It’s been a crazy month since our last blog! Since we last updated, Saleo raised $1.5M dollars to help companies like yours give better software demos. We’ve had a ton on our plate, handling new customers, and planning our upcoming webinar – A Perfect Demo Environment Revealed! With Peter Cohan of Great Demo! It couldn’t be more exciting here at Saleo HQ, but we wanted to spend some time outlining for you, all the incredible ways we’ve seen Saleo help our customers.
As a sales engineer, you know how integral the sales demo environment is for sales performance in SaaS. It allows you to give clients a realistic representation of what your product offers, and the right sales demo aligned to your prospects needs, helps to take customers further down the funnel.
However, sales demo environments come with several challenges and limitations. These can significantly reduce the chances of closing a deal, especially when showcasing a complicated software platform
Fortunately, you can leave such issues in the past by upgrading to a robust sales demo environment.
But how do you know you need an upgrade to your current demo environment?
For starters, you often apologize to clients as your demo system does not include an example they ask for. Or, you have to say to frequently say the feature you want to show is not in your demo environment.
Each time you give such an excuse, it casts doubts over your capacity to deliver and the product you’re showcasing. Even worse, the more doubt there is, the more likely you are to lose your deal, or be entrenched in a length proof-of-concept.
If this is a familiar feeling for you, it’s time for a new approach. Read on to learn how you can increase win rates and revenue with Saleo.
How Is Saleo Helping Pre-Sales Teams Close More Business?
1. Demo Preparation
You’ve probably created numerous sales demos in your career. With each, you try and demonstrate the value your product or service has to current and prospective clients. Generally, this involves demonstrating and explaining key features and capabilities.
Sadly, that’s just the bare minimum.
If you want better results with sales demonstrations, you need to delve a little deeper and have clear objectives. So, begin by determining what you hope to achieve instead of preparing demos and waiting to see how it goes. It’s only by beginning with the end in mind that you’ll get desirable results.
In this regard, Saleo is helping our customers showcase their demos built after some of our favorite discovery questions:
- What does your product do differently, or what unique feature does it offer?
- Who would use your product?
- How can the unique features benefit potential users?
- What results do your prospects expect?
Similarly, you may also want to incorporate open-ended sales questions to get prospects talking to you. These are designed to pique their curiosity and increase engagement, getting them to visualize using your product.
2. Personalization
While you may have a unique value proposition, there’s a chance that several other companies have something similar. And, they’re competing with you for the same market. Just like you, they’ll prepare sales demos to persuade clients.
Due to the high competition levels, consumer decisions are not solely driven by product features. So, even if you have a feature-rich solution that stands out head and shoulders above the rest, you’re not guaranteed to lead the market.
One of the elements of building a deal-winning sales demo is aligning it with customer pain points and positioning your brand as the ideal solution. However, this is not possible when using a rigid and restricting demo environment.
This is one of the areas where Saleo absolutely crushes the competition. With a focus on versatility and flexibility, it allows you to personalize live sales demo environments, and make them data-complete in seconds. By moving away from generic content like your competitors are using, you can increase your win rates.
Saleo offers customization capabilities in the following areas:
1. Text
In sales, the little things count for a lot. When you’re facing clients, you may be eager to show them your product’s best features. While that’s important, it only answers one of the questions they’ll have. This is especially so with clients you have not worked with before.
Beyond the product’s capabilities, they’ll question whether you and your brand are reliable or the right fit. As they try to figure that out, their focus on the presentation will reduce. Therefore, you need to find creative and subtle ways to address these concerns right out of the bat.
Saleo can help with this. You can edit generic information pulled from the demo environment through its text editing features. This allows you to:
- Change company names to reflect the prospects industry
- Change industry references to match the client.
- Change user names, to people in their org, so they can see themselves using it
- Adjust values to reflect particular use cases
By providing such detail inside your demo environment, prospects will be more focused and engaged during the presentation.
2. Tables
You’ll need data when trying to convince a client that your solution perfectly suits their needs. The goal of using data is to help them clearly understand the impact your software will have on their business. So, along with industry data, you need to provide insight relating to businesses of a similar size and nature.
Therefore, you need to look beyond generic data. With Saleo, you’ll get complete control over every row and every column in your tables.
For instance, if your product has a list of companies and statistics around how they responded to an advertising campaign, you can bulk replace every row with companies your prospect may target, and tweak the metrics shown in those fields to match the best-in-class performance you know your product can offer.
While such details may seem insignificant, they make all the difference.
3. Images/Icons
By nature, human beings are visual creatures. This means people’s brains are better at storing and recalling visual information than text.
It also means that your prospects can pick up when you are demoing generic demo instances. One of the most common places our customers replace images is in the header bar of the product, white labeling their instances to their customer, or changing the users avatars to pictures of people in the companies they’re selling to.
4. Graphs/Metrics
When it comes to visual representations of data, graphs are one of the most effective tools. Taking complex data and reporting on it simply, and visually is a hallmark of SaaS technology. However, when demoing these graphs in complex environments, generating the data needed to render the graphs, and keep them updated in real-time was too costly for most customers.
Saleo’s graph designer gives you complete control over your products graphs, metrics and more, in real-time. You can easily push 30, 60, 90 or even 10+ years worth of data to any graph in your environment in seconds.
Get Ahead of the Competition
As the level of competition increases in the SaaS ecosystem, any edge you can get can significantly boost business outcomes.
In this regard, Saleo can be an invaluable asset in your arsenal. It allows you to personalize sales demonstrations, thus increasing win rates while reducing time-to-close. So, request a demo today to find out how Saleo can improve your win rates, today.
