What is DemoTech? Definition, Examples, and Trends

There is a gap in the modern sales stack. There are dedicated tools for lead generation, prospect outreach, meeting facilitation, conversation intelligence, and customer relationship management, but the product demo has largely been ignored. To fill this gap, a new category of technology is emerging to support all steps involved in the product demo journey.

The product demo is a pivotal step in the sales process. After all of the discovery, scheduling, and preparation build up, the demo is where you can finally showcase your product value and get to that crucial "wow moment". It is the first opportunity your prospect has to visualize working product functionality and see if the solution will meet their business needs and requirements. The demo allows prospects to feel how their business challenges can be met with a purpose-built solution. It is where the rubber meets the road and the abstract marketing-talk becomes tangible and actionable.

DemoTech is a term that is seeing increasing popularity due to the changing role of the product demo in modern B2B selling motions. Similar to SalesTech or MarTech, DemoTech is the set of tools and solutions designed to help sellers (both technical specialists as well as product generalists) build, deliver, and analyze better product demos to support the selling process. DemoTech solutions can be applied at a wide range of points across the prospect demo journey from demo setup to screen sharing to customer-driven demos to demo analytics. These solutions exist to help support sellers and enable them to better use their time and focus on the right initiatives needed to close deals.

Sales technology has been supporting sellers and accelerating sales growth for decades. However, with the rise of readily available SaaS and lower barriers to building great software, this industry has exploded in the past 10 years. Nancy Nardin's 2021 Enterprise SalesTech landscape shows 1078 solutions across 45 distinct categories. With virtual selling as the new default for enterprise sales, these solutions have emerged to fill new gaps that did not exist in our in-person world. Categorization for these solutions is becoming increasing challenging as well. New tools are blurring the lines between existing categories such as video conferencing, CRM, prospecting, and knowledge sharing which makes tracking these solutions difficult. Additionally, new categories are emerging to the foreground with purpose-built tools evolving to solve real issues in the modern sales process.

One of these quickly growing categories is demo technology.

Demo technology has emerged to solve real challenges in the B2B sales process. The product demo has traditionally been viewed as a gated access point in the sales cycle where only technical experts could chime in to share with prospects. This is no longer true. Prospects now expect to see a product from the first interaction with a vendor. This means that vendors need to be comfortable sharing their product in new and engaging ways. This trend towards the consumerism of B2B software buying has led to a real need for new and different ways to quickly and effectively demo software solutions.

To understand demotech, it is first important to understand the demo itself. The product demo is evolving. A demonstration used to be a technical seller walking a prospect through a product feature by feature to showcase business value and technical fit. This is no longer how sales works. Prospects do not always want to sit through a presentation style demo in order to see a product first hand. Oftentimes, all they want is a quick overview certain features or product components that matter most to their unique business challenges or needs. This increase in demand and style of demo means that the number of demos a vendor needs to give is rising. With this increase in quantity, teams are looking for new options to support their technical sellers and enable new members of the sales organization, such as account executives, to step in and deliver first round demonstrations that engage prospects.

DemoTech can be an answer for organizations looking to increase demo productivity and meet a rising demo demand. Teams are now realizing that good-enough demo solutions that require significant time and effort from product specialist are no longer the only option to showcase their solutions to prospective buyers.

A strong demo can be your best driver for conversion. Like tooling designed to facilitate the rest of the sales motion, demotech tools can facilitate better prospect experiences when interacting with your product. At the end of the day, demotech is another tool in the B2B seller's toolkit. DemoTech solutions are not intended to replace the seller and product expert, but instead provide the team with a supplemental tool that can be used to build a better buyer experience.