4 steps to verticalizing your demo process

Looking to enable your team on the demo process? Or maybe you're trying to verticalize your demos? IN this video, I walk through a few ways that we've worked to scale our demo process in addition to a few key strategies we've seen our customers deploy.

When you're looking to demo software, the demo needs to be tailored to the customer. You can't just use a generic demo and expect results - that's not how it works. In order for potential customers to understand the value of your software, they need a demo that is specific to their industry or business type. This can be challenging with it's a technical product and/or the lead volume is high enough that technical resources can't be spent on those deals. In this world, it's critical that we enable sales reps to run high quality product demos, solo, so they can better qualify a prospect and move them along in the funnel. That's where verticalization comes in.

We've run a number of workshops with customers helping them to verticalize their product demos. I break it down into a four-step process.

1. Start high level

The first step to creating verticalization in product demos is determining the highest level of segmentation we'd like to start with. This can be broken down by: industry, product line, use case, country/region, etc. One customer I'm working with right now is creating a decision tree of four different types of segmentation: Business use case, monetization model, industry, and channel of service. After a rep does a discovery call, they should know all four of these bullets and will select (via tagging/folder system) the segments that make the most sense for this customer. This will narrow down the list of assets available to help a rep craft the perfect narrative for this prospect.

Click here for a blog post on "The perfect demo flow to crush your remote demo"

2. Persona-based

The next layer down is persona-based segmentation. This will be a constant for every organization. How you pitch to a C-level exec will vastly differ from how you pitch to an individual contributor or manager. The questions asked, value prompts articulated, ROI statements, etc will all be different. After you've determined your high level library structure, you'll want to segment based upon a few key personas. We recommend Leadership, Managers, and Individual contributors. You can segment further if you'd like but that will help get you started.

3. Create a library of Flows

If steps 1 and 2 are completed correctly, you should leave those exercises with a list of assets that need to be created. These assets can include marketing slide decks, platform demo instances, product videos, case studies, etc. This is where you'd get your marketing and demo engineering team involved to help with the creation. You'll need marketing-approved collateral catered to each "flow" and, likely, a demo instance that will resonate with that use-case you're catering to.

One thing that can help the people creating these "flows" is a general structure. The question is, what assets need to be new and what assets can be reused? Creating a general outline of a demo can be very helpful in answering these questions. Here is a structure I typically propose:

• Welcome and Intro
• Summary of last time & How we can help
• Solutions preview (3 use cases/features paid with customer stories)
• Value add outcome statements
• Next Steps

Many times, it's just steps 3 and 4 that need to be customized to the segmentation defined above. Other assets can be reused and customized with text specific to that customer.

4. Enable in real-time

Okay, so you've now gone through immense work of creating segmentation in your demos, catering it to different personas, and had marketing and demo engineers create everything necessary to bring it to life.

Now what?

Now you need to bring all of that work front and center. One of the biggest "misses" is a lack of organization once this work has been completed. Reps need to use this on live calls, so it'll be imperative that creates a location for these assets that are easily accessible before the call and even during it. You can use various cloud management systems for storing assets, but those do fall short when pivoting to different content on live calls. That's where we can help out! Gondola connects to your cloud asset system and pulls in up-to-date collateral for reps to prepare ahead of time and can pivot to in a live conversation seamlessly.

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If you're working to verticalize your demo process and want to have a deeper conversation as to how to set it up, please reach out to us! We'd love to help you out in the creation of this library.

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