It’s been the unlock of that, and that was honestly a little bit easier to overcome.
It was just like, you all can go and do this now. We haven’t been able to do this before, so we encourage you to go do it.
Now we’re on the other side of the equation where, because we have a shared instance, they would like to move to a multi instance world at some point in the near future. But, we have a ton of dashboards.
So that’s become more of a cleanup exercise, which to me is somewhat of a good problem to have right now. Now we won’t fix it, but, it’s a good problem to have.
So, we’re in that phase now where we’re seeing more and more. And I think, where we want to go next, and I’m with working with Michael on the CS team, is how do we do more with text replace and tokens? How do we do a little bit more with adjustments and configurations? I want our analytics module to look like this because I’m working with the customer that has this product or focuses on this segment or things like that.
So that’s where we want to take it next so we can get that extra level of customization.
To your point, somebody comes into our demo experience. They’re seeing names that they know about, they’re seeing data points that are familiar to them, and they’re seeing it structured in a way that is aligned to how they run their business.
Danny Garcia
Yep. Just the simplest changes, like identifying and aligning sales stages to what they’re doing internally.
Those things just allow them to put themselves in the shoes of being an actual customer before getting to that point, which is every salesperson’s dream to be able to do on a call. Right?
Brian Cody
I also think it increases the confidence of the SE when you’re presenting too. Right? Like, going back to one of the things you said is, like, imagine this.
Right?
One of the things we demo is: hey, if you’re really focused on driving new product growth. There’s different components of how you go build pipeline generation for it? How do you inspect all your deals and accounts for white space purposes? Or are you cross selling different products? And then, how do you forecast?
A lot of times, that was our old world, where it’s like, hey. Here are four demo products. Now imagine these are your products, but I just ran a demo using Saleo where it’s really easy to swap out all the product names.
That was really the only thing that I did for this, but it made me more confident on that demo being like, Danny, here’s your forecast. Like, you’re trying to see growth in this product area.
Here’s how I do that. And just a simple name change alone, I don’t know, eliminates thirty seconds, a minute of an explanation that you don’t want to have to talk to?
Danny Garcia
For sure. I mean, they see it clear as day as to where it’s going to actually fit into their workflow and their process.
They actually see it come to life, which is everything. Everybody wants to see this in the solution. Right? So when you think about that, you kind of touched on the customizations that you are doing right now, and you touched on how long the customizations took you long took you at your previous state.
How does that process look now? What does that mean from a demo prep time, cutting into that, making you all more efficient?
Brian Cody
I think it’s, demo prep time isn’t how I’m looking at it right now. I think that’s probably where I want to get to as we get to more custom demos.
I think the emphasis for us has been on how impactful are the stories that you’re building and the demo org reflecting. So, arguably, we could say that’s more of a coaching mechanism or a reinforcement mechanism.
Are you building a good narrative? And we’re doing some pretty interesting stuff with notebook LM and our own products to surface up and build those stories for us. And then is that translating into what you’re doing with some of the demo instance stuff? Now we want to do and as we’re working on, expanding with Saleo to do more in our product. That’s where we want to get to next – how can we build more customization in more areas, and then I think efficiency will be a little bit more top of mind for us there because it’ll be more broad. The SEs will be touching more of the product and customizing more of the product.
Danny Garcia
Yeah. Absolutely.
You hit my next question, which is going to be around what’s next for Clari in terms of evolving the sales motion now that you have Saleo in place. So that’s awesome to hear.
More customizations, more tailored experiences, that’s all going to continue to lean into the increase in win rate for new business that you mentioned earlier. We love to hear that.
Brian Cody
And I’m really excited, we just got access to some of the new AI features. So that’s what I’m really excited to see.
You know? I would say my ideal state would be, okay – I’m going to demo to Saleo.
Right? There’s a lot of public data, just CRO or CEO, Danny’s VP of sales, etcetera, etcetera. Like, if we could get to that point where it’s like, I’m just going to demo to Saleo and you’re doing web scrapes for product names, for people, all that stuff.
And that’s what I’m really hopeful for. So we’ll start to play around with that.
I know we’re going to be able to do some in this first phase, but that’s what I’m really hoping for because, you set up the right tokens, you set up the right structure at sort of the template level right. We can get to that point where you’re just telling it here’s who I’m demoing to, and it takes over thirty, fifty, whatever percent of that demo creation and adjust to it.
Danny Garcia
It’s incredible the experience and the edge you get with the demo data creator.
That it’s game changing, man. I’m excited for you guys to get your hands on and play around with it, because it’s going to up the level of customization and the speed, it just becomes so much more powerful.
Because you have all the ideas. You know exactly, especially if you’ve done a good discovery framework, you have that point of view from the account executive and sales leadership.
Now it’s just – how do we get this to translate into the areas that we’ve taken over, and then it’s game changing. It takes it to the next level.
So I’m excited to see that – maybe our next webinar, we do a deep dive on what that’s been like for you guys, I love to hear it.
Brian Cody
I don’t know how many audience members out there have used Makuru, but my Salesforce days, you know, Makuru is our best friend where it’s like, alright. I need to build a CSV that I’ve been uploaded in my demo work.
Like, give it some parameters. You’re going row by row, object by object, and now that’s going to just move way faster.
Danny Garcia
This was simple prompt training.
We can get you going at lightning speed. So I love it.
When you think about rolling out Saleo, there’s obviously been a lot of lessons learned and some best practices that you probably come across, being a customer with us for quite some time now. What would you say is the most impactful change for the Clari sales org after the implementation of Saleo in general?
Brian Cody
I think it probably goes back to the solution selling motion. Obviously, you know, you go look at, you know, the 11% increase in win rate.
That’s important for us. I think what we would like to see is, obviously, as we move forward, more velocity, more custom demos and the velocity that comes with it.
But it’s just been that simple change for us of before static demo – you know, one demo org, static data, a lot of imagine this type of conversations – to after, two meetings, here’s what this would look like, customers being able to see them in our environment in an easier way. And to add to that, one of the things that has been a popular way to experience Clari is what we call a connected demo.
What we do is we get connected to your instance and then we demo it back to you. And that’s been our way to really resonate with a customer.
The benefits there, that maybe Saleo can’t touch, is customers can see what their projection is for the quarter. Right? That’s one example that’s really powerful. But that takes a long time to get approval for, it’s actually pretty easy to stand up, but security doesn’t want you to touch it. You know, security is always like, don’t touch our data unless you really have to.
And so we’ve got to sell to get connected to that data. So we’re viewing Saleo as the middle ground between those generic sort of demos and what’s really effective, which is our connected demos, which have a 60 plus percent win rate.
They don’t slow down the sales cycle. So if we can increase the win rate and run a faster cycle, that’s the hope there.
Get closer to that connected demo experience.
Danny Garcia
And that’s without having to do the POC. Is that right? That’s awesome.
I mean, it goes back to the storytelling.
If you’re actually able to nail the story by being super relevant and the data that you’ve learned and the insights you’ve gleaned from the conversations, it can help eliminate the need for even having to go down that rabbit hole. Because, like you mentioned before, there’s so many obstacles that you’ve got to get through just to even connect to someone’s Salesforce environment or their CRM in general.
It’s a lot of sensitive data that you have to go through, so it just adds complexity into the sales cycle.
Curious from you, hindsight is always twenty-twenty. If you were to look back, any suggestions for the audience, for anybody listening to the recording here, if you were to implement a solution like Saleo or in general, what were some of the suggestions you’d give them or things that you would do differently?
Brian Cody
Yeah, phenomenal question.
I think we learned a ton in our implementation process.
And, honestly, a lot of it was on us. I think Saleo was early stage, so everybody’s still learning at that point.
But I think from our perspective, we were not as clear in how we wanted the demo to be built, and took some assumptions, as we should have been. And so there’s two ways I would break that down.
One, with any technology, there’s a lot of clicks that you can make at any single point. Right? So there’s so many different variations of data that you could build.
But you don’t need to build all that to sell effectively, to tell a good demo story. So for us, after we did sort of the first version of deployment, we’re like, okay. We’ve got to think about things a little bit differently. It really came down to areas of the platform it was taking over.
How do we give ourselves the flexibility to be able to tell different types of stories? And we decided that, basically, there’s two drivers for that. There’s a time period driver for us and the view of the data that you had, and those would really change the data or allow you to change the data.
And everything else from there, we decided that, hey – we want to decrease numbers on the screen or something like that.
Let’s find more creative solutions to drop that down by a factor of 30 or something like that. So there were the trade offs between full levels of flexibility and the data management side.
And finding where you want to be on that spectrum is important because Saleo is really powerful. You can create tables for anything. You can create data for everything. Now with AI, maybe this pushes you a little bit more to the full flexibility side.
But for us, we had to really find where that line was. And so a lot of our early implementation was us figuring out what does that actually mean.
And then I think the second piece was – we could have been a lot more clear on what data outputs we were trying to get, and that tied into some of how we wanted to build a flexible tool, manipulate the data and stuff like that. But we could have been more clear on how we want to go through this type of user flow, so we want the data to be able to change here, and here to provide the right recommendations to your team. So then it’s like, okay – got it. I see where you want to be flexible. I see where we need to think about different types of solutions, and we don’t want another table, subtable, etcetera, that type of thing.
So that was the biggest thing for us, was the level of requirements and balancing the flexibility and where we want to be flexible, where we didn’t.
Danny Garcia
Absolutely.
I mean, we talk about it internally all the time and obviously with prospects as well, but the data is the story. And what one of the things that you have to really hone in on is what is the problem that you’re trying to solve, or what is the story that you’re trying to tell, and then what is the data that actually helps support that data that you need us to take over. Right? And so walking back that problem, and figuring out what is the data integrity to do it, how do we make that scalable so that, to your point, for the future state, you want to be able to make more tailored customizations.
Well, can we tell one really good story now? And then how does that evolve for us if we want to get others to be able to make tweaks or changes to this story, for later on in the future or for other specific use cases, for verticals, and industries that you may be selling into. That next level personalization is how do you actually take it to that next stage? So I love to hear that.
Any advice for the audience here when considering a demo platform?
Brian Cody
Well, the space has grown a ton.
There’s a lot of great players in this space. And I think it comes down to the constituents that you need to work with.
I think what’s really important in this area is the interlock between PMM and SE and figuring out the right balance between what you need across both of those organizations. The better interlock you have with both of those teams, the better alignment you can get on what you’re actually going to invest in and what’s a priority.
I think where we’ve landed, and this still holds true, is – live demos still are sort of core for us because SEs are touching a wide set of customers with a wide set of use cases, different requirements, and nuances and things like that, but we’re trying to build demos for that. And if we can solve the live demo, then we can feed the rest.
I’m like, hey. Here’s a new use case. It’s actually worked really well. Driving a lot of customer value.
If an SE builds a custom demo for that, then product marketing can inherit that for website tours or anything else like that. So, I think that’s probably the biggest stakeholder in figuring out where the space is right now, and balancing the different needs, and aligning on the needs between those two roles.
Danny Garcia
Love it. That’s great advice.
Coming up towards the end here, looking through some of the questions from the audience. I think it’s good to move into some of the Q and A.
You good with that, Brian?
So I think we have one open question right now, and it’s asking, can Saleo run without an underlying instance? So kind of a loaded question. Just want to make sure I understand it.
At the end of the day, yes, we’re going to render naturally on an application. We take over the end points that we need to.
If there is data in there already to work off of, that makes the implementation a lot easier and a lot smoother. But, yes, we are able to operate without an underlying dataset.
We’re in between the data layer and any other areas, and the platform actually rendering. Brian, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add to that from your implementation?
Brian Cody
It just goes back to the best practices that we talked about, in my opinion, it’ll help the Saleo team if they know what the current instance and the output looks like and where you want to be flexible, where you don’t. Where do you actually want to click and see meaningful changes? Where is the data going to change in order to help you tell that story? Maybe try to frame in the way that you did, Danny.
Like, that’s really important rather than the blank canvas of, like, hey. Try to, you know, just try to figure this out.
Danny Garcia
Yeah. Boil in the ocean. It works. You can take over everything.
But if there’s specific areas that you need the data to really show, having those specifics really makes an impact.
Laura Cotton
I think in that same vein, another question we got refers to what you were talking about – boiling down the demo story. You talked about needing to get more clear about your demo story.
How do you suggest distilling down your demo story or your demo needs as a whole organization?
Brian Cody
Great question.
Here’s where we start in the process: one, obviously the foundation of the demo story is going to be two parts. It’s what can you learn about your buyer through account research? Amazingly easy ways to do that now. I actually think one of the best little hacks that I learned from Gartner actually, is I go ask AI before I go demo to a customer, can you give me a day in the life of this persona for this company.
And it actually does a pretty good job of breaking down, this is probably what their day in the life is based off of Indeed and everything else like that. So I try to wrap my head around the personas in addition to all the other things that we care about, which is how’s their growth rate? What are their sales strategies? Give me the breakdown of those, and that gives me a full picture.
Then, obviously, as you’re having conversations with a customer, you’ll get more insight into their pain point, whatever sort of discovery you’re doing at the personal level, pain point level, whatever it might be.
And so what we’re doing right now is, because Clari is capturing all the conversations for us. We’re doing our own account research.
We’re actually using NotebookLM to bring all of this data together. And then what we do is we have a demo story framework and we actually have a technical discovery, we call it solution-fit-framework, in there as well. So as you build data from the conversations that you have for notes or any extra, external, even PDFs or decks or anything else like that.
The new flow for the SEs is, hey – can you build me a story? Based off of all the different conversations that we’re having, it’s done in the context of the storytelling framework that we’ve built.
And then we’ve also added some product documentation, showing – this is how we support a retention use case, versus a new logo use case, or anything else like that.
So NotebookLM has been really good by providing the right framing and the right context for how we want to build it, and then we just dump all of our notes and conversations in there to be able to take that data and format it in the way that we want. We use that then as the baseline for – what objectives are we selling against, personas are we going to impact, and how should that guide what we’re demoing.
Laura Cotton
Awesome. Thank you.
Another question that came in. What kind of evaluation criteria did you have when you were looking for a demo solution?
Brian Cody
First meeting was – help us fix the live demo. You know?
I would say we are not as buttoned up. We didn’t have line by line, like, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? So, for me as an individual, but for us in the space, being new at the time, it was figuring out what we could do. I think once we got into the POC, that’s where we broke down the requirements. We’re like, okay – we need you to take over these two areas of the product, these pieces of the product.
Because what was actually really great about working with Saleo was our dashboards are a hybrid approach. It’s some of the data that we have easily managed and built ourselves and some of it’s Saleo. So it’s actually really great to see, we could plug in the data that we need, that’s hard. We have the rest figured out. So we had one of those examples where it’s like, we need the dashboard to look like this. We need to make sure that this data that we built, you don’t touch and it doesn’t change. And then these pieces, we can change and you can show us how you can deliver some flexibility or how we configure those.
And then we gave one portion of our product where we have to take over everything and show us how you can replicate, in two or three clicks, that we typically do in that part of the demo. So it came down to that.
Laura Cotton
Awesome. Another question that was submitted.
Other than conversion rates, how are you measuring which demos or aspects of the demo flow are most successful?
Brian Cody
We’re not there yet. I’d say that is much more of a coaching element.
Like, to dry runs, storytelling prep, we’re using AI to, look back at the calls and be like, did we actually touch on some of these points and stuff like that, asking our own product that. So I think that’s much more of a human led – are we delivering the types of demos effectively to influence buying behavior, rather than is there a particular product or something that is leading to better win rates or faster win rates.
So we’re not there yet, but that’s what we’re really still focused on.
Laura Cotton
Alright. And I think this one’s kind of a Saleo question, actually.
You mentioned demo data creator. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Danny Garcia
Yeah. I can take this one.
So, the Demo Data Creator, imagine a world where you’re actually able to go in and ask specific prompts and queue up the data that you need, that is relevant to the audience or the industry or vertical that you’re speaking to. So you can inject it, live, in our instance of Saleo. You’re able to actually input specific prompts and get it to output the data that you need, whether it’s specific products for a specific industry, vertical, skews.
If it’s a story, if it’s email content, sky’s the limit of where you can take this. But it’s a way to automate and leverage AI to be able to use and inject the data at scale. So rather than have it go line by line, AI is taking the heavy lifting off you.
Brian Cody
You guys had a great webinar on it a couple weeks ago, on that launch and it was a good one.
Laura Cotton
Well, thank you so much. We’re right at the end of our time actually.
Brian, Danny, thank you for sharing your insights and your experience. I know I learned a lot, and hopefully everyone who joined us today did as well.
To everyone who’s on today, thank you so much for joining us for today’s session. We appreciate you taking the time to be here.
We encourage you to share your feedback or any new topics for future episodes in the exit survey. And just as a reminder, you will receive a recording of today’s webinar, within about twenty four hours.
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