How Can You Stop Competitors from Accessing Your Demo?
Head of Growth & Product Marketing
We often get asked this question by our customers and their leadership teams.
The truth is, your competitors can already find a ton of information about your product from your website and G2 reviews.
While those channels might be more curated, people will find other ways to see your product that potentially aren’t as buttoned up: through peers, Reddit, and Slack communities.
At Navattic, we don’t believe you should hide your product for the sake of competitors, but we do have some tips for easing the worry around competitor risk — and for convincing your boss to open them up to the public.
TL;DR
- You can control who sees your demo through strategic demo builds, one-on-one sharing, email blacklisting, and targeted ads.
- To maximize interactive demos performance, push back the gate. Demos with gates mid-demo have a 10% higher engagement rate than demos with gates upfront.
- Convincing leadership to show your product is possible. You just need data, alignment, and a commitment to sharing real-time results.
4 ways to block competitors from seeing your demo
1. Control what parts of your product you show
The great thing about interactive demos is that they aren’t a sandbox. Prospects don’t have free rein to explore every part of your product — including areas that may not be fully built out.
With interactive demos, visitors only see what you show them.
Because people’s attention spans are short, the latest State of the Interactive Product Demo data showed that top demos are short: around 5 - 12 steps. That should give you plenty of room to focus on the key aha moments.
If you’re building your interactive demo in Navattic and there are:
- Parts of the product that aren’t ready yet
- Areas that you don't want competitors to see (like a certain section of your navbar)
- Features that may need a bit more polish
You can blur them out or remove them altogether with our blur feature.
2. Send demos one-on-one in the sales cycle
Though website embeds are the most popular way to use interactive demos, they’re certainly not the only way.
Instead of putting interactive demos on your website, consider sending them directly to prospects already in your sales cycle:
In outbound emails to pique their interest
Kevin Corelli at megadata uses demos in cold outreach as an alternative to a high-ask Calendly link.
“For Sales, we use the demos as a cold outreach engagement tool that is a lower ask than booking a demo. So far, we have seen 20% more MQL conversions than without the product demos.”
Before live sales calls
An Account Executive at a 45-person travel tech company says his team creates personalized interactive tours tailored to prospects’ needs to showcase the value they'll see in a live demo.
“We've been able to convert 20% more sales with prospects compared to the ones we don't send an interactive demo.”
After live demos
Joseph Chang at Searchlight (acq. Multiverse) uses interactive demos as a high level “sandbox” for prospects to play around with and to keep the convo going.
“We were able to attribute 22 S0s either directly or indirectly influenced by our Navattic demo, which accounted for roughly 33% of total pipeline.”
If you’re really concerned about security, you can also password-protect your demos. When you generate a share link in Navattic, you can add a password, expiration date, and other personalization elements to your demo.
3. Form gate your demo
Roughly 70% of the top 1% of interactive demos do not begin with a form gate. And ungated demos have a 10% higher engagement rate than gated demos.
But if you choose to form gate your demo, you can embed third-party forms from tools like Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot directly into a Navattic demo to prevent blacklisted competitors from seeing it.
Here’s a quick snippet from Marketo’s documentation to give you a sense of how this process works.
If you decide to go this route, we recommend waiting to add your gate until the middle of your demo. That way:
- You can still engage high-intent leads while hiding more advanced features
- Demos with forms placed at later steps had a 10% increase in engagement rate.
- The most popular form placement for our highest-performing demos is in the middle of the demo.
If you’re still on the fence, here’s a resource to help you decide whether to gate your demos or not.
4. Set up targeted ads
In LinkedIn and Google Ad campaigns, you can choose the accounts you want to see your demo.
Our customer, FORM, took this approach, adding an interactive demo to their “Take a Tour” call to action.
That CTA alone decreased their cost per lead in ABM campaigns by nearly 50% when compared to campaigns using their original “Request a Demo” CTA.
Per SaaS marketing expert Brendan Hufford, Interactive demos increase prospects’ familiarity with your product, promote higher CTRs, and drive free-to-paid conversions.
With this approach, you can dramatically decrease your CAC.
Click here for more tips on using product demos in your paid marketing strategy.
How to convince leadership to show your product
Though there are multiple ways to stop competitors from seeing your product, each strategy inherently limits how many people can see your product in general.
To maximize the views your demos get (and to improve the buying experience), we recommend completely ungated demos.
As Eric Holland at DemoDash puts it:
“Coming from a competitive intelligence platform, your competitor has probably seen your product one way or another. Putting it out there on your website is only going to help your buyer.”
We know you’re probably on board, but it can take more convincing to get management’s approval. Here are some strategies we recommend to our Navattic customers:
1. Use data to strengthen your case
Show that you’ve done your research about ungating interactive demos.
Start by pointing out all the various ways customers could get their hands on videos or images of your product today.
Then, share how many competitors are giving prospects access to free trials or freemium accounts and how many leads (and corresponding potential revenue) were lost as a result.
Finally, cite data from reports to show there’s demand for more hands-on access.
For example, in the State of the Interactive Demo Report, survey respondents reported demo leads attributed to roughly 10% - 20% of their inbound lead volume and contributed to a 20% - 25% increase in website conversion rate.
It also has quotes from real go-to-market professionals to support these stats. Pat Donaghy, Creative Director at Cavelo, explains:
“We have an embedded, ungated tour just underneath the fold. Our sales team links to our product tour after every discovery call so the prospect can distribute it to the rest of their team. Our product tour demo is responsible for 12% of our 2024 inbound leads.”
Other B2B software buyer behavior reports like the ones G2 publishes include powerful stats. This year, G2’s report showed 69% of buyers say they engage a salesperson at a software company only when they have made their decision.
Data points show it’s not just your opinion that your demos need to be ungated. There’s a concrete need.
2. Build internal champions
Sales and product teams will have a big say in your GTM and buyer experience, so you really need their buy-in.
In a webinar for the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, Lauren Kersanske at Axonius pointed out that anecdotes from website visitors can go a long way:
“What gets sales excited is qualitative data, like great feedback from prospects and partners. Sharing that interactive demos had already improved our onsite conversion rate-to-demo by X% was really exciting.”
Here are a few other areas to look for support:
- G2 reviews or Reddit threads where people are asking to see more of your product.
- Calls with customers who converted that mention them wanting to have seen the product earlier.
- Closed deals in your CRM where interactive demos were used in outbound emails.
- Answers to a field like ‘Please share anything that would help us prepare for our meeting.’ on your book a demo form — some might say something like ‘Access to the product.’
3. Position your ungated demos as experiments
As I shared on the Digital Banter podcast:
“I’ve heard marketers say, ‘There’s no way my CEO is going to let me put the product on the website.’ That’s when I recommend trying it in the sales cycle or testing it on an ad landing page first. Trying it out in smaller ways feels less scary than the front end of your website.”
Starting off slowly can also help you see whether there’s an increase in engagement and what kinds of interactive demos prospects gravitate towards.
Having this information upfront can help you iterate on your demos and feel super confident in them before you add them to your home page for everyone to see.
4. Share your results and plans to iterate
If your leadership feels like they’re going out on a limb by approving the use of ungated demos, you want to give them continuous reassurance that it’s going well.
Keep them up to date with how your experimentation is going with KPIs like:
- Number of interactive demo visits
- Key accounts looking at those demos
- Number of MQLs who looked at the demos
- Sales cycle speed
Navattic customer Coupa saw major changes to their sales cycle after making it easier for anyone to try out their product:
“Before Navattic, prospective customers had to wait 2-3 weeks to get a demo and even longer to get a test drive. With Navattic interactive demos, we’ve helped influence over $10M of ARR.”
Results like these get your boss excited about the potential of interactive demos and get you the green light to use them in other ways, too.
Want some advice on other ways to use demos?
Check out the customer interviews section of our blog to get inspiration from real marketers like you.