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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:00:00]:
1234, exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:02]:
Flower, exit.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:00:12]:
Exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:14]:
Okay, we got 45 people in here already, so they were waiting for us. Natalie and I were backstage hanging out, talking about New York, New Jersey. Marco Tulio. Did I say it right? Marco Tulio.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:00:25]:
Marco Tulio. There you go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:26]:
Marco Tulio. Natalie is our guest this month for this exit five live session. Don't you dare call it a webinar, Natalie. It's not a webinar. It's a live session. Much better branding. Carrie Foster is in here. Always see Carrie on all of our content, which is awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:41]:
So we have a great presentation today, but we heard your feedback. This is not going to be 40 minutes of slides. We're going to make this conversational. Think of it as a podcast live session webinar with slides, with your questions. We're going to bring it all in here for this live session on interactive product demos. And I'm excited to have Natalie. But real quick, before we get started and I pass it over to Natalie, do me a favor. Go in the chat right now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:04]:
It's my favorite part. Write us. I'm going to do it, too. Where are you from? Actually, let's add a new question today. I want to know, what's your name, where are you listening in from, and what is your job in marketing. Title, role, company, whatever. Just so we can get a quick sense. I'm going to do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:18]:
Dave, founder, exit five. Oh, where am I? Burlington, Vermont.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:01:24]:
I always love seeing what's the most popular city. I have my New York City bias, so I'm kind of hoping it's that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:29]:
Yeah. But how about we got Vienna, we got Austria, North Carolina, Michigan, Baltimore, San Diego. It's going too fast.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:01:36]:
I actually can't even read it at the same time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:40]:
It's not. Jane is in Seattle. Keaton isn't. We got Dublin, Dublin, Pennsylvania. Leslie Lopez is in Arlington. Somebody said something about, oh, vp of marketing at a golf company. Let's go, let's go. We got all the good people here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:52]:
This is awesome. All right, Natalie. See, I told you people come to these things.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:01:56]:
It was funny. I saw New York, and then I know the person. So shout out, Aston, thanks for representing New York.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:00]:
Love that. All right, New York is in the building. Natalie is in the building. I'm going to turn it over to you. But here's two things. My last two housekeeping items, for those of you in the chat right now from all over the world that are listening to this, watching this right now, do me a favor. Two things. Number one, questions.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:14]:
I want to make this interactive, you took the time out of your day to be here with us. So go to the Q A, put your questions in there, and then a cool feature that they have in here is we can upvote the questions. And so that will help me, your lovely moderator today, decide which questions to stop and interrupt and bring into the discussion with Natalie. So do that in the Q A. But also, you're all marketers in here. And one of my favorite things about doing these live sessions is that the people in the chat help out each other. And so as we're talking, add in your opinion, share your feedback. But if you're going to do a question, do it in the Q A.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:43]:
All right, Natalie, over to you. We're going to talk about interactive product demos. The stage is yours, my friend.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:02:48]:
Yeah, thank you. So first, before diving into interactive product demos, just going to give quick intro of who I am. So I'm Natalie Mercatilio, head of growth at a company called Navattic. Not surprisingly, we do interactive product demos, which are essentially what I call like try before you buy for software, just clickable ways to go through your product and share it with prospects and customers. But besides interactive demos, we'll get to the specifics. Really what I want to talk about today is B two B buying and how to make it just nicely not suck. I was a huge buyer of software in my past. Basically at my past job, I was the chief of staff for a little.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:03:21]:
So I was the one constantly responsible for evaluating software, testing new software, no matter what department. It just landed on my lap. And I just got so sick of the hours wasted sitting on sales calls, setting up free trials, kind of having to dig through so much information to figure out what I was trying to buy. So I became really passionate about b two B software and making the buying experience better. It's how I got connected to Nevada. So before going into demos, I'm going to talk a little bit about the state kind of in 2024 of the b two b buying experience.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:51]:
I love that. I didn't know you were chief of staff before this. That's a cool little career path. Also, I think there's something big. What's interesting to me about this topic is you hear a lot about product led growth and freemium and free trial motions that have come into b two B SaaS over the last however many years. But even in I was listening to a podcast the other day and David Sachs, who's this legendary tech investor, founder of PayPal and Yammer, and he knows b two B SaaS, in and out. He was saying that even in the enterprise, the best way to get people to buy your software is to have them try it first. And that just goes fundamentally with all of the traditional sales advice field.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:28]:
Like the hardcore enterprise, old school vp of sales doesn't want you to share pricing, doesn't want you to share product. They don't want to share any of that until you have somebody on a three month pilot. And I think that the interactive product demos is a perfect bridge between all of those paths. And I think it's something that's becoming even more relevant for people today. We're not going to buy a product unless we can see it, touch it, play with it before we decide to bring it into our company. So I'm excited to see what you got.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:04:53]:
Yeah, the enterprise note is interesting. We've been seeing, I think, a huge proponent of interactive demos than Gartner. And shout out David from Gartner. But they get that question all the time, like, oh, enterprises who would use it, they're so old school. But this is kind of usually like an easier step than PlG. So we've actually been seeing that as kind of like a growing use case, as enterprises using it as PLG. But I'll save that for another note and dive into just general b two b buying.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:17]:
Cool, let's do it.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:05:18]:
Okay, so yeah, as we talk about, I'm going to talk about how to improve b two b buying experience. And I think this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone if you've bought software kind of similar to my experience I was talking about. But b two b buyers, I'd say, have some trust issues. Oftentimes we've seen data that buyers want to avoid sales. I think this is even a stat from two years ago, so I can't imagine what the stat would be now. But 60% of buyers agree vendors aren't involved in the research phase. That's from g two. We've heard this all the time.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:05:44]:
I feel like every b two b marketer I talk to talks about how they want to mirror b to c, but 90% of b two b buyers expect a similar experience to b to c. Again, not surprising. B to c is such a common part of our day to day that we'd want to bring it into our job. And then on top of all that, the reason buyers have trust issues, kind of going back to my experience, is that a lot of times we'd be ignored. Maybe we won't get the proper information. It feels like a manhunt to get that data. We want, like, pricing, like what the product is. And we ran a report with Chili Piper last year and found that on average, the top 100 SaaS companies we booked demos with, and it took them two days to respond, and 35% of the companies never responded to us.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:06:23]:
So it's kind of a two way street. Yes, maybe buyers are asking for more, but I think as b two b companies, we still belong.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:29]:
You took me down memory lane a little bit. I got to tell you a story. So, Chili Piper, Nevada. I don't know who originated this idea, but we did something back in the day when I worked at this company called Drift, where we did a secret shopper study, and we basically had somebody go to all these websites, fill out everybody's forms, go through the sales process, measure the response time. And that was like the best thing we ever did, because you would go then reach out to a head of sales and say, hey, we submitted this thing on your site, and we didn't hear from anybody. We didn't hear from you for four days. And the VPS sales was like, wait, what? And it was the best conversation starter, and we got amazing data and content from this. So there's just an interesting.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:08]:
There's a lot of collaboration. Old lives are coming together right now with this real time b two b buying conversation.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:07:13]:
That's so funny. I've seen reports like this before, and it was kind of us and chili Piper together, we were just talking about ways we could, what data we both provide. But it's funny how many times I feel like every year, some variation of this report is run, and yet there are still so many companies that ignore you, don't respond, hide pricing and product information. So it doesn't seem like these reports are necessarily making it better. But as I talked about b two B trust issues, I think that's something. As buyers, we all probably know, and just some stats. We talked a little bit about PLG, how to give that firsthand product experience. This is kind of like the current state.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:07:49]:
So even if you do have, like, a product video, best case scenario is about ten to 15%. We've seen on average, as far as how many website visitors will watch that product video. If you take that even further, and if you think about the amount of website visitors that will do a free trial or sign up for a demo, that's about 2%. So that means about one in 20 visitors to your website will actually experience any product value, which is kind of crazy to think about. You've crafted this beautiful website. You want to describe what your product does, but if they don't get a chance to see it or touch it in a real way, beyond just a screenshot, really, a vast majority of your website visitors won't actually get to understand what your product does. Another cool stat I found is that about, on average, a b two B buyer spends 1.3 minutes on a b two B website, which is really crazy to think that you have about a little more than a minute to catch a buyer's attention. And then comparing this, not surprisingly, with interactive demos, we found that there was about a 40% to 60% of visitors will engage with an interactive demo.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:08:49]:
Obviously copy out if it's prominently placed, if it's hidden in a corner, they might not see it. About like 30% to 40% of those will complete the entire demo, so they'll get full picture of your value. And this equates to one in two website visitors experience your product value versus that one in 20 we talked about. And then this was another cool stat. I didn't really think about this till there was actually someone else mentioned this in a LinkedIn post. Of the normal b two b website time versus an interactive demo. We found about 1.8 minutes on average. So you're almost doubling your website or time someone spends on a website by adding this more engaging element to it versus just like static screenshots.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:26]:
I think that's the most underrated product marketing technique, is show me the damn product. I don't know why you go to a lot of b two b websites and it's very copy fluff driven. And I think you have the ultimate ingredient, which is people want to see the product, they want to see examples. And we're talking about this now as we're going through and focusing on exit five. We're like, man, we don't do a good enough job of showing what's in the product on the site. So this one makes a ton of sense. And look, you got to treat buyers like, I think we used to have this mindset of, if somebody's on my website, I can't talk about any of my competitors, but you have to be aware of like, look, this person is going to be shopping even if they see you today, Natalie. And they're like, natalie is awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:08]:
I'm really interested in Nevada. This is something I want to do. Any smart person is going to go do their due diligence and check out two or three other products anyway. That's just how we operate. And so the more you can give away some of your keys and let people see what's actually happening here. You're going to meet buyers where they are. I think this is a really important trend.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:10:27]:
It's funny. To your point about value, I almost see it as marketing constantly has these big swings. So for a while it was maybe feature dumping, like let's say early 2000s when we first started doing websites. They looked terrible. And all you did was throw every single feature of your product on there. And then there was this big swing against that of we need to be value driven, we need to show ROI, which still important, but we need to make sure people understand why they should buy our product. But then I think the SaaS market has gotten so saturated that suddenly every single website I went to said, increase your pipeline by five x drive deals.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:02]:
Well, you know what they all say today, though, everyone is the AI. The something for AI, the AI webinar platform, the AI copywriting platform. So yeah, just constant waves of this.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:11:13]:
Yes, I was going to say like increasing ROI now powered with AI that I've seen a million times. But I think this is the interactive demo movement as almost a swing back. It's like buyers know how to buy. Let's trust them. Well, five years ago, let's be honest, I didn't know how to buy b two B software. I didn't buy software as part of my job. But the average person now is buying software, especially with PLG. It's kind of like, let's trust they know how to do it and give them the information versus not assuming we have to overly explain the value.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:39]:
We take this question. Now there's a good question. Even though the rules are broken and this is a question from chat, there's a lot of good Q a questions. We'll get to them. But this just relevant and popped in my head. This from Zachary in the chat. What's the thought around gating versus not gating? The product demo?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:11:53]:
Okay, this person, I think you might have seen my presentation, you just queued up the next slide. So let's get to it. My thought is ungating. And I have a few alternatives because I know this can be a little bit divisive about gating versus ungating. I will say from our report, basically what we did is what all these stats are about is we made a report that looked at the top 1% of demos on our platform. That was about 200 demos. I personally went through all 200 and we tried to figure out what were commonalities that these demos had that put them in the top 1% and gave them stats like a 32% click through rate. And we did find that 73% of these demos were ungated.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:12:32]:
So there is a trend towards higher performing demos to be ungated. I will say if you do want to gate it, because I understand the value of getting a little bit more of that lead information. We highly recommend put it at like step five because nothing's more jarring as a b two b buyer, right? You see a nice product demo, you're so excited to see what the product does, and then you get a big gate in your face versus give them a tiny bit, just a little. Five steps is not going to give away your entire product. And we saw that like a 15% higher engagement rate if you do move that five steps in versus have it up front.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:03]:
Interesting. So there's a fully ungated product demo would just be. It's just there. Anybody can do that. And do some people do that? Do customers do that?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:13:12]:
Yeah, like 73%. At least in this cohort just had it fully ungated. You could just click on it, start playing around. You didn't need to enter any information.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:20]:
And is there any way to measure how much that stuff's interacted? Can you cookie them and figure out who that is? Or is it just more like we believe in, like we're going to give away a ton of value? We believe in this. We're going to show it to you. If you're interested. We're going to then throw a prompt at the end to contact us.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:13:35]:
Yeah. A few options there. So you can embed ctas through in an interactive demo. That's where this 32% click through rate comes from. You're going through a demo because it is dynamic on like a video. You're clicking and controlling it. So you could then have a prominent CTA throughout the entire thing and then just use UTMs to track did they come from this demo. We also can track on the account level through cookie and ip tracking which accounts went through your demo.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:13:59]:
So even if it is ungated internally, what we do is we have intent signals and retargeting around the accounts that went through and can measure success versus on the contact level. It's not as accurate, but gives us something.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:11]:
This is a good comment from Aneska in chat for me. It's so underwhelming when I start checking a product interactive demo. And then step five is gated and it's the same old form story all over again. And this happens with marketing and tools. Right. It's like we kind of just do default to using things the old way. So like, you have a product demo, you have a product tour on your site, but it's gated. How is that different than just having something that says, fill out this form and I'll email you a video of our product demo.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:37]:
Right?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:14:38]:
Yeah. I think what I find to customers too is it kind of depends on how you're going to use that gate in that email. If you use that email and then send that person some personalized follow ups, that was helpful. Next steps. Not just, hey, you went through my product or take a live demo. I think as long as it's an equal value exchange, that's okay. But if your real goal is number of eyeballs on your product, kind of going back to that other point I made of like, if you want one and two website visitors to see your product value, then let them see it. Don't stop them before they can.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:07]:
And then the last point, I don't think we hit on this part yet, but the prominent part. Place your interactive demo above the fold on the navigation bar. So basically, if you're going to, don't just do this, but you're basically doing this. I mean, if I'm checking out your site as an example, right. You're not just doing this, but you're making it kind of the primary thing on your website is the best practice, right? Yeah.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:15:25]:
What we saw was 84% of that top 1% cohort had it as above the folder in the navigation bar. And it doesn't have to be embedded. Like if you go to our website, we have it literally embedded like a video on basically right above the fold. That's because we're Nevada. We want it to be super obvious. We use interactive demos. The most common use case, and I have an example of this that you're very familiar with later, is a secondary CTA. So let's say you have your primary CTA as take a live demo, or if you're PlG, take a free trial, just a secondary one.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:15:57]:
Nice. And next to it that says take a tour or see a demo.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:01]:
Yeah. Check out this from Whitney. In the chat, we use an interactive demo tool, both gated and ungated. Even ungated tours with a form at the end convert higher than the gated ones. It also has robust analytics showing how people move through the demo. This just shows if the intent is high, someone is going to reach out. Right. It's like my wife and I order from this pizza place down the street and it's the only one close to us.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:22]:
And they have this horrific mobile ordering platform that you got to fill out 30 fields in the form each time. But guess what? We do it because we want that pizza and we want it delivered to our house. Same thing here. You give away the tour if it's good and if you have the right product and the right fit and the right messaging people are going to do, it's not going to be because you held it from somebody that that's why they ended up buying. Anyway, do you want to answer this personalization question now or do you have a section where that would make sense after?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:16:47]:
No, we can go for it now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:49]:
Okay, so Grant is in the chat saying, how important is personalization in this type of demo experience? And then Shaheen said earlier, how do you achieve a personalized demo prior to a gated mechanism?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:16:59]:
Yeah. So that actually touches on that valuable point that was us really looking at the copy and content of these demos. I think as much as possible, if you can make these personalized and speak to different audiences, that you'll have, obviously, just like any marketing will have more success with that. So actually that does again queue up my next slide really well. I think an example is the best way to show this. So this is our customer rally. They are research platform management. It's actually been a two time builder who's amazing, that has built at other companies before.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:17:30]:
But what they did that I really liked is they broke up the different demos, as you can see here, by different personas, by different use cases. This is a common thing we see where if you do want to make your demos feel more personalized, you don't just have to have one demo, you can make, let's say a demo center, for example, and then have multiple demos by use, case by Persona. So that person can then go in, decide which one matches what they need. And it does feel more than just a generic overview.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:56]:
Beautiful.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:17:57]:
Yeah. We've also seen some customers will just ask up front in the very first modal is what we call it. So in this little text call out, you could just ask them, are you a designer? Do you want to use it for this use case? This use case and let them choose their own adventure. Or we have a little checklist where you could go pop up, kind of like in app product guidance for those little checklists. Pop up and say like, oh, I want to go into this use case. I only care about this versus that. So that's how you can, even without a demo or gate, can make it more valuable or personalized.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:23]:
Beautiful. All right, keep going. I see all the questions in the Q-A-I got them sorted. I'm going to let Natalie rip through this deck and we're going to get to them all, I promise. Cool, perfect.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:18:30]:
We have two more examples and then good for questions to go back to the engated point. I just wanted to show this is actually another good example of the idea of multiple use cases personas. Let me see. I'm going to share my actual screen and show this. So this is the demand based demo library and this is again all engated. What I love about this is that you can sort by different use cases again, going into that, making as personal as possible. So if I just care about engaging target accounts, suddenly only demos show up revolving around engaging target accounts. And then I can go in and then boom, I have a personalized demo just for that use case.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:19:07]:
I can click around, start learning about it, or go back and say, oh no, I actually wanted to learn about this, but I think this is really impressive because this is entirely ungated. So anyone can go to the demand based website and basically take a tour of any part of their product entirely like frictionless, without having to sign up for anything. One last example here. I'm just going to go right into the example. This is not surprising, Dave. I had to give a Jeff shout out. It's actually funny because I had this example queued up in the slide deck and then after I put it on, I was like, oh, this is a really good one for an exit five talk. But this goes to that question of where should you promote an interactive demo?
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:43]:
It's like seeing a friend. You haven't seen this deep relationship with this old friend and you're seeing this. I used to know this website intimately. I have no idea now, but I'm excited to see what you got.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:19:54]:
I was going to say I was curious if you've even seen the new updates, because I think they put this on, I think a few months ago. But this is the primary example of how you should promote interactive demo again, the main CTA get a demo secondary, take a tour, and then if you hit take a tour, it's going to open you up to a new screen. So I'm going to have to share that instead. And then it's a full page of the interactive demo. They have a little text call out here and then they walk you through their chat bot. Theirs is a little more of a story because obviously it's the chat bot versus the entire software, but I just thought that deployment is so smooth, it looks really nice with the other CTA. It doesn't track from it. And then if you want to, you get taken to a separate page.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:20:32]:
You can go through the whole demo, or you can easily go back to the website and read a little more before going in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:37]:
Yeah, I like you're seeing a lot of this from companies now where it used to be ten years ago, whatever it would be, one CTA, everything locked down, fill out a form and then we'll give you a call. And now you're seeing much more companies doing this. Much more like, hey, get a demo, get a tour. We're going to figure this out. How much of this do you think it's because that we can, is it because we can track everybody now that companies are okay with giving more away? What happens in a world where a lot of people talk about privacy and data and are cookies going to go away? There was that example from Whitney in the chat earlier about give it all away and good things will happen. You know what I'm trying to, I.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:21:14]:
Think I see it in two lenses. One, I think we realize we can't control the buying process as much we used to. So to your point about the one CPA, perfectly nurturing down, I think marketers have just realized that we don't have that much control over our buyers. They can go to a slack community and go ask ten people, hey, what software is the best? Does it have these features? They can go maybe look up our help docs. They can go to g two and do sleuthing. Like in the past, we used to have way more control versus the buyer. Now the buyer has a lot more control. Similar to the movement of direct to consumer for b to b.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:21:46]:
Right. And buyer has a lot more power. So I think that's part of it. As far as cookie tracking, what's kind of cool about these interactive demos is even if you have this ungated, but you can see what accounts are going through, suddenly you're getting first party data about what these accounts care about. Unlike, let's say, third party intent data. You're not exactly sure where it came from. If I go back to the demand based example, I can now see which accounts are interested in finding and prioritizing accounts versus closing effective opportunities. And then I can personalize my outreach to them based on what demos they went through and know what use case they care about.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:22:20]:
So I think customers, at least I'd say big, innovative customers, are realizing this is a new form of intent and can help with the replacement of cookies going away. That's all my examples. That was kind of slides. I'd love to tackle some of the good work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:34]:
Good work. Live from an undisclosed location in New York. Good job. This question from Enmol in the chat I'm convinced on having non gated product demo on the website, but what are your views? I like to add a little emphasis know I a little drama to these question readings. Gotta have some fun. But what are your views on protecting your product from being visible to your competitors?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:22:51]:
I think I've gotten this question from day one of joining Navattic. So I have a few answers to this one. I'm going to give my thoughts as a marketer and then I'm going to give how you can do this more from the product. As a marketer, my thoughts are think about how much you know about your competitors. I have seen a lot from our competitors. You find ways to get that information and your competitors already have probably seen demos of your software. They probably already stalk you. New product updates, kind of similar to how the buyers have more information than others.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:23:19]:
I think competitors also do. But I get it. Convincing leadership of that can be hard sometimes. What I recommend is one first start using it in the sales cycle. Right? Then you're just sending it to specific prospects. If you want to password gate it, you can. We do have that option where you can add a specific password so only your prospect can see it. And then start building trust from leadership by sending, having the sales team send it out.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:23:41]:
Replace the typical hey after a call, send you an hour long gong recording of our demo. Start sending interactive demos instead. And usually the whole team is going to get a little more comfortable with being more open with your product. And then that's when you can make more of the pitch to put on your website. If your leadership is really anti competitors seeing it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:59]:
Yeah, I think to your point, honestly, every company that I've ever been in, we have and so has the other companies. We've always found a sales rep who left this other company sends us like, hey, did you know that these people had your deck? And we're like, how the heck did they have your deck? People are ruthless and they're going to find out. I think what trumps that possible scenario is I'd much rather give all that information to my potential customers. I think we get so competitor focused. So you don't want to let your competitors, you don't want to let your four competitors see this. So you're not going to let 100% of your potential customers see this. That math doesn't add up for me. And then just to follow on this, I see the admall added to adding to my previous comments, specifically when you know for a fact there's one competitor that is unethically copying everything.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:40]:
I think, I'm not even trying to be a jerk. And I'm saying, welcome to the world of business. There's always going to be someone who's copying your stuff. I think you have two options. You can ignore it. Probably just a distraction. Focus on your business. Focus on delivering value for your customers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:53]:
Everything's going to be fine. If it really is impacting your business and really is unethical, then take a legal approach to this. Go reach out to your corporate lawyer and figure out what paths you might have otherwise. The solution is not don't show the interactive product demo on the screen. That's my opinion.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:25:08]:
I have one last thought on this because I see someone asked in the chat about how long they should be. Another thing is these demos should be pretty short, so we recommend eight to 15 steps. It's about 30 seconds. That's not enough to give away your secret sauce of your product. You should be showing the major aha moments, things that really get users excited, not your entire product. I've heard customers describe it before as like, it's an appetizer, not the full meal. So that should also not be so much that your competitors can copy everything you do if you're just showing a quick little 32nd interactive demo on your website.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:39]:
Yeah, that's really well said. All right, let's flip over to the Q and a. Carrie wants to know, how does product complexity factor into whether demo visitors will engage or complete a. Ooh.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:25:49]:
So I don't have stats on that, but what I can say is that the top three industries that we found from this report were cybersecurity, fintech, and then it goes into like, AI, marketing, tech, sales, tech, all that. So not really simple products. I think when something's really simple, like Slack, for example, PLG might actually be the best option. Something that's super easy to get up and running. If your product is a little more complex, I think an interactive demo can be a good fit because you can show, again, just select parts of it, the real aha moments, not every single part, in a very controlled manner. So I don't have stats on a more complex product versus not, but it tends to be more complex industries that do use interactive demos.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:31]:
So you're saying if it's a simple product, this might not be as good of a fit I think if it's so simple, if you sell pizza, you don't need an interactive product tour for your pizza. You just be like, here's a picture of the pizza. It looks good. Here are the reviews.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:26:43]:
I would love to see an interactive product tour of pizza. Being a New Yorker and how much I love pizza, but I haven't seen.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:48]:
It done a good. You can have this one. This one's free. With the webinar, you should do an April Fool's Day campaign where you'd create a site and it's product tours for small businesses. And so you'd pick out your favorite pizza joint in New York and you do interactive product tour. Take them through their pizza. That'd be fantastic. Jorge is in chat throwing pizza pictures right now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:07]:
We can't have that, sir. You're going to get banned. Craig wants to know, are there ways to do interactive demos without a big budget to apply to it?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:27:14]:
Yeah, I'd say, first off, interactive demos are no code. So as far as like, internal resources, you shouldn't need an entire team to be responsible for it. Some of our best builders are like one product marketer, and generally, I'd say the actual building part of a demo takes 30 minutes. We've seen customers get live within a day or two, but it depends on how long the storyboarding process and planning what you want to show. That could take a little longer. As far as money wise, it wasn't trying to avoid that part. We have our pricing publicly available on our website.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:44]:
How bold of you.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:27:45]:
That's something that it'd be hard to give a talk about transparent b two b buying and then not do it ourselves. But most of our customers pay $500 a month, which I buy a lot of b two b software. In my mind, that's not breaking the bank. And we do have some startup options if you are a little smaller.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:01]:
The MVP is screenshots.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:28:05]:
What I tell people is like, if you want to start with a video or loom, especially if you're a newer startup, you don't know exactly what your product is yet. Just do something. Just move to the direction of it and get your company more familiar with putting your product on your website.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:18]:
All right, I like that. Good advice. $500 a month. You can make this work. Sue Chan wants to know effective best practices for turning interactive product demos into lead gen. You kind of talked about this, but maybe answer it in a different context.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:28:32]:
Yeah, I think as far as lead gen, if you don't want to gate it again, have multiple ctas we found most effective if you have two ctas or even like a banner that has a constant CTA running. We've seen a lot of customers also use it in more lead gen channels, like Google Ads. So especially on competitor pages. Right. If you're trying to explain how your product is so much better than competitor, why not show them? Or like, in LinkedIn ads? Because especially in LinkedIn, I'm not trying to scroll through my LinkedIn feed and then go book a demo. I'm trying to avoid doing work, not sign up for more when I'm on LinkedIn. So we've seen a lot of customers use interactive demos as LinkedIn ads, because then you can say, okay, versus having to go take time to schedule demo. I can learn a little more about this product in a very low lift way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:13]:
When you say they use LinkedIn ads, they use the interactive demo as a LinkedIn ad. Is it like a landing page that has the interactive. Like they're driving traffic to a page that has the product demo on it, or the actual creative is interactive product.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:29:25]:
Demo, usually the landing page with the interactive demo on it. Like the creative might be a screenshot or promotion of it. Some people send right to the interactive demo, but it sort of depends on your setup. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:34]:
Rebecca chen in the chat said, this is my first time thinking about interactive demos. What are some software platforms y'all would recommend? I'm biased, but maybe for today you could look into Nevada. What's the right way to say it? I feel like an accent. Nevada. Nevada. Nevada. You being from jersey threw me off in the Nevada pronunciation.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:29:51]:
The amount of times you get like, nevada or navitich.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:54]:
Navitich, yeah. When I worked at privy, which was P-R-I-V-Y-I would get all this outreach from people, and it would be like, how are things going at P-R-I-V-Y? Because there was another startup named divi. People just. They don't pay attention. But anyway, check it out. This question is from aston. With the rising prominence of interactive product tours, what can you do to make them stand out from the competition?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:30:17]:
First off, hey, Aston. I think actually, aston, do you know aston? Yeah, he's a great builder of demos. So I think his example of putting them, he put them all over the jellyfish website, if you go check it out, another great example. But as far as how to make them stand out, I think the biggest thing I've seen, and again, going through the top 1% of demos is a detail to like UI and Ux. And this, again, Aspen pointed this out so I'm taking this from our customers, but you can tell those who kind of similar to any sort of product video, you can make a product video show some screenshots that looks good, but those who really take the time to say each step what copy is going to get someone to move to the next step. Where should I place this text call out versus how will it look behind my product? Or what's going to get someone to move next or really make them feel like they're using the product? It's usually designers who are the best at that. And that, I think, really makes a demo kind of give a wow moment versus if it is just okay, look at this next. Then look at this next.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:31:13]:
Look at this next. And it feels a little more like work than you playing with the product. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:19]:
Hey, whoever you are out there, shout out to you. Asset mule on Twitter just tweeted about this live tweet live from this webinar. That's what I'm here for. Thank you for that. Craig is back. Craig says, what if the product doesn't look and feel that good, like the real value is in the results, but it's hard to show that in a demo. Natalie, do you work with any customers that you know who have products that are hard to show?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:31:38]:
Yeah, I think this is where I'd actually argue that a interactive demo can be better than, like, a demo or free trial because you can have the data perfectly set up. So even if the product itself, the setting up the data isn't the prettiest, you don't have to show that. You can just show the end state of the beautiful dashboards, kind of giving you that aha moment without all the mess that comes before it. And we also have a ding feature, so you can go in and edit any parts of your product. So maybe if certain parts look a little messy, or if you have, for example, data that shows a bunch of negative numbers and you want to change that to positive numbers, that's a common use case. You can do that all in our editor. So you don't need a perfect demo environment with perfect demo data. You can do that in Nevada to tell a little bit better of a product story if your product maybe doesn't tell it itself.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:22]:
I also think it's important, and I have no experience with any of this. I'm out of the, I'm just, I tweet a lot. I run a media company now. I'm out of the game. But don't you feel like you have to have a goal similar to the website. Right. The goal of the website is not to show everybody every possible feature, every possible use case, every Persona that can buy it. It's like ultimately you're going to have to have a conversation with somebody.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:44]:
You're going to have to figure out how to implement it. You're going to have to talk about pricing. There's a lot here. And so the goal is, what's the right level of just enough of a taste to someone. Ultimately they're going to have a demo and probably talk to sales at some point, right. It's like, how do you give them enough? And I always have loved copywriting. And one of my favorite copywriting kind of isms is what's the goal of the first line of your copy? It's to get somebody to read the second line of the copy. What's the goal of the second line of copy? It's to get them to read the third.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:10]:
And I think about websites in that same context. And I think that really plays well into this idea of interactive product demos, too. It's like the goal is to not to replace. Okay, cool, I'm ready to buy this thing now. It's interesting. This might be what I'm looking for. I'm going to reach out and contact the company.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:33:24]:
Yeah, I think exactly what you said. It should not replace a live demo. It should get someone excited about taking that live demo, because really what it's doing is just validating that first step of, is this what I think it is? Because I've signed up for product demos or software demos and it's been entirely different than what I thought it was. And then we just both wasted my time and the sales rep's time. So it's really that first step to get people excited and like, yes, this is what I want. I want to go further explore this now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:50]:
All right, you know, what do you say? Any questions in the Q A? Don't let me hog this. I'm happy to play host, but is there one that stands out to you in the Q A? That's like, I got a strong opinion on that.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:34:00]:
I have not been monitoring as much, but let me see one quick question, because I've heard this before. Can you demo physical products are limited to software. It is currently limited to software because basically what we're doing is we're cloning the code of your software and then creating like a perfect replica of it. I have seen some companies use it for like, if you have a course or if you have a notion template or something like that, it's not your software, but that's what you sell. But we can't create an interactive demo of a shoe or golf clubs we were talking about before.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:29]:
We could work on that, we could find a way.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:34:31]:
Pizza. That's the next thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:32]:
Pizza is the next one. This question is from Craig at Repsley. We've introduced several interactive demos at Repsley and we're discovering that they provide the most value to our sales team when shared throughout the entire sales cycle. This has presented us with some struggles when trying to track activity and attribution. Any tips or ideas for things that I should be paying closer attention to? We just started out in its simplest form, tracking the percentage of deals that an AE was sharing. A Nevada tour in a deal as yes or no.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:34:58]:
Yeah. Also, hey, Greg, love seeing all these builders on the webinar. Not webinar, live chat. That's awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:04]:
No live session for two. Live. The live session. God get it right.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:35:09]:
I only posted about it a few times. How could I forget?
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:12]:
Live session. It's not a webinar. This is not a webinar. Everyone hang up right now.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:35:16]:
Never a webinar. I feel like in b two b. The sin is to call anything a webinar these days. But to Craig's question, I think one thing that we've looked at internally and are going to start measuring better is not just how many opportunities use an interactive demo, but then how did that affect the sales cycle length? Because really, that's kind of what you're validating in these demos, is it should move faster. Right. If I send this to my champion and they send it to their internal stakeholders, and then those internal stakeholders see the product don't need to jump on a live second demo, then hopefully this will speed up the entire sales cycle. That's what we're trying to measure, is those demos that do or those opportunities that have been marked. Yes, they've been using interactive demo.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:35:55]:
What is the sales cycle of those versus those that have not used an interactive demo?
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:59]:
That's one of those things that drives me nuts about b two B marketing. Sometimes it's like we have to prove that this works. We can't just use. Well, we showed more people of the product and they bought. We have to. Did Natalie see? I need to. Oh, but then the rep forgot to check it. It's chaos.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:36:18]:
I will say we've hired some customers create, and I think Repsley might do this, create demos for specific customers. So then at least it's a little less. The rep has to go into Salesforce and check something. It's just, oh, I saw that there was a demo created for Google, therefore we know the Google deal had a demo.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:33]:
This is a question from Justin can sales reps create personalized product demos for each prospect?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:36:38]:
That kind of just perfectly answered what I said. Yes, you can. There are a few different ways you can use, basically have like a find and replace feature. So if you want to change out all the logos, if you want to change out the text, so it says like, hey, company name. Hey, this name, you can use those find and replace variables. And if you're sending it in an email campaign, you can also pull in variables from outreach or HubSpot, kind of the classic email variables, and pull that in. So it's not like you have to manually update that. It will just automatically update.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:37:05]:
So if the email says, hey Natalie, the demo will say, hey, Natalie. You could also just clone one demo and then if you wanted to change what it shows, you could also clone demo, remove some sections, add some sections, and sort of have one template that your sales reps work off of.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:19]:
And then Craig also said, we're talking a lot about website lead gen. I'm a solo product marketer. Nevada has been incredible as an asset to include in our product launches. Who is the biggest power user of the product? Is it product marketing? Is it marketing? Is it sales enablement? What's the split at your customers?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:37:35]:
So the builders are most often product marketers. And I typically recommend if your company has a strong product marketing function, they should be the builders. Product marketing tends to make really good demos. Not surprisingly, they know the product in and out. But then we often see the demand den team will use it, actually distribute it in different channels. We'll see the sales team will use it as we talked about in sales lead behinds, or maybe BDRs will use it in outreach. And then a new really big growing use case that we're seeing is customer success, using it for training customers so you don't have to do always one on one trainings, sending them a more async resource for them to learn the product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:14]:
Cool. Jeff Porter, aka Real Smooth in the chat, wants to know, does Nevada integrate with chilipiper?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:38:20]:
Yes, we actually just released that integration I think like a month ago at this point. So you can have a chili piper form embedded right into your demo. So to the point of how can you track where these leads are coming from or use it for lead gen? You can even midway through the demo, it doesn't have to be at the very end you could just say, hey, ready for a live demo? Sign up with a rep. Now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:40]:
Ali Keller wants to know, do you have any examples of using this product for a service based business versus a tech product?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:38:47]:
Yeah, it's definitely less common. That example that I've seen kind of, I mentioned, like courses, but I've seen some consultants. Right. If they sell a course or if they sell a notion template, or if they sell, I don't know, like any sort of package you could get that is still of a digital asset. They've created interactive demos to almost preview, hey, if you buy this course, this is some of the things that you'll get in it. We've even actually seen some customers who make research reports create interactive demos of the research report. And we did this with our report to kind of quickly show you the highlights of the research report, which I think just goes to show how low our attention span is. Me very guilty of this as well, that we need something that points out, hey, here's what you should pay attention to in this report.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:29]:
Yeah, the questions have been fantastic. It's the right fit of people here and having this discussion. I really like this question from Tanuja in the Q A, and maybe you could talk about what you all do at your company. What's the structure of the first call? With a prospect that converted through the demo on the website. So somebody goes to the website, they go through the interactive product tour, they book a call. How long does that call typically go? What's the overall agenda of that?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:39:54]:
That is a great question, and actually, that's the first time I've gotten that. So kudos, because I've heard a lot of questions on interactive demos. This is what we do at Navattic. This is kind of divisive, so take it if you want just an example. But we actually don't do a discovery call. We do, the first call is mix of Discovery plus live demo. We don't have an SDR that you talked the first time, because our view on it is if you went through the interactive demo, you kind of self qualified, you know, what you're signing up for. We still do some discovery up front for the first five minutes, but then we show you the product, and I think to that point about how to interactive demos help speed up the sales cycle.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:40:28]:
The goal is hopefully you could even eliminate one call altogether. That kind of first discovery call of, do you know what you're signing up for? Do you have budget, all that, and just dive right into seeing and you can go in and say like, okay, I saw you saw an interactive demo of x, y and z feature. Do you have any questions on it? Do you want to dive into it more or do you want to dive into more complex functionality and kind of get past that initial harbor tour demo?
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:51]:
We may have touched on this, but it's kind of phrased in a different way. So I'm going to ask it anyway. Are there channels other than the website that have been effective for an interactive product tour?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:41:00]:
Yeah. So some other fun ones that we've seen on g two or on any review site. So especially if you think about it like someone is on your product page on g two, they're probably pretty high intent. They are looking at you versus competitors. Why not show them exactly how you differ versus, again, explaining it. That's been a really popular one in email campaigns. So especially for if you are PLG, we've seen a lot of customers use it in that onboarding experience because I feel like common problem with PLG is if they don't log in after day one, it's hard to get them back in the product. This is a way to educate them without them needing to be in the product.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:41:36]:
I touched on Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, feature launches is a big one. I think we've talked about this as well. Really think of any channel that you'd use a video for or even like a screenshot and you could use a demo for it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:49]:
All right, Dave, I'm going to ask the last question, then we're going to let everybody get out of here a little bit early, get some minutes back in their day. I'm just curious to hear about the marketing team. And into 2024, you all are trying to get more people to know about interactive product demos to use your product. What's exciting to you as somebody interested in marketing and growth right now? What interesting things are you all doing right now? Marketing strategy. What does the marketing playbook look like?
Natalie Marcotullio [00:42:13]:
Okay, I'm going to give two answers, one that relates to interactive demos and one that doesn't.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:16]:
Because hit me.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:42:17]:
Sorry. Interactive demos are always on my mind.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:20]:
I do think that is the best marketing thing you could be doing, right. If you're at a company and you can use the product to do the marketing, you'd be silly to not do that. So it's great.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:42:28]:
Yeah. I think if anything, using more demos and running more experiments, that's a big thing. So we're going to be running a lot of internal experiments with demos for small things. Like one thing we're running right now is how does embedding a chili Piper form versus linking out to a CTA change my conversion rate and then documenting those experiments and sharing those with our customers. So we're just going to run a lot more growth experiments using demos ourselves and then sharing those in our content on LinkedIn to customers themselves. And part of that's kind of that intent data play I was talking about. I really want to test a lot more how we could basically take any third party intent we're using, still use it a little bit, but then combine it with fully using the Nevada data as our first party intent. On the non Nevada side, something I'm getting really excited about is I'm thinking through redoing our customer loyalty program and I'm just thinking through how I can help better celebrate.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:43:19]:
Like we've seen, there's been some amazing Nevada customers in this chat. Thank you for everyone who showed up. We have an awesome fan base. How can we just better reward and celebrate them in a way that's not tied to the very typical hey, you spend x amount with Nevada so you get the most praise. I want to almost remove the person from the account and just think about how we can celebrate the fan over the company. So that's still tbdoo, but that's a big bet.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:43]:
I have one more question. It's a question, but it's a word. And I'd like to hear your first thing that comes to mind as you think about marketing right now. And that word is Chat GPT.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:43:53]:
So I was at first very anti because I saw it as a way to create more spammy marketing. But then, kudos to my new hire who created cool new ways to use chat GTP. We're using it for like internal enablement. So for example, we loaded all of our blog posts into a chat GTP bot. And now you can search that using chat GTP. Say, give me a blog post that shows a fintech customer using Nevada for LinkedIn ads and it will pop out an example. So I think I'm less focused on how can I use it to write, copy or create a million blog posts that are low quality, and how can I use it to make my day to day more efficient and my sales team's day to day more efficient? And by me, I mean my new hire. But that's what I'm currently thinking about.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:39]:
Well, you can do it too. I think there's a lot of use cases. A year ago I was very like, well, you just use it to generate copy. And now this morning I was writing a video script and I just had nothing. You go to like, I got an hour to do this. I just got nothing. And I spend 30 minutes writing prompts and editing using Chat GPT. And that got me to where I was able to then go and write, and I actually ended up writing the script all in my words, in my copy, but it was the getting the ball rolling piece that was super helpful.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:04]:
All right, Natalie, this was awesome. Thank you for coming. Thank you for doing this. Thank you to all you who turned out in the chat. Impressive number of people are still hanging around, so thank you for that. We will send out the recording to all this if you're listening to this in the future. Hey, future, you future listeners, maybe on a run out for a walk, cleaning the house, doing something. Listening to this in the future on the exit five podcast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:25]:
Thanks for listening, everybody. Signing off in the chat right now. Natalie, fist bump through the screen. Enjoy the rest of your day in New York and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody, for coming. We'll see you on another exit five live session in the future.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:45:37]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:38]:
Goodbye, Natalie. You rocked it. I'll see you later. Thank you.
Natalie Marcotullio [00:45:41]:
Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:50]:
Deep exit.