Laura Cotton:
I’m Laura Cotton and I want to thank you all for joining us. This session is specifically designed to help you scale your best Saleo demos. I am pleased to be joined today by two of our Saleo experts, Eunice Pack and Brian Hornick.
Before we dive in, two quick reminders. We’re going to have time at the end of the session for Q&A. Please feel free to submit those questions at any time during the webinar in that Q&A window. Also, today’s webinar will be recorded and we will be sharing it after the session.
Today’s session, we’re going to cover the best ways to share demos internally and some of the common mistakes we see. We’re also going to cover the scaling engine, so master demos and demo sync. We’re going to share a scaling checklist. We’re going to go through some tips and tricks, and then we’ll dive into the Q&A at the end. With that I’m going to hand things over to Eunice to get us started.
Eunice Pak:
Thanks so much, Laura. Thank you everybody for joining us today.
Here’s a brief review of the agenda that we’ll go over today. And then Brian and I will tag team between sharing the slides and actually hopping into the live Saleo product. Using our training site. So if you’re a customer, you may be familiar with it and have seen it.
We will keep an eye on questions, but we have some time specifically for Q&A at the end. So we may answer them as we go if it’s relevant. If not, we’ll save those until the end and make sure that you get your answers. All right. So the first place we’re going to start is doing a quick review or a refresher on the best way to share demos internally.
There’s a few different access types. So you have viewers, editors, and owners. And I think before we even get into what type of access you should be giving your users, it’s important to think about what your user base looks like in terms of the types of seats they’re assigned in Saleo, but also what are your use cases?
What are the demo stories that you’re telling? One of the common mistakes that we see customers make is they are often over assigning editor access. And when that happens and there’s not a good process around when you’re editing or updating your parent demo, who has access to edit and update those demos, you can oftentimes write over each other, that whole idea of having too many cooks in the kitchen.
So before you even grant access to your users, you want to start to think about: who do we want to have access to edit? Who do we want to have access to simply play? And who do we want to have access to duplicate or make personalized views? So when thinking about this, just remember that sales users cannot edit data within any tables or graph designers.
And that’s both at the parent demo level and personalized view level. They can only edit token and image replacement values. Demo creators, however, can be given access to add new text and image replacements within parent and personalized views. So something to remember again before you just go out and give access to all of your demos, to your all of your users.
Additionally, you want to think about who should have access to edit the parent demos. Something that we typically recommend is keeping a controlled group of editors for those parent demos. To ensure that you’re not writing over each other and that all of you are aligned on the updates and edits that are being made to those demos.
Then of course, you can see here, these are the various permissions you can grant and you can grant these permissions based on teams, seat types or even individual users. So you have that flexible access control. And we’ll show you all what that looks like in just a minute when we hop over into the platform.
Brian, anything that you would add here?
Brian Honick:
Yeah, I popped into the chat as well, but I just want you to think about any decks that you have had, any documents that you’ve shared internally. There is always going to be that parent document or parent slide deck, and I think we’ve all seen how much sprawl you can have when everyone has their own version or ability to edit.
Think about it like that with your demos. You don’t want everyone to be an editor, like Eunice mentioned. Be intentional with that so that you don’t have to go in and clean everything up later and consistently deal with a lot of chaos.
Eunice Pak:
Great point. So just to reiterate some common mistakes that we’ve seen when sharing, again, not being intentional, and that really comes down to what is your strategy, what are your processes in place?
We have some customers that do this really well. They have processes for things like demo naming, conventions, access, control levels, when to share, when to not share. We have some customers that may go into this and just immediately share their entire demo library with all of their users.
And a lot of times, to Brian’s point, that can create clutter, that can create noise in your library, and then users are left not knowing when to use what demos. So you just want to be super intentional about when you’re assigning access to these demos and what types of access you’re granting.
Alright, so getting into scaling here. So something to remember with the demo sync functionality, you now have the ability to have a parent level demo and any updates that you make to that parent level demo can automatically cascade down to all personalized views. And then we also have a third level of personalized views.
You may hear us reference those as views of views. I’ve even heard some people call them like grandchild views. It’s important to remember that you have that trickle down effect across all levels to any changes made at the parent level, template level. A couple things that I’ll mention here is that you want to be mindful about when you’re creating parent demos and personalized views versus when you’re creating duplicates of demos.
One thing to remember is that if you duplicate a parent level demo, that breaks it off from that hierarchy. So you also have to think about how many parent level demos do you want to be maintaining. Right, over time. So if from an implementation perspective, you have rolled Saleo out to your broader team, but you’re still in the process of developing new areas for takeover with Saleo, you’ll want to remember that any new tables, new columns, new sub tables that are added to your overall Saleo model will be need to be updated individually across all of your parent demos.
I’ll pause there and see, Brian, if there’s anything that you would add here or what you’re seeing across your customers when it comes to this demo sync hierarchy.
Brian Honick:
Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. When it comes to duplicating a great use case, it can be for different market segments. So right now the main master demo template that we’re showing here could be for an SMB and all of the data that that would correlate to that would be for an SMB customer.
You might also have mid-market, you have enterprise, and you could duplicate to ensure that those data sets match those market segments. And then you could create your different verticals below that, on your level two demos like you see here. So it very much depends on what you need and whether that’s absolutely valuable for you to do and whether you want to manage all of those.
But that would be where we see that happening and you’ll see a little bit more of that as we get into our demonstration.
Eunice Pak:
Perfect. So I’m actually going to hop over now into our demo environment which is what you’re seeing here. So hopefully you all see the Saleo training portal as well as the extension.
One question that I’m seeing here from Dawn. So there is a hierarchy view in the extension itself, but also within the Saleo portal. I’ll show you what that looks like in the extension. So you can see here I have a parent level demo. Just call it Acme Inc. For my SMB segment.
Like Brian mentioned, you want to be thoughtful about how you create your parent demos. So one example is many of our customers who sell to a wide variety of company sizes may have parent demos for each segment. So an SMB, mid-market, enterprise. Because the data that they want to be able to show, or the data story that they want to be able to tell, cannot be varied just by tokens and text replacements.
They actually have different sizes of data sets that they’re using across those various segments. So they have parent demos for those segments, and then within those segments. So if I click into this demo, you’ll see this is the parent demo for SMB. And then below that I have my personalized views for different industries within that SMB segment.
One thing that I’ll mention here is if you have created a parent demo, this sparkle icon is what allows you to create personalized views under this parent demo. So you’ll see here when I click on this, it’s telling me I’m about to create a personalized view, and then it’s going to allow me to give it a unique name, share it with other users on my team, and then create this as a personalized view. If you are in your library and you do not see that sparkle button, you simply just need to go to the demo settings and check this box here under set personalization options. And this is what allows you and others you’ve shared this parent demo with to create personalized views of this particular demo.
Brian, in a second, is going to show you how you create views of views, so you’ll be able to see what that hierarchy looks like when we take it even a step further. A couple things that I’ll mention here with personalized views. When you think about whether a demo should be a personalized view or another parent demo, a couple things to consider is can this data set be edited simply through tokens and text replacement, or is it a broader level adjustment to the data you need to make in the Saleo table or graph designers themselves?
So that’s the biggest thing to think about. If you make a duplicate of a personalized view or a view of a view, it simply creates another personalized view or a view of a view. It does not create a brand new parent level demo. So that’s something else to consider when thinking about duplicating or creating personalized views.
One other thing before I pass it over to Brian is that when you go to share these demos with a broader team, you’ll need to ensure that not only do you share the parent level demo, so you’ll come in and share, like we mentioned before, you can share it by seat type. And you’ll have all the various access levels for each seat type.
You can share it across teams that you’ve built within your organization, or you can also share it with individual users. And you can assign each individual user different levels of access. So not only do you need to share the parent level demo, but you’ll also need to share each individual personalized view as well. And that is also the case for views of views.
Then when creating those personalized views or views of views, make sure you look at each of those individual sharing options. Like who can access, who can make personalized views, who can play. I’ll pause here and pass it over to Brian so he can walk you all through the process of either creating a new personalized view or a view of a view and when that might be appropriate.
Brian Honick:
Awesome. Thanks, Eunice.
Okay, everyone should be seeing my setup here, where you can look at the hierarchy of what’s been shared. You’ll actually notice that I do not have access to that retail demo or the personalized view that Eunice had, and that that could be because I am actually in a different segment of the business that I would never even need to see that.
And so that goes to show that you don’t need to share all personalized views with all teams. It can create a lot of cloudiness in your actual setup. So what I see here though is the ability to play this demo. You’ll notice I can’t actually click into this demo because I don’t have edit access.
And the reason for that is, one, I’m a sales user, but also it wasn’t given to me. And the reason it wasn’t given to me is we don’t want to go in and change the data set at the parent level. So if I want to, I can go in and press play on this, and this is going to show me all of the data that is with that main master demo.
So what I will do if I’m a user, I’m going to launch Saleo, I will then find the demo and I can go ahead and press play on that. So now this is Acme, a hundred customers, it has a RR sales chart going up. But I know that this may not be as pertinent to the demo that I’m about to be giving to that prospect I’m about to be giving it to.
And I also know that when I was looking at those personalized views, I didn’t see that there was a software as a service personalized view. There’s finserv, there’s food and bev. I want something a bit more generic. And so this could be a good use case to get in and make a SaaS demo. And we already know this is for SMB because it has the SMB dataset in it.
So I’ll go ahead and create this. And while I’m doing that, I’m looking at all of these different sharing options. And for now, I don’t want to share this with anyone. I’m setting this up. If it works for me, I can share it later. I’ll go ahead and create that. Now what I am set up as is a sales user. So when I get in, this is what I’m seeing.
I’m seeing any tokens that have been set up by my demo creator at the master level. I’m also seeing any images that I want to change. Now, of course, I could go ahead and leave Acme there. That might be fine. And I will go in and now I could personalize these tokens.
So the tokens, you’ll notice it says customers. We have the MRR chart, but I need to make this a bit more personalized. And same thing when I go to the company table. A lot of these, it just says sales representative, marketing associates. It’s very generic and I want it to be a bit more software as a service focused. So I will go into Saleo AI. I can go ahead and find all of my positions, and since I have filtered my token library by this title, I will now be able to change all of these different tokens to something that might be more relevant.
Now, of course, I can start typing a prompt as to what I want to change. I can also look at previous prompts that I’ve typed. Maybe I have ones that work really well for me. You’ll notice that there are quite a few, maybe one works better than others, and what I would do then is I would press this little star icon. Next to a prompt that I’m happy with, and that would then show up in this star favorited folder.
So you’ll notice this prompt updates all employee job titles to reflect a fast-growing SMB SaaS company, replaces generic or administrative roles for realistic positions. Essentially, we are trying to drive towards a more realistic view for the values that are set.
I’ll go ahead and update that. You’ll notice some things won’t update, like chief Executive Officer, it’s probably already pertinent to the use case. And I’ll scroll down and make sure that everything looks good. And as long as everything looks good, I’m going to go ahead and accept those changes. Now when I go ahead and refresh my page, and for all of you that don’t know this as a demo creator or as a sales seat, when you have the extension open and you are within a demo, you can go ahead and refresh your page in the top, and that will hook in all of the changes that you’ve made.
So if you’re going and pressing play and stopping the demo and going back, that’s too many clicks to make sure that you’re seeing all those changes. Just a quick tip and trick to make this easier for you. You’ll also notice that we have our dashboard, and going back to the same thing, I may want to make this a bit more personalized.
So for that graph title, I probably want this to be open opportunities or maybe closed won opportunities, even better. And at the bottom I have my ARR, my customer account as well. And, I know that these are my customer accounts because they’re descriptions that have been placed by my demo creator to tell me what these numbers are actually for.
I know that this is a smaller customer, maybe 52. We have ARR of 600,000 and we have, I’ll go ahead and put that dollar sign in there. And then we have an MRR of 50,000. So just making some of these small tweaks and changes. Maybe I want this to be six regions. Instead, you’ll notice it says number of regions.
So it’s giving me the ability to change the things that I want to change, and if I ever want to revert back to the original value from that master demo, I can go ahead and press this button. And that brings back the original value that was set up for me by my demo creator. So everything is now set. I’ve changed all of my tokens.
I’m going to go ahead and run my demo. And at this point now we have closed won opportunities. The customers is a bit smaller, regions is smaller, ARR, et cetera. Then we have the table that is going to be a bit more pertinent to that use case. Now, what Eunice had mentioned was there’s always a use case where you may want to make that grandchild view.
That is where you would go in. And now I say, well, I know I’m giving a SaaS demo, but this is going to be for Pipeline IQ, a prospect that I’ve been working with for a while. And pretty much I’m happy with the data on my SaaS demo. But what I want to do is I want to make sure that this is pertinent to that customer.
So I’m going to go through. I have an image token that I can change, and that’s all I will need to do. Now we know that our prospects may not need to see everything as pertinent to them. If do, we can always make changes. You can ask your demo creators to do it, but at this point, this is fairly personalized for my Pipeline IQ demo.
Any time I’m giving more of a harbor a cruise demo for a SaaS company, I can always use my SaaS level two demo instead of my level three demo. And I could continue to make those additional views of views like Eunice mentioned, depending on the prospects I’m working with.
And now as those are there as a sales view, sales seat, I may have a demo coming up and I’m out of town and I need somebody else to give that demo for me, I can then share that demo out. With any of my colleagues by simply going in, going to my personalized view and sharing that with a particular team or a particular user.
So that walks you through a lot of how you can do that and why that’s important and as Eunice makes changes to that master demo or as you know, Saleo is consistently releasing work for you, we’ll release work in the master that parent demo at the top, and that will then trickle down to all of my personalized views.
So I’m always getting up to date functionality.
Eunice, is there anything you want to add here?
Eunice Pak:
Not here. We’ll go over some tips and tricks, but I think you made a great point around some of the tricks that you shared here. Love it.
So I’m going to go back to our slides here. What we want to talk through next is just around scaling.
This within your organization and a few items on a checklist that can help you in terms of how you can be more thoughtful and systemize your demo strategy. A couple things here. Number one, I would definitely recommend, if you are already a Saleo user, but you’re finding that as more users start to utilize a Saleo platform to demo your product. Maybe there’s just a little bit more clutter. You need to build in some processes.
So the first place we would recommend that you start is by auditing your demo library. If you’ve given access to a broader team, you may notice that over time there are a lot of demos being created within your demo library that maybe are more of a one-time use. For practice maybe. And so one thing that we would recommend again, is going through and determining which demos you want to keep, maybe which ones can be archived or deleted, and really cleaning up that view so that when your users go in to the extension, they know exactly what’s available to them, which ones are current, and which ones they can use live in their conversations with prospects.
Additionally, something else that you should consider is really identifying what your key demo stories are and ensuring that you have parent demos and personalized views according to your key audiences or key industries or segments. Then once you’ve identified those key stories, you can then start to create and flesh out your demo library with your parent demos for those specific data sets.
Then thinking about how you can further customize each of those more generic demos into industry specific location or language specific or segment specific personalized views. Another great point here on the checklist is cleaning up any duplicates from your library. This can happen over time. Again, like we said, the more demo creators you have, you probably need to do this maintenance or clean up a little bit more often. So that’s definitely something we recommend as well.
You can also nest demos within folders. So I don’t know if you saw when I was sharing mine, you can see that I have a folder for archived. And then everything else that’s current, I just keep at the main homepage here. So over time, as you create more up-to-date demos, you can then go through and archive some of the older ones to reduce that clutter that you have in your library.
You can also, Brian showed this, but apply tags within the token library. That can help you identify the tags that users need to update quickly in order to customize their personalized views or views of views.
And then last but not least, this is something we mentioned up at the top, is ensuring that you establish the correct permission standards. And I always recommend starting smaller and then scaling as requests come in from your team. Maybe starting everyone as a sales seat. And as people raise their hand to say, I would really love the ability to customize more, or I would love the ability to be able to edit graph designers or table designers being thoughtful about how you enable those users to be able to do more. Even when it comes to things like the Token Library, starting with some of those more critical data points that you want your users to customize and then let them come to you.
Let the demand drive the creation of additional personalized views, tokens, text replacements, et cetera. Anything else you’d add here, Brian?
Brian Honick:
No, I think you nailed all of it, nothing to add.
Eunice Pak:
Perfect. One thing that I want do, I want to hop over and share a little bit around our analytics and how you can use that to drive some of the data cleanup or demo creation.
In the Saleo portal, for some of you who may not be as familiar, there is an analytics hub and one of the tabs under the analytics hub is called live demo activity. You’ll see here under analytics which is the little graph icon from the main menu. There’s a tab here called live demo activity, and you can, of course, filter by date ranges, by team, by user. Also the duration of the demo. So how long was that demo played or demo names? This table right here, this graph right here, I think is really, can be really helpful in the cleanup, the creation of demos. Really understanding what your team is utilizing today. So you can see over the last 30 days the top demos that was played across our entire user base. And use this to really guide, should I be creating more personalized views? Should I be focusing more on additional parent level demos for more segments? Which ones are we seeing used most often? And maybe those are some demos where you may want to go in and add additional metrics, add more data, tell a different story by creating different variations of those parent demos.
So this can be a really great tool in scaling, revising, and continuing to iterate on your demo strategy with Saleo.
Brian Honick:
You just pointed out the demo duration. That’ll be really important for you all as you’re looking through this. Oftentimes we recommend users go in and test their click path, press play on the demo ahead of your real demo. Make sure that you know your click path and what you’re going to say and your actual value led story, right?
We’re not just wanting to click through features. We want to tell a story that resonates with our prospects. And so with that, you may end up with demos that are 10 minutes or less, and you know that there’s no demo, potentially for your team, that’s going to be that amount of time or less. So you can move that demo duration up to 10 minutes, let’s say, and filter out all the rest.
Or you can look at 10 minutes and below to figure out what are the durations, what are the demos, that maybe we are not using that much, or who is actually using this at a small time? Because then you can bring those to one-on-ones. You can bring those to team meetings and you can discuss what’s working for everyone. What demos are you using, what demos aren’t you using and help your team guide the cleanup effort as well.
Eunice Pak:
Yeah, that’s a great point. Don’t try to do it all yourself. And then one other thing that I’ll mention here is many of our customers have a really great cadence or process for keeping their parent demos updated.
So you may want to have a quarterly update or, if you’re pushing out updates more frequently, maybe a monthly update. And best practice is to name your demos accordingly by using dates, quarters, years, so that again, your team knows which ones they should be using. Are there ones that are outdated or newer ones that they should be using instead?
Keeping this really clean and updating on a regular cadence can be helpful so that your team always has the most up to date, the most recent, the most current demos at their fingertips to use.
Alright, going back over to the deck here. Just a couple of tips and tricks that we’ll reiterate that we reviewed today on our conversation. So make sure that you come up with a good organization strategy, whether that’s using folders, whether that’s using tags, making sure that you’re considering the seat types of your users, and the use cases of your users to ensure they have the right access levels.
Then of course, not only using personalized views, but using views of views to create more highly specific or customized demos like Brian showed with the Pipeline IQ example. Not only can you use text replacement and tokens, but you also have the ability to tokenize image replacements as well.
So just something that can be really quick and easy for reps to do. I know oftentimes you all are probably in back-to-back conversations, and so being able to spin up something really quickly with a customization, like a logo, or a prospect name, can go a really long way. So just setting your team up for success so they have those options at their fingertips that they can utilize in their busy days.
Alright, so we will pause here for questions. Laura, are there any we don’t see in the chat?
Laura Cotton:
We’ve got a couple over in the Q&A. I’d say the first one to lead with is when it comes to cleaning up your demo library, where do you recommend people start?
Eunice Pak:
That’s a good question. So I think I mentioned this earlier, but definitely start by looking at your analytics hub in the Saleo portal.
And understanding which demos are the most played and looking at the dates of when they were last played. So there may be some demos that are no longer relevant for your team. Maybe it’s outdated data. Maybe you’ve added additional Saleo tables or more tokens and other parent demos that are more relevant for your team. So definitely starting there.
Additionally, I think the biggest thing is to take a step back and make sure you’re aligning on your overall strategy with your team and that your Saleo demos are supporting that strategy. So thinking about what are we lacking today and making sure you get that feedback from your team.
Is there something within the demo story today or within the demo data today that doesn’t necessarily support. Your new story. Are there adjustments that we can make so that the data is more closely aligned with your prospects and your ICP? Are there demos that can be reused versus creating new personalized views or new master demos?
I think all those things are really important to think about. And then additionally, like I said, that’s why I think it’s so important to start small and scale up and let that demand from your team really drive the creation of more demos. Versus starting with 25 parent demos and you’ve put in all that work and effort upfront only to realize that maybe only a fifth of those are really actively being used.
I think it’s really critical to be thoughtful in the creation of those parent demos and ensuring that you have a good process for things like naming conventions, tokens, and text replacement.
Laura Cotton:
Okay. So a good follow on to that. How many parent demos are you seeing with your most successful customers, those who are really using it most effectively?
Eunice Pak:
Brian, I feel like you have such a wide range of customer sizes. Is there anything specific you would share that you’re seeing?
Brian Honick:
Yeah, so demo creators that are using this the most effectively to a lot of Eunice’s points, are thinking about, in chatting with their team around what are the use cases and what is the overall data set that’s going to be okay for a large amount of demos within that parent demo.
So as you saw, I made a personalized view and then I made a view of that view. The data itself is not changing. But the certain token values that I’ve been given access to, I can change, which oftentimes it’s not going to be every single item that is tokenized. It’s tough for a sales user to go in and customize all data points within a demo.
So tokenize what makes sense for your team and make sure that underlying data makes sense for, not only one story, but multiple stories. So that’s where it comes in to have those conversations with your team in team meetings, in one-on-ones, what do they need? What are the majority of demos that they’re giving?
And you already may know that, but giving them that ability so that once they are creating a hundred views, or views of views, that data set is going to be pertinent to all of those. To Eunice’s point earlier, you’re oftentimes running from back to back demos, depending on what team you’re on. We want to make this really quick and allow your team the ability to personalize as fast as possible. That is a big one. Making sure that that’s the case.
So I think when you’re thinking about the data that’s going into, that may lead you to want to segment them out into additional demos, you may not be able to get there. And that’s what we were talking about with the SMB demo that Eunice had built for me earlier, was that the data showed a sales chart that only had 80 open opportunities, and that’s not going to be nearly if I’m talking to an enterprise customer. So that would be an example of where I would reach out to my demo creators and let them know that I need a larger, more robust data set for some of those larger segments that I might be speaking to.
Eunice Pak:
Yeah, and I think that’s where you can determine how many parent level demos you need to have.
So to Brian’s point, we have some customers who work with larger segments, and so they may have 5, 10, 15 parent demos. Whereas an organization, maybe their ICP is a little bit more defined, more specific, they may only really have the need for one or two parent demos. It’s really so dependent on your use cases and your teams.
But you also have to think about from a management perspective, how many parent demos can you realistically manage at any given time? You know, considering you might have new table updates. So when it comes to the number of master demos, we don’t have a specific recommendation. I think, like a lot of the questions that have been posed, the answer is, it depends.
But to Brian’s point, just make sure that you get the feedback from your team to ensure that they have what they need without creating clutter, without creating noise within your demo library.
Laura Cotton:
All right. It looks like the last question I’m seeing for today: what’s the biggest mistake you see around people scaling and sharing demos?
Eunice Pak:
Yeah, I think I said this a couple times, but I think the biggest thing is being too, maybe over ambitious, about the number of demos that you’re creating or the number of tokens that you’re creating. I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but really let the demand drive the creation.
Starting small and making sure that you continuously have a feedback loop from your team so that they can let you know what more they need or what areas need to be fleshed out a little bit further. Or maybe areas where they can use more tokens and want to do more customizations. Again, going back to the point about starting with sales users and once they have gotten the hang of using Saleo in their demos. Let them come to you and raise their hand to say, you know, if they want to be able to have more access to control things in table designers or graph designers and expand usage accordingly.
Another thing that is not super relevant to demo sync and personalized views specifically, but we have a lot of customers doing this really well, where they have that continuous feedback loop. Maybe they have some sort of internal Slack or Teams chat where users can share success stories and share what they’re seeing works. That can get the conversation flowing to help you, as the demo creator or administrator, determine what next steps you should take with Saleo demos and where you can create more demos or create more opportunities for your team and really make sure that you’re filling those voids based on the feedback that your team is giving.
I’ll just reiterate, starting small and expanding on that as you get feedback from your team, I think is really the best way to go about this.
Laura Cotton:
Fantastic. I think that wraps us up for the day. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you so much, Eunice, Brian, this was truly a great session.
Eunice Pak:
Thank you guys so much.
Brian Honick:
Thanks for having us.
