Building an Unbreakable Software Demo

Demos fall apart all the time.

It's game time. Your prospect champion is on the other end of the Zoom call and has engaged their manager (the decision maker) and other team members to evaluate your solution. The stage is set for your success.

What happens next keeps sales engineers up at night in a cold sweat.

• You can't log in to your account.
• A system connection is lost.
• You don't have the right permission set for the account.
• You can't connect to the VPN due to client site access.
• The list goes on...

This fumble can quickly become a dealbreaker. Your prospect is expecting to see a working overview of a product that can solve their business challenges not on the fly troubleshooting. Unfortunately, broken demos are commonplace in presales. If you ask any sales engineer with demo experience, they will be able to tell you war stories of demo flops and failures.

Elon Musk's famous Tesla Cybertruck demo failure

Sales engineers are trained on how to navigate throughout the platform but can still run into bugs and trouble areas. But, as Murphy's Law states, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Keeping calm under this pressure can be challenging as the future of the deal depends on the success of a demo overview.

But why do things have to go wrong in the first place? What if we could launch a demo that can't fail - an unbreakable product demonstration.

An unbreakable demo is a product overview that can consistently and reliably run no matter the situation. It's a demo overview looks and feels like the real product overview, but is logically isolated from a production application to remove failure points associated with the real app. This front end walkthrough enables a seller to showcase the demo highlights in an environment that mirrors the real application without needing to worry about access controls, connection health, or demo environment status.

You have a great product but there are often a lot of moving pieces. An unbreakable demo minimizes complexity to create a simplified experience with zero failure points. It provides sellers with the infrastructure to showcase the product in a safe and controlled setting while providing a prospective buyer with a detailed and immersive product experience.

Sounds like a dream, right?

In building an unbreakable demo, you need to first determine the possible break points in your existing product demo process. These dependencies, potential break points, and system bridges are areas where the demo can quickly fall apart. The beginning of the demo is always the riskiest. Accessing a system can be a multidimensional process with large room for failure. System log-ins, access credentials, rotating keys, and changing user permissions can lead to tricky and complex entry paths. An unbreakable demo simulates a logged-in and authenticated product environment to bypass these concerns all together. This enables sellers to jump right into a consistent and fully set up demo overview, every time.

Managing demo environments can be a major chore for sales engineers and demo teams. Cleaning out old records and test files from a sandbox can be time consuming. An unbreakable demo environment eliminates this need all together. Every time a seller accesses the unbreakable demo, it is fresh and ready to go for the next prospect. Sellers can quickly jump into a new demonstration without needing to worry about records or files from the last conversation.

Technical sales engineers are an immensely valuable resource on the sales team. They use their detailed product knowledge to showcase different product components and features to build the right story for a prospective buyer. Additionally, they are comfortable with the product to the point where they are able to recover or redirect after a product slip up or stumble.

Growing your technical sales capacity is essential to keep up with increased buyer requests to get hands-on with the product. The AE to SE ratio is rising as organizations bring on more sellers and demand more of existing technical sellers. Technical sellers are stretched thin with demos, proof of concepts, and general technical enablement. SEs are a valuable asset that must be effectively utilized to avoid wasted time and overall burnout.

Oftentimes at the early stages of a deal, the prospect is still evaluating multiple solutions and is most likely "just browsing" when they request a demo. These lower intent leads can consume significant SE bandwidth that should be put towards higher value initiatives.

Enter the unbreakable demo.

With a demo overview that just works, your frontline AEs now have a tool to showcase a high-level product walkthrough to satisfy an early prospect's request while saving your sSE hours for the later stage deals. By providing a safe and available demo account that anyone can use without fear of demo catastrophe, AEs can comfortable and confidently deliver an initial demo overview that wows prospects and leads to future conversations. This is not intended to replace the SE from the deal, but provide another option for revenue teams looking to scale operations and open up demos to a wider range of prospective buyers.

Enable the entire team to deliver excellent demo experiences that close more deals.

Want to learn more about how you can create your own unbreakable product demo? Chat with the team.