Self-Service Education With An Interactive Product Tour

In the past, it was common for software vendors to be the gatekeeper of information in the buying process. Everything was accessible, as long as you went through their sales process.

However, modern buyers are different and with the consumerization of enterprise software, they are less likely to respond to traditional, sales-led go-to-market strategies.

Companies that are thriving in this product-led era are those that enable buyers with all the information they need up front, without needing to go through a lengthy sales process.

This is pretty straightforward on a use case, customer story and pricing side, but providing access to the product is challenging to do without a dedicated engineering team assigned to the task.

Enter interactive product tours. You may have seen them on a website behind a “Tour Product” or “Self-Guided Product Tour” CTA.

In this piece, we’ll explore the essentials of why interactive product tours so closely align with the needs of modern buyers.

SaaS buyers have more product knowledge than ever before. They search reviews on G2, ask friends about experiences with the software in slack channels and do extensive digging on the market all before talking with sales. The first conversation is often oriented around the details in the SaaS product and how the solution addresses their concerns.

So, what value does a website product tour provide?

Today, a significant proportion of consumers crave interacting with the product earlier in the buying cycle because they want to touch and feel how the software works, without the overhead of a sales process.

Website product tours meet this need, while also helping with top of funnel lead capture. The flexible nature of the tours allows you to share an interactive demo that accounts for many different use cases and personas.

"Try the demo" on the Navattic home page

With a website product tour, you can drive users to a call-to-action on the page or collect names/email to get a concrete set of leads, many of which will be MQLs.

Modern SaaS buyers prioritize self-education. For initial exploration, they want to have access to key information on the product and use cases at the onset. For those that conceal this information, they face a competitive risk to other companies that meet this need right out of the gates.

But self-service absolutely does not mean the same thing as “no sales”; instead, it's a low-sales approach, a hybrid of sorts that empowers buyers to contact the sales team only when they are ready to buy.

Low-sales strategies are particularly effective because consumers have the power and the freedom to get their hands on a product and experience the “ah-ha!” moment faster than usual.

Having said that, the question is this: which tools enable self-service best? The answer is to develop an interactive product tour that walks prospects through the core components of your product and the value it provides to their teams.

This allows buyers to experience a product in a frictionless manner. After all, if a buyer is interested in experiencing your software, what better way than showing it to them upfront?

An Interactive Demo Embedded on the Taplytics Site

The primary benefit of an interactive product tour is the ability to meet buyers where they are, giving them the ability to explore the product in a frictionless manner.

Buyers get hands-on experiences right away, helping them easily assess whether the product will meet their needs.

Vendors can see increased conversion and if they choose to gate it, have a list of qualified leads that are interested in their product.

Best of all, many of these interactive demo platforms don't require any coding knowledge to deploy and can be set up in a matter of minutes. Moving forward, self-service product tours could become the norm as more SaaS companies align to changing SaaS buyer patterns.