Customer Show & Tell: Eric Holland: Building a Multi-Use Case Demo Center

At our NYC user meetup last year, we asked several top customers to present their most effective Navattic use case. In this series, we’ll share their tips and tricks for building interactive demos for specific demo use cases.

In this post, we're featuring Eric Holland former product marketing consultant at Klue and co-founder of DemoDash. While at Klue, he realized one demo was not enough to address the varied needs of their buyers. So he created a multi-use case demo center that engaged different buyer personas to increase pipeline.

Keep reading to see exactly how Eric planned, collaborated on, and built a demo center that attributed to over half a million dollars in the first 60 days post-launch.

After transitioning from manufacturing to B2B, I noticed a significant disconnect between how buyers interact with SaaS products and their ability to understand what those products do and why they're valuable.

When I dug into the research I found that, according to Gartner, 75% of buyers don't want to talk to a salesperson. (Spoiler alert: I’m definitely in that 75%.)

And yet, only 12% of B2B websites have a product tour CTA.

Before I started working at Klue, I found that many beloved SaaS companies only have one product tour on their website:

• Crayon had one tour
• UserEvidence had one tour
• Klue, where I work, just had tours on product pages when I started
• Sendoso and Lattice also had only one tour

The issue here is that companies have too many personas, too many features, and too many segments for one product tour.

A one-size-fits-all demo just won’t address the needs of all the different buyers in your audience.

To solve this problem, I decided to make multiple tours. We’d target the top segments of our core personas and focus on the use cases they care most about.

All told, we created 14 different product tours across four different personas and called it our “Demo Arena.”

Now, it’s basically become one centralized asset for everyone in the buyer journey.

It’s public-facing and isn’t gated. Anyone can access it and explore the specific use cases that matter to them.

To me, this is the money shot. These are the results I saw 60 days post-launch:

• 50% of all engaged visits come directly from the Demo Arena. Before launch, we had decent engagement, but now the Demo Arena drives half of our tour traffic.
• Demo requests have tripled. And we’ve almost 3x’d our conversion rate. We get more people who are actually interested in our product, making it to the opportunity stage instead of getting disqualified as a lead.
• Over $550,000 in new pipeline. We've attributed over half a million dollars to the Demo Arena.
• 500+ companies engaged. Before, we didn’t really know who was engaging with our product. Now we know that 510 companies have engaged with one of the tours in the Demo Arena. Whether they qualify or disqualify themselves, they’ve interacted with Klue.
• A lot more interactive tour engagement. Before launch, about 83 different tour users would show up in a given month. During our recent product launch, we had well over 300 engagements.

You may have seen other demo centers out there, but ours is different in a few ways, and I think that’s what contributed to our success.

First, it’s based solely on use cases, not just features. It’s designed for our best-fit champions, influencers, and decision-makers — not some generic persona.

It’s also a great resource for helping buyers get familiar with the product and understand exactly how Klue can help them in their specific roles.

And because of that, the Demo Arena helps us qualify and disqualify prospects. Knowing in a few minutes whether Klue is the right or wrong fit saves time for both parties.

You can fairly easily reproduce my process to create a demo center of your own:

1. Plan

First, I had to get executive buy-in, so I worked closely with our sales team to figure out the key segments and personas we needed to create tours for.

From there, we defined the use cases together and got approval for the project plan.

2. Visualize

Next, I started working in Canva to build out a wireframe of the tour for our design team. This made it super easy for them — and our sponsors — to see how it would all look as a Navattic tour.

We got sign-off from our sponsor based on those slides and then picked a name for the demo center. We went with “Demo Arena” to give our new asset a little personality.

3. Build

Once the designs were approved, we got to work building the tours. Really, the most crucial step, though was testing the Demo Arena landing page.

We wanted to make sure the user experience was super smooth and that the integration with our CRM to capture intent data was working.

With a little magic from my internal RevOps team and the integrations that Navattic already has, we can now easily attribute Demo Arena activity to pipeline in HubSpot.

Here’s the code we used:

4. Launch

We tested the connection to ensure we were capturing all the activity. We built a dashboard in HubSpot so I can see all the stats. We prepared our SDRs and AE teams.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to involve them. They need to understand how this asset fits into their workflow. You can’t just drop it in their lap and say, ‘Use this.’

Lastly, we put the Demo Arena in our main navigation. If buyers can't find it, what's the point of it being centralized?

Put it in your main nav right next to your get a demo button.

Building a multi-use case demo center was a game-changer for Klue. Here are my key takeaways:

1. Customize demos for each persona and use case. Address the needs of all the different buyers in your audience.
2. Centralize your demos. Have a centralized demo center on your website so it’s easy for buyers to find content relevant to them.
3. Plan and get buy-in early. Before you start building get buy-in from executives and wireframe designs in a tool like Canva
4. Integrate with your CRM for attribution. Send data to Salesforce to tie demo center engagement back to pipeline generation.
5. Involve your sales team. Train your SDRs and AEs so they know how to use the demo center as part of their workflow

Jason Oakley and I just launched DemoDash, a full-stack interactive demo agency that helps you build tours that improve buyer engagement and help you attribute your marketing impact.

Check out some more Demo Center examples for inspiration.