This discussion, featuring Justin McDonald, Co-Founder and CEO of Saleo and Brian Cotter, Senior Vice President of Sales Engineering at Seismic, focuses on some of the challenges related to selling SaaS products, particularly in the context of evolving buyer behavior. Buyers now have more information and less time, meaning sellers need to maximize their impact during their interactions. Justin and Brian delve into the specifics of enablement technology, particularly demo automation. They define four categories: interactive video, product tours, cloning/sandbox environments, and live demos. Brian Cotter shares Seismic’s experience with implementing a demo automation solution to address challenges in maintaining demo environments, managing costs, and delivering personalized experiences at scale. The conversation concludes with advice on making demoing easier by focusing on targeted storytelling and efficient preparation.
Read the full transcript below:
Justin McDonald
Thank you all for joining. Really excited for the webinar.
Brian, really excited to have you, man. I appreciate you joining.
So, enjoyed getting to know you over the years as a customer, as a friend. I know sometimes we’ll have just one off discussions that we think are ten minutes, and I look on my phone, it ends up being two hours.
Love to talk to you about all things presales and demo automation, sales demo technology, and just really love your journey too. You’ve always been an advocate for the community, your thought leadership in the space.
You had a great run at Salesforce and Zuora, now Seismic. So super excited to have you.
Brian Cotter
Thanks for having me, Justin. Really appreciate it.
And, that’s probably a pretty common comment. The ten minute conversation goes two hours.
It is a long journey of many different companies, of looking at the evolution of presales and kind of seeing where I started in the late nineties, early 2000’s to today is really exciting. And with the evolution of some things that we’re going to be talking about today, including generative AI, and grow-at-all-costs vs. growth profitability. This is the right time to talk about the power of these solutions.
I’m really excited, and it’s not just for tech companies. It’s across the board.
Any go to market strategy really needs to think about the way that they’re enabling their buyers. So, really looking forward to it and excited to have a conversation and also just elevate in presales of the whole.
So thanks for having me.
Justin McDonald
Love it. And I what I always appreciate is we both got our start in presales.
It was almost 20 years for me and you as well. And so we have passion for presales.
I know we also have a shared passion for all things engine related that move fast, but I’ll throw an audible at you. It’s not planned.
But other than those things, what are you most passionate about? Just for the audience to get to know you?
Brian Cotter
It’s kind of funny. Well, one – I have 3 boys, so any other thing that I can do outside and adventure with them, you’re always looking at skiing and hiking, and I just spent 3 days in Big Bear Mountain.
Anything to do with off roading and camping and family time, and I might have a little bit of a problem with sunglasses. I like sunglasses for a different reason.
Really, I just kind of look at different ways to have different experiences and take different journeys with different people in different adventures.
Justin McDonald
Love it. That’s great.
I feel like every time I talk to you, you’re on a plane, outside somewhere or yeah. Well, let’s get started.
We’ll jump into the first slide, but I welcome everyone. Really excited to talk through all this.
So first and foremost – and this has been the case for all of time – selling SaaS is hard.
It always has been, always will be, and I think it’s exacerbated recently by the macroeconomic conditions. The data that you see here actually was published by HubSpot.
They did a state of the union for sellers where 54% saying that selling is harder this year. More scrutiny on budgets, there’s challenges with P & L.
You know, there’s a lot more people in the buying committee. I think anytime you get pricing pressures, challenges, you get more people involved in the buying committee, deal velocity slows down.
And then also within the study, 82% said that building relationships is important, but they lack the time to do so effectively.
So I think some of the things we’ll be talking about today – in demo automation, within buyer enablement – have to do with really maximizing the time the sellers get to spend with the buyers.
So this is setting the stage. But, yeah, it’s hard. It’s tough out there.
Brian, I’ll kind of unleash you on this. I know this is an area of passion for you as it relates to buyer enablement and some of the things that you see at Seismic, but we’d love to kind of talk through what this looks like. Maximizing the time the sellers get to spend with the buyers.
Brian Cotter
Yeah. One of the things that’s been interesting, when I started at BMC Software as a presales engineer back in 2001, the seller really owned everything.They owned the process. And if you wanted anything, you had to go to that seller, and then they dictated the sales process.
I think one of the things that we’ve seen shift over the last 20 plus years is the sellers are no longer in control. And one of the reasons why I went to Seismic is it’s really about the power of that story that you’re talking about.
But when you kind of take a look at some of the metrics here, 17% of the time, you’re with the buyer. And if you have 5 vendors going into any deal, you have 3.2% to make your impact, to highlight your value, but you have 83% of the time where the buyers are alone. How can you actually position things so they sell on your behalf when you’re not with them? It’s something that I’ve always kind of talked about.
How do you take massive amounts of information, distill it down to 3 to 5 points after a live meeting, and then share that with the actual buyer so they can sell on your behalf when you’re gone. The power of that story needs to extend beyond the time that you’re with the buyers.
The second part is 85% of the time, if you don’t hit the mark the first meeting, the buyers are saying: door, window, choose your exit. You didn’t hit the mark. You don’t know their business. You can’t align to their outcomes to solve their problems, to identify the value they can realize.
So it’s critically important for us to really be unique, relevant, personalized in every single interaction because there’s only 3 ultimate outcomes in every interaction these days. Decreasing wallet share, running flat, or increasing wallet share.
So you have a 33% chance of really hitting the mark where they want to take the next step with you. And the last part is if you don’t make it look like their future world in a way that they can actually see them using your platform or them using your solution, you’re not going to be able to move forward.
It’s amazing how B2C and the go-to-market of B2C companies is now infused into B2B enterprise selling. They want everything to be unique, relevant, personalized.
And if you take a look at the ability for sellers to do it, it’s really challenging because the buyers are smarter.
Justin, you and I have talked about this. If you take a look at 3 major micro trends, the pandemic created nothing but accelerated everything. The digital unique experience is key and critical in every single interaction.
You take a look at the acceleration of generative AI and how intelligent buyers are these days, sellers actually have to be one step ahead. So you need to make sure that they know their customer’s business better than anybody.
I think you mentioned a little bit about it earlier. You sell it all, grow-at-all-costs vs. growth profit profitability.
It has to be about outcomes that companies want to achieve or the value that they can realize over time. And if you don’t deliver value every month, every quarter, every year, your customers are going to look at your competitors.
So it’s critical to focus on the buyer, enabling them not just the first sale, but every subsequent sale after that.
Justin McDonald
Totally agree.
I think the thing that resonates for me, that kind of surfaces to the top on the 50,000 foot view is that every single moment matters. Every interaction. You have limited time with the buyer. You have to make it count. Every single detail matters.
You know, I spent many years in account based marketing, that ABM World, and conversational marketing where personalization was everything. And then meeting the buyer where they’re at, is everything.
So I think the parallels between those and then how they converge into demo automation or sales demo technology is very similar. So it’s actually one of the reasons why we had the idea to start Saleo – how do you take the elements of personalization and also meeting the buyer where they’re at, combine the two to create a much better experience.
It’s funny. When we were doing some prep, Katie had mentioned that when you look at buyer enablement, you look at seller enablement, they’re conjoined twins.
They overlap in the Venn diagram. And for you to enable the buyer well in those interactions, you have to enable the seller.
Sales enablement, the whole space that Seismic plays in, is a subset of buyer enablement because if you don’t do that well, you don’t have the ability to enable the buyer well.
I think one of the means of which that can happen, is that 17% of time that you are with the buyer – those live interactions – being able to provide the means, the efficiency, everything you can to equip the seller is so critical for helping the buyer. Because if you help the seller, you can help the buyer.
So, Brian, I know this is obviously near and dear to your heart as well.
Brian Cotter
Yeah. There’s two areas to highlight.
I really think about this, it’s us sellers or sales, field people’s job to take a prospect, and you’re only a prospect once, and turn them into a customer. And they’re a customer because they’re actually paying you.
But in reality, they’re a buyer in perpetuity. Our job is to really get them to balance between the buying journey and the value journey where presales never ends. The story never ends.
Or in your example, really being able to highlight elements around what they’re seeing and how you can actually see their future on the road map.
When you look at buyer enablement and seller enablement, you can do all the enablement you want for your sales teams. But if you were not educating, informing, politely validating, or challenging the buyer’s point of view, you’re not going to be able to get a deal.
The buyers are more educated. There’s more of them. They expect more personalization. And if you don’t hit the mark… So I do agree with you.
These are conjoined twins as far as the ability to actually see this. When you look at Seismic and the way that we view it, the power of being able to enable the seller is all about engaging with the buyer.
And one of the things that I kind of highlighted, it’s not one thing that can solve it. It’s not just enablement for the buyer, enablement for the seller. It really is the way the companies go to market.
How do you align the problem that you’re looking to solve for, the way you’re going to market, with the strategy, with marketing, with enablement? How do you arm and prepare the sellers to be prepared for meetings? Justin, to your point, to actually deliver that live meeting and then actually have follow-up that’s actionable while still giving insights to the seller to pivot the deal, but also managers to coach their sellers to be better so they can engage with buyers better and enable them so they actually can close the deal.
But, ultimately, what are the things that you did during that sales process? How many times did you do discovery to be prepared for a live meeting so you can hit that mark and understand the metrics of what I define as the anatomy of a deal? And part of that is going in and earning the right to be able to give a presentation in a live format that shows that company their future on your platform. So these are things that we will see more and more companies actually enable their sellers to actually effectively enable their buyers.
We will see those great experiences happening more and more and companies that embrace that, I believe will do better.
Justin McDonald
Love it and agree. So getting to the kind of the buyer enablement tech landscape, as I look at the different categories that exploded, you could take sales enablement, take sales engagement, take ABM, or even CRM, you know, back in the early 2000.
Demo automation is going through just a very interesting kind of birthing, kind of a big bang creation, as well as vendors coming at it from so many different angles. I think it’s coming into a category where there’s 40 plus vendors. You can see some of the logos. So many vendors involved.
There’s 6 plus different use cases that all the vendors are coming to, at least from problems that are solved and then their points of origin on how they’re actually approaching the demo automation landscape.
There’s 5 plus methods on how these technologies work together.
And I think what’s happening is there’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of muddied waters and non clarity on who does what, what happens, what are the different approaches, how do the particular use cases apply.
So I think it’s affecting the buyers, and quite honestly, I think the category is so new, the sellers themselves are starting to figure it out.
So I think the sellers and the vendors themselves are creating some of that confusion.
I think it’s natural for a new category like this to happen. I think it’s exacerbated because there’s so many different approaches, so many use cases, which I think is only speaking to the necessity. The value behind the category. We’re learning more and more of all the different variations and use cases, for these demo automation or sales demo technologies.
Just to kind of reduce it down to 4, I thought it’d be really good to set the stage to add some clarity of what are these demo technology types.
You’ve got the interactive video. Those are the video walk throughs. Those are the prerecordings. Some choose your own adventure, but it’s essentially a video of the product tour or the product demo.
Seismic, I know, plays in this well.
Consensus does this really well. They’re one of the first folks to join the market.
You’ve got the product tours, which I would say the vast majority of the 40 plus vendors in the demo automation space come from the product tour space, and there’s even different flavors in the product tours.
You’ve got screenshots. You’ve got some of the HTML components.
But essentially, I have an asynchronous view of my product that I can view through a link that can be shared out, that can be an embed on a website or landing page.
And then you have kind of a newer variant, which is cloning or sandbox, which is it’s kind of a product tours plus.
It’s more responsive. It’s more of a clone or copy of the front end, the dom, the HTML.
If you’ve ever seen one that allows you to kind of click in, you can see hovers, the more responsiveness versus a static image of the product tours, I would liken to this. And it does have some more functionality with some of the back end components that let the product be as realistic as possible versus being the real thing.
And then you have a live component. The actual real product that’s pulled up, that you’re logged in, you’re with the customer, that has real live data where you’re actually you’re not faking it. It’s not a copy. It’s not a sandbox.
It’s the legitimate product that’s live, both in a product perspective as well as you having a live interaction with the buyer.
So these are the 4 variants.
Hopefully, that adds some clarity. Brian, anything you would add to this before the next slide?
Brian Cotter
Just along the lines of, I’ve been very fortunate to work with companies that really looked at this as a full journey. You know, BMC Software to Salesforce to Zuora to InsideSales and now Seismic over the last twenty-four plus years.
You know, there’s different needs for different points of that journey. And I think that highlighting the power of this, where your needs are and where you can go to look for some solutions is critical because you are right.
You know, 4 years ago, I looked in this category because I believe that there are ways we could be more efficient and tell better stories consistently and have a library of them.
There’s 4 to 6 vendors out there that were kind of just starting. And to see 40 exploding in different ways, and attacking it in different use cases or different methods, it really is awesome to see because the buyers are driving this.
They are expecting and demanding more, and we need to deliver something that’s going to help them make a decision on the best product for their company and their needs. Looking forward to kind of digging in a little bit more, and obviously talking and learning a little bit more about what each one of these does and how to apply them to your organization based upon your needs right now.
Justin McDonald
Great. You set up the next slide well, which is really the buying journey. At what point, an inflection point in the sales cycle or the buying cycle, can you engage? And so, we’ll kind of step through some of the use cases and then how the technologies can be applied and then the personas, because it’s more than just sales or presales. Marketing gets involved, customer success. There’s many applications and usages, sales demo tools.
So we’ve broken it between awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, and adoption. And I get, based upon your sales stages or your funnel between marketing and sales, you may call them something different, but this is a nice, over simplification of where a buyer may move through in the cycle.
Then you have different use cases and ways that you can consume or utilize the product. You’ve got on the website: if I have a product tour or a link that I send outbound that gets them to engage on some video or variation of a product tour.
You’ve got the harbor tour demo or first meeting, the discovery demo, which maybe you use a product to drive some additional use cases in discovery.
You’ve got the POV demo.
You may have a follow-up demo.
And for anyone that’s been in presales, there’s probably 16 to 20 different variations and iterations of when you’re doing a demo, or when you need to be called.
And then what we’re finding is the adoption phase. If you’re trying to expand, if you’re trying to get CSMs or post sales to really help the customers understand how their products can help different use cases, different buyers within their particular customer base, we’re seeing sales demo tools be used post sales with CSMs for expansion and or just better adoption.
Within that, you then have, “alright, here are the use cases. And then what’s the additional layer below that, that shows the technologies?”
So, we find that interactive videos and demos are great for top of the funnel.
Live demos kind of persist based upon when you need to engage the buyers all the way through interest through adoption.
Product tours as well can be used across the whole customer life cycle.
Cloning sandbox, typically within – hey, I’m interested. I want to get at least a feel for the product, or, hey, I want to trial it and kind of experience it myself before I purchase.
And then also we’re seeing uses for interactive videos as well in adoption.
And then even that layer below is, hey – how does this resonate with the different personas or buyers within our customers?
So you have marketing. You have sales. There’s presales and customer success.
So there’s a lot going on here between the phases and then the use cases and then the demo technology types and then the personas. But, hopefully, this adds some clarity to where different pieces come in throughout the customer journey.
So, Brian, anything you’d add in this area?
Brian Cotter
Yeah. I mean, just as far as the evolution of my career and kind of seeing the power of that story. I think marketing has always done a good job of looking at the customer experience, customer journey, or buyer’s journey and buyer’s experience.
One of the things I’ve seen over the last, probably 7 to 10 years or so, historically, your customer experiences and customer journeys have been defined by the vendor, and we now live in a world where the buyers are autonomous. They have access to a lot of information.
So having the tools that could have aligned your go-to-market motion to the tools that you use to support your teams, it’s no longer just a sales motion. It literally is a go-to-market motion.
And I talk about this a lot where every customer and prospect facing employee is now a seller. And every one of those sellers needs to make sure they are hitting the mark with that interaction, with that prospect, with that buyer, that client, that customer.
And it’s no longer about the first sale. It’s about every subsequent sale because we live in a world that’s portable.
If you don’t see value, you can go to another SaaS based application. So understanding that this is incredibly powerful and the underpinnings of your go-to-market motion and there’s many different ways for you to interact with your prospects, your customers, your buyers, your clients is key.
And this is an incredibly powerful slide for me because there’s so many different ways that presales leaders can use this, to not just show their sales leaders what they’re doing. They can start highlighting the impact that they’re having and point to specific areas.
So this slide alone could probably be the whole webinar, Justin, in my opinion. We could break this down, and maybe that’s part 2 of this webinar.
Justin McDonald
Yep. Let’s do it.
So, I think one of the things you said, is a theme that I’m seeing over and over again. Even last night, we had a big customer event where buyers have access to more information than they’ve ever had.
I heard you kind of say that, Brian. The digital transformation comes into play alongside COVID. People get isolated. They do have access to everything.
They want to experience the product async.
They have tons of research they’re doing.
But I think one of the things that’s happening that I heard loud and clear last night from a big customer of ours is they’re really ready to get together in a room. About 30 minutes in, like, we could not have had this discussion if it wasn’t live, if we weren’t together, meeting and talking.
So I think there’s this element where buyers on one hand of the spectrum have more information than they’ve ever had.
It’s also creating this element where if you can really nail the seller enablement, you can nail the live setting. It just provides this kind of magic wow factor that they’ve been missing staring at a Zoom all day or, you know, doing research.
So I think it’s a really good opportunity for sellers to show up, to really have that kind of 1 on 1 live experience, with the buyer.
Brian Cotter
Justin, just to dig in or double click into one area there. A lot of my career, obviously, pre COVID, was about getting your face in the place and walking the halls and and working with customers in a live environment where you can do discovery, you can actually do the meetings, and you can do the follow-up.
You know, one of the evolutions of buyers being so armed and knowledgeable is they have a tendency to do a lot of research to solve their own problems. And one of the challenges that I’m always struggling with is, we can do root cause to a symptom or a buyer can say, I have this symptom.
Let me solve that symptom. But one of the things about the powerful elements of being live and understanding your buyer as good, if not better, than they know themselves, is the ability to kind of peel back that onion, not to the symptom, but to the root cause.
Having that live relationship to be able to understand their world, to meet and greet them, but also be able to come back and show them how you can actually solve the real root cause of what they’re going through versus just a symptom. That is a challenge, I think, to all presalespeople because the more we enable the buyers, the more they can try and solve their own problems.
But sometimes, they’re solving the symptom, not the root cause. I think it’s a very good point about being live and being able to show them their future and their world in a way that they could solve those really big problems is important.
And the live piece, I think, that we can’t lose sight of it, even though we’re going to a digital world or we’re seeing more of a push to a digital journey.
Justin McDonald
Yeah. And you’d mentioned kind of getting to the root cause versus just a symptom.
I think, one, if you’re not solving the root cause pain, for any business – the renewal, the churn, just the overall value to the business – it’s going to reveal itself if you’re not truly solving the pain point.
And to your point of getting to the pain, it goes back to the criticality of great discovery.
If you can really peel back the onion, having the time with the buyer, even though it may be short compared to how it used to be many, many years ago. Using that time to really understand what’s driving the project, what’s the pain point, what’s the actual root cause versus just a symptom. Then taking that and being able to harness it into the actual presentation, into the actual demo, into the data and the story that you’re trying to tell into the live demo.
I always tell our team those little details matter. It is the difference between winning and losing, if you can incorporate them into the demo.
Brian Cotter
Justin, I just want to layer one part on it, because I want to double click on the live demo part, is that you hear a lot of people saying no demo without discovery. And I’ve always been a big fan of knowing where to aim and figuring it out.
But the reality is the buyers are a little bit different, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t demo something that’s unique, relevant, personalized. The buyers have a lot of tools to do research.
But with generative AI, my team and my value team, we actually have structured prompts that allow us to use generative AI to understand the business of the person that we’re going to meet with, to understand at another level. We don’t have enough time in the day to do the research.
I think you started that comment about the preparation to go into meetings. As many tools and powerful elements that the buyers have to do research, our sellers have the same capability.
So you can still do great discovery and come to a meeting with a point of view to actually validate or politely challenge your buyers, your customers, your prospects to a point that you can actually deliver a live demo that is really relevant, unique, and personalized without having to spend the traditional couple of days or hours doing discovery. You still need to do your homework before you present a live demo. But there’s different ways that you could accelerate that and come with a stronger point of view to make the live demo even more powerful, maybe in a shorter amount of time than it historically took us in the past.
Justin McDonald
Yeah. I love that. I think the gen AI component within sales enablement, some of the stuff that Seismic does in preparation, some of the things I’ve seen in rev tech or sales engagement, they’re doing a really good job of informing the sellers with as much information as possible so they can carry that through into discovery to have a much more impactful conversation. I think that’s great.
We took a little bit from this slide, which is great, Brian. But I think live demos enhance buyer enablement. They just do.
I think the real time interaction is so critical, being able to get that feedback, to be able to adapt to the buyers’ needs.
We’ve talked about personalization.
It’s everything, especially as you’re trying to set yourself apart from the rest of the market. Having a tailored experience in a live demo that’s personalized, it’s relevant, not a static product or a simulation, there are places for that.
But when you’re getting to help align to those root cause issues, not just the symptoms, being able to tailor that in the actual demonstration – in the product that you’re actually buying – is so critical. And then I think another thing, and you will appreciate this in sales enablement or just overall go-to-market in general, but authentic capabilities.
You never want to mislead the buyer. Being able to show the actual product, how it works in its genuine setting, the actual use cases that they can use the moment it’s turned on for them, is so critical.
And the only way to do that is to have the actual live product. So I think that, from a selling style, but also making sure the buyer enablement is great, and the customer experience is equally as equally as good.
And then competitive differentiation. This is a big piece that you want to make sure the buyers can do their research.
You want to meet them where they’re at and inform them as best as possible. But at the end of the day, people buy from people.
Having that moment where – if there are any misconceptions, if there are any things in the selling cycle that maybe were interpreted incorrectly, having that moment where you can sit down with the buyer, have a discussion, explain what’s going on, differentiate between the competition – is so critical.
Brian Cotter
I love this slide, Justin, I always I’ve always kind of felt you need to have a defensible position in whatever you present. You understand the buyer.
We talked about the discovery. We talked about making it unique, relevant, personalized, but being able to navigate through to address their use cases.
But if they ever ask a question – being like, “hey, listen. That looks awesome as far as what you did. Really see how you do it. But, how did you make it happen? Why did you approach it that way?”
And that’s the double click when you’re in a live environment, you can take your flow that you’ve gone through, and it’s what I call the yo-yo rule. You can basically yo-yo to answer that question and come back.
You’re not going down a different path that’s going to change the flow. But if you really know their business, you know where you have to start, you know where you have to end, but you know questions are going to come up.
Having the flexibility to know you can hit the story, but you can still yo-yo back and forth and come back to the main points is critical.
So real time is huge.
Making it their own and tailored is awesome.
Highlighting where you need to hit your marks, as far as being authentic, but then being able to highlight where you are and how you’re different in a live environment is really incredibly powerful.
Whether you’re doing it on Zoom or whether you’re actually in a conference room, it doesn’t matter. Having that flexibility to have that defensible position is critical.
And something that I’ve tried to do my whole career is – if I build something, I’m not going to show it all. But if I get asked a question, I need to show them I know how it was built and why it was built that way.
Justin McDonald
Agreed. There’s only so much positioning and relationship building you can do, a-sync or in an email or copy that you’re putting in front of them.
The ability to talk through it, to position, to have inflection, to be able to interact and make sure that: one, you fully understand their requirements, and two, they fully understand what you’re capable of, what you bring to the table, and the challenges that you solve for them. So, that interaction, that competitive differentiation only happens, at least in its best form, during the live demo.
So as we were talking through this, you hear this ambiguous term live.
I thought it’d be good to kind of level set as we’re double clicking on this. What is live and what is it not?
I think from a pure sales demo perspective, from demo automation, live is not a clone or copy of your live product.
There’s a place for that. We sell that in the buying journey and when you may introduce a product tour.
It’s not a generic one size fits all experience. Brian, we’ve been talking about personalization and tailoring it to customer needs.
You know, it’s not focused on interactive leave behinds. It’s not an asynchronous session and it’s not using a product tour during a live demo.
In tandem with that, live is using the actual authentic product. Logging into your product where it is the actual tenant.
It’s the actual product where you can navigate. You can go anywhere. You have live data creating a personalized experience. Brian, you’d mentioned this with the yo-yo.
Live is the ability to navigate anywhere, do anything. We always use the term no hidden brick walls, no potholes.
If you’ve ever been in presales, you’ve played the game stump the chump where some buyers just want to have fun and they want to go where they want to go, and you have to be able to serve them well. You have to be able to go anywhere, do anything.
So that is a core component of live – having the flexibility to really navigate where the buyer needs you to go, having that real time interaction. And, again, we’ve talked through this, live as best for relationship building and it’s best for closing deals.
Brian Cotter
Yeah. I kind of call them the techie dictator, the person in the room that’s going to throw the grenade at you and kind of derail everything.
And just because you have the ability to show it, doesn’t mean you need to just because you have the capability. You know, I think it also gives you an opportunity when you’re live to really ask qualifying questions or to understand the needs of someone that might be new.
And when you’re showing something, you bring up questions. It’s obviously either a legit objection that you can address or you can say I’d love to learn more about that, and you can really apply it to the next part of the story you need to tell.
And that’s really powerful because when you’re doing a live demonstration, you are actually at the same time learning more about that buyer and what is important to them. Some things you may already know, but some of the things may pop up. So everything you mentioned here, I completely agree with.
And it’s also the power of being able to morph that story into including a bigger, more powerful value driven outcome based solution that you can deliver.
Justin McDonald
To your point, the presales people that have the situational awareness to know when to adapt, where they come in with this preconceived notion or script of where we need to go and the learnings that you get from the live interaction that gives them the wherewithal to pivot or go down a path that they hadn’t planned, based upon some of the learnings. So I think the best presales or and AEs that have that awareness in the EQ to pick up on that, it’s a difference maker.
So and by the way, the dictator, 100% going to my glossary. That’s pretty good. I love it.
So, as we look at the live demo technology, this whole webinar is about buyer enablement and what does the category look like. I think it’s really important to understand the two different variations of live.
Especially, as every single software company has a different go-to-market motion. Some are more PLG focused. Some are more enterprise, kind of sales led.
Either way, with the SaaS product, there’s different components that make up live and how they work.
And there’s this concept of overlay versus data injection. So there’s the live product in which case, both overlay and data injection harness.
And overlay is mainly known for text and image replacement. It’s more superficial.
The thing that data injection is known for is it’s at the API layer. It’s within the bowels of the product that allows all areas, all functions of the product, to do what it’s supposed to do, to render how the product and engineers that built that SaaS product designed it to do.
And then there’s this data continuity control. As we talked about going anywhere, doing anything, overlay is really great for personalization. It’s really great for text replacements or setting up some tailored experiences.
But if you have an application that needs to drill into a dashboard or click through a workflow or go deeper into a report or information that cascades throughout the entire application, not just one screen, that data continuity control is critical and linked datasets.
We’re getting into some technology here, but from an API perspective, there’s many components about an application that are controlled on 1 page or 5 pages or 10 pages.
So making sure that you have the ability to not only control the data, but make sure a consistent story is being told, and it happens automatically is such a critical part of data injection. Because with overlay, if you have the ability to change it or use Gen AI to change it, you have to tell it – or it’s not going to automatically learn the calculations of the app.
It’s not going to understand, hey. If I change this particular metric here that then flows to this dashboard, you have to manually get out the calculator as a presalesperson or AE to then make sure that the story makes sense. And so that data continuity control is so critical.
Hopefully, that’s some good education between what an overlay of a live application looks like versus a data injection application.
Awesome. So one of the things that I am extremely passionate about is the word data is thrown around quite a bit.
We hear data on intent. We hear data on analytics. We have buyer data, seller data.
For me, within the demo automation space, all of the intent data is really great.
You want to understand the buying committee and where people are looking. But when we say data as it relates to the actual live product, data is a story.
If you look at the UI, if you look at an actual product, without the data behind it, there is no story. There’s no workflow. There’s no data. There’s no information.
There’s just a blank, stale UI. So the data is a story that you want to tell in presales.
And so when it comes to data injection, it goes beyond just the live demos because – and I had a rep that said this, so I’ll steal his terminology – it’s kind of garbage in, garbage out.
If you’re wanting to do a product tour or you’re wanting to do a clone or sandbox or interactive video, all really great use cases, all very valid, all super important in the demo automation category. If you do not have the actual product rendering naturally with the right data, the right personalization, the right story, the right use case that you want to tell… All of those other ancillary assets that you’re creating in a video or a clone or a product tour are predicated on having that live product that renders naturally, that has the great data.
So data injection is so critical because it not only impacts the live demo, it impacts the actual assets that are created from the live product. Right? The product tours, the clone, the sandbox, the interactive video.
Brian, I know this is something Seismic does. You are doing product tours. You are also doing live. So I know this is something your team is really augured in on.
Brian Cotter
Yeah. I think at the end of this, we’ll get into a little bit more of the specific use case of Seismic.
But one of the things that really resonates with me on multiple levels. And as I mentioned, I spent about 8 years at Salesforce, and one of the things that we really wanted to do is Marc Benioff was always like, it’s always about the story, always about the experience, always about how you’re going to show them their future.
And a good friend and a coworker for a number of years by the name of Todd Janssen, he ran this group called Q branch, and we had this tool called the org customizer. So we could spin up a clone.
We could then go in and update the environment, then we would go in and really make it sing, to look like their future. The applications that we have now, you know, it’s not just kind of flat file updates.
It really is engagement data. It’s interactive data. It’s metric data. It’s really complex elements.
And going back to what you talked about earlier when we mentioned grow at all costs versus growth profitability – highlighting the outcome and the value, you need to show them their world from a standpoint of, here’s the data – you’re looking at the front side and the problems you’re trying to solve. Here are the workflows that are going to address these use cases, for these personas, to address these problems.
Oh, by the way, at the end of it, here’s what the data will look like. Some of that in the applications that we’re selling or have sold, that might take 3, 6, 9, 12 months to actually have a company see the power of that.
So to be able to actually show a company, by manipulating the data or massaging the data to tell the story as you alluded to in a live environment, is incredibly powerful because it’s not like “imagine if you will” over here. It’s like, “this is your world. This is your problem. This is your workflow. These are your workers. Oh, by the way, if you do it the right way, this is the outcome that you should be doing.”
If you don’t have the data that underpins that, you are basically just giving them a painting that’s blank and saying, well, paint what you want to. This gives us the ability to actually help paint that picture – to them based upon the real world that they’re living.
And the one thing I’ve learned about doing this a long time, we’ve always been account centric where we actually had to sell the first deal and actually help them be successful over the course of time. It’s not like you back the truck up, throw the software over, and then you leave.
This gives us the ability to continue that story as they evolve using more of your product. So having tools like this and being able to manipulate the data across that full buyer’s journey so you can continue from the 1st sale, to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or the upsell, crosssell, renewal, expansion opportunities is critical.
So, as you know, Justin, you and I have talked a lot about this. I do believe the data is the key to everything.
And if you don’t have a good story backed by good data, the demo is just a visual prop with nothing behind it.
Justin McDonald
Yeah. Won’t resonate, fall flat. So, I completely agree.
There’s the element as well of, even if you have the means to try to manipulate a screen or an image or a product tour or take a picture of a graph or change HTML in a clone, it can work in some cases.
Many times, it’s disingenuous because you want the app to render naturally. You want the app to operate exactly how your product and engineering team has designed.
And so feeding it the data so that it can work alongside the actual product in real time is just a more authentic approach.
Brian Cotter
And just as far as just putting this on the orders of magnitude, when I did leave Salesforce, I had 85 separate orgs that I owned based upon working with hundreds of different companies in different ways, shape, or forms. And being able to keep up with that story, it becomes a scalability problem and a continuity problem of the strength of that story.
So being able to kind of refresh that data to align to the next evolution or iteration of that company’s growth is critical. And that’s a thing that we need to think about, is that the data keeps everything fresh and top of mind.
When you are highlighting the way that your company is innovating and how they can take advantage of more stories, you’re not starting from scratch. You can continually build that story with them.
Justin McDonald
That’s great.
We’ve obviously worked closely with your team, just really great people, by the way, Brian.
I appreciate your leadership over the years. Some really cool results, some really cool data points – speaking of creating data and maintaining tenants – just the amount of time and effort it took pre Saleo.
So, I’d love to just kind of hear from you about the experience, kind of what you guys are doing with Seismic and Saleo.
Brian Cotter
No. I appreciate the time, and obviously, a lot of kudos goes to Warren and Ron for digging in and really understanding the problems we were having and where Saleo could jump in and help out.
Initially, this goes back probably a year and a half ago if not further, we were running into 2 challenges. One of them was how do you continually have a unique, relevant, personalized experience every single time when you’re building the product, you’re fixing the product, you’re innovating on the product, you’re acquiring new companies, you’re putting things together.
That became a problem for Warren Villanueva and what we call w-branch, or the global presale services team that Ron owns, is the ability to make sure that we always have the best version of Seismic to tell that story, that could be morphed to look like the future of whatever company we’re selling to. That was problem number one as far as how do we actually keep up the speed of the ever changing buyer and the ability to manipulate the environment to tell that story that aligns to the problem we need to solve and the outcomes that they need to deliver to their company.
The second part is we had an unpredictable and out of control ever growing demo cost situation. So our customer acquisition costs were hard to manage.
And with the evolution of AI, AI layers a lot more cost onto these applications. So those were the two big problems that we were looking to solve.
And the way that we were looking at it is, when Warren and myself and Ron were looking at supporting a deal, it was a very significant sized deal, that had very unique needs, that we actually had to figure out how to do that. Here’s your pre-problem solving data, and here’s the impact that you could have.
We actually had 5 days and 5 people using bots and real human beings to manipulate data, and it became clear very quickly to us that we can’t scale this. We can’t support it.
So we wanted to manipulate that data to tell the best story in an easy way.
The other part, as I was talking about, is there’s time and effort and energy in spinning up environments.
We were talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of demo environments – it takes time to actually spin those up, make sure they’re up to date when we have new releases and break fixes and hot fixes and innovation and acquisitions. It’s hard to manage a platform that’s growing both wider and deeper.
And at the end of the day, you can use technology or you can actually hire more people. But in the world we live in today, hiring more people is at a premium.
You have to justify it. So for us, looking at this, we needed ways that could actually help us manipulate that data, reduce the amount of time that we were doing the electrical or plumbing work, that we call it, on these demo environments. But also realize we weren’t going to have the luxury of just saying add more people, add more people, add more people.
We need to take a step back to try and solve the problem of the ever growing out of control, unpredictable costs, yet still delivering that unique, relevant, personalized experience in every interaction. Not just for one SE, but for every SE at Seismic and every go to market person that’s presenting the product and do it at scale. So that is the number one reason or no, the two reasons, Justin, that we sought out an opportunity to solve this problem with your company and being able to roll it out.
We are just now really starting to see some of the impact because we are a global company with different segments, geos, and verticals that have different needs for us to apply Saleo too.
Justin McDonald
I got to see some of this firsthand. I’ll share a little bit of a personal story, I may not have even shared with you in the past.
But, you sent the global presales team to the Saleo corporate headquarters here in Atlanta – so thank you for doing that – when we were doing the onboarding and training. And, this speaks to the 5 people for 5 days to create one realistic demo.
There’s a lot of data, a lot of great functionality in Seismic. It takes a long time to prep for it.
And when we were training the global presales team, Ron, and Warren’s teams had a competition. Basically, “hey, now that we have Saleo, how can we show how we can instantly create this data in a few hours or a few minutes, versus a few days?” So we got to watch your team do some presentations and we got to judge it. It was really cool to see them. The wow factor of: one, even if I could have done this, it would take me 5 plus days to do. Now I can do it in seconds. And two, I’m able to personalize and do things that we just couldn’t do before because it was just untenable. It was too costly.
So it was really neat to see firsthand, see one of your team present, to get to meet some really cool, talented people, and to see the impact they were having just a day out of training.
Brian Cotter
Thank you for that.
I think that the next generation of presales teams are going to need to have this capability. I can be very high level sometimes but I’ve tried to bring it down to the street where a lot of my team lives, and where I loved actually spending a lot of my career there – is the ability to kind of go in and create that demo environment.
And I simplify it by saying, I need UI/UX capabilities and I need the ability to manipulate data. If I can have those two pieces, I can literally show a customer their future.
Like I said, I can be kind of high level and say, oh, it’s very easy – we just do this. But to actually start breaking it down, it’s very hard to do, hard to do at scale.
With the evolution of buyer enablement and with Salio and what you’ve been doing, it’s making it easier for us to actually tell better stories and to make an impact so customers will take action to partner with Seismic. Initially, but also, maybe in different ways as we roll out our products and services to help them solve more problems and drive to the outcomes that they want.
Justin McDonald
That’s great. Thank you for that. It’s also been neat to see the work that Ron and Warren and his team have done to create better datasets and transform the tenants. And then how you’re using it to do product tours and some of the digital selling rooms, some of the other stuff with Seismic that you’re harnessing Capture for.
So it’s been neat to see how it’s impacted both sides of the house.
But we’ll stop there.
I’m not sure if there’s any questions, but Katie, we’ll give you control back to do some delegation here.
Katie Kanaday
We actually do have a few questions.
Brian, the first one I’ll actually ask you. You were talking earlier about how your team is using Gen AI to basically prep for demos or even do some discovery.
Could you give any insight of maybe some prompts that your team is using or even other ways that they’re using Gen AI to help with their presales efforts?
Brian Cotter
Yeah. That is a great question.
Kosta and Neil Fotistos, who runs our value team, a lot of what we do as we morph from solving point product problems that people are having to actually really showing the value in the outcomes, we need to do better discovery in the front side. But sometimes we don’t always get the time to meet with customers or they don’t want to invest a couple hours to do true discovery. So working with that team, we have looked at publicly traded companies, and we’ve looked at privately traded companies.
We’ve created 4 different prompts that enable us to use generative AI to give us almost an account planning or account strategy breakdown in a format that allows us to align Seismic solutions to the the things that we’re picking up on in some of these responses from the Gen AI questions. So we will go in and understand the go-to-market strategies. If there are public companies: looking at their earnings calls, ripping into some of their 10k’s, asking specific questions around what initiatives they have, or looking for keywords in certain earnings calls reports to extract it.
The thing is you can’t just hit a button and have Gen AI say, “oh, here’s your whole demo flow.” But it will give you data that you can then interpret and apply. Because like I said, we have different geos, different segments, and different verticals that require us to know different sets of data.
Justin, to your point, we have to manipulate our demo environments to tell a story for financial services. Everyone’s like, “oh, great. Is it asset management or is it wealth management? Is it banking or is it insurance? Is it retail or is it commercial?” There’s a lot of nuances to the data we collect.
So, whoever asked that question – I think I saw it come in, we are more than happy to take a side call to walk them through as far as what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
But generative AI is a great way to get 80% of the information so you can create a point of view and then be able to validate or politely challenge your customer, your prospect, your client to say, this is what we’ve learned. This is how we can apply our product, but we want to vet out some of these things.
So that’s a little formula in my own head that I’ve always played with, I plus E equals M. Information is all about learning or sharing information.
Through discovery or Gen AI, you can actually create connections or doorways that open up these connections to trust – where then you can go in and really do discovery from a live environment and really be able to help guide them. But then, if you actually know the information and you can connect on that emotional level, because they know that they could trust you, you become memorable far beyond the product that you’re selling.
And interestingly enough, it’s the same formula, but it’s E+I equals M. It’s what Hollywood has been using for about 70 years to create memorable films. If you can learn something and you can relate with it, you’ll be remembered.
If it’s generic and it’s not relevant, you’re not going to be remembered. And I think generative AI gives us a little bit of a head start.
Justin, you and I have talked a little bit about this, I would love to see how I could eventually inject some of those responses to be able to help automate some of the creation of this data injection and some of the manipulation of demo environments. We’re still early in the phase, but I think generative AI and the power of it is here to stay.
Justin McDonald
Yeah, we’re just getting started.
I think the impact it has to sales tech and martech and just the overall go-to-market is substantial. So I think we’re just at the very beginning stages of how we can apply it.
Katie Kanaday
And we’ve got one more question, because I think everyone in presales and sales has probably asked themselves this. How can we make demoing easier for presales and sales? And you can interpret that any way you want.
But what are some tips, tricks, tactical things that teams can do from the presale side or even the sell side to make demoing a little bit easier?
Justin McDonald
Brian, you want to take that one?
Brian Cotter
This is what I call the alphabet rule. Just because your product can show all 26 letters, doesn’t mean that you have to show it.
I think going back to what I highlighted earlier about generative AI and the power of discovery, married with what Justin obviously has highlighted here about the injection of data. If you can realize that sometimes the most powerful story is 3 letters in the alphabet, and if you can figure that out, you can tell an incredibly powerful story.
So it’s not necessarily about how I demo better. I think, more importantly, do you know where to aim? Do you know your audience and do you know the outcome that your buyer is looking for? If you know the audience, you know your stuff, and you know where to aim, you can then apply any story to a technology and the fact that Saleo can help you insert the uniqueness, the relevance of the data to make it look like their world.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but if you don’t have a good story, the demo is just a visual that’s not going to hit the mark. If you have a good story and you can create that visual to align to that story, you are going to have a customer for life because they believe that you can help solve their problem today and tomorrow.
So it’s about the business acumen, about understanding your audience, understanding your stuff, and understanding where to aim. Then you can apply that to the visual using tools like Saleo to help you tell that unique relevant personalized story every time.
Justin McDonald
Yeah. I think that’s great, Brian. To the genesis of the question, how can you make demoing easier? I think the answer is it just depends on how you demo in your app and the things you’re struggling with and your go-to-market motion.
But I think the vast majority, no matter the type of app you’re demoing or whether you’re presales led demos or AEs are giving demos, is reduction in demo prep time and scalability. And it could be scalability of: I have 1 presalesperson or 2 AEs, at which case I’m replicating my time. I’m able to perform functions much easier and faster and reducing the time it takes to get the demo in the right state and or the optionality to do personalization.
But, yeah, demo prep time. I think if you can find a way to reduce the amount of time spent to prepare a baseline demo and then exponential reduction of taking it to the next level of personalization and making it relevant for the buyer. Because I think most of the difficulties around making demos easier or why they’re hard is it’s really hard to get them in the right state. It’s hard to tell the right story.
Furthermore, demos become much easier when you’re actually presenting it, when it’s really easy to tell a story that resonates with the buyer.
To Brian’s point of aiming in the right direction. It’s one thing to know where to aim, but if you don’t have the ability to aim, it’s very difficult to do.
I think scalability, whether there’s 10,000 people demoing or 1 or 2, reducing the time it takes to get them to the point where you’re wowing with that product. You’re wowing that buyer because it’s hitting the mark, and then scaling that, replicating that across as many people as you need to. So Awesome.
Katie Kanaday
I wanted to thank you both for giving us your time and talking, and sharing all of your insights, And thank you to everyone that attended.
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