Sales demo environments are essential for sales performance in the SaaS industry. At different levels of sales, the sales team needs to have the right sales demo environments to provide an engaging, customizable, and reliable demo experience. Especially if the software or platform is complex and offers customized solutions, the sales team will need to showcase different use cases. Sales demo environments can also be used to scale self-serve sales demos by providing a prospect with their product demo.
The below article gives an overview of the sales demo environment, and why it matters and gives a brief comparison of the various sales demo software available in the market.
What is a Sales Demo Environment?
A sales demo environment is an environment that helps prospects immerse themselves in software demos. The demo platform supports A / B testing features, messages, and graphs to determine the highest conversion rate. You can also use them to understand the best demos for your sales reps and help your team improve and standardize overall performance.
This includes using data, charts, graphs, functions shown in the demo, and the tools used to display them. This is the demo instance or the demo experience platform itself, or the meeting tools, slides to display, and attendees to use. The sales demo tool can also collect customer feedback and market intelligence, increase closing rates, and reduce the time required to close a sale. As a result, when used properly, sales demo tools are a powerful asset for all sales professionals.
Benefits Of Using A Sales Demo Environment
- Realistic Experience: The sales demo environment can be tailored to the industry of your prospects.
- Fast: The product demo platform allows you to create multiple templates for different types of customers. Sales teams can easily generate these template environments and quickly prepare for product demos.
- More compelling: You can adjust the sales demo environment as needed which makes it easier for your prospects to visualize the benefits. It helps to bring the software to life.
- Interactive: Interactive demo software allows end users to explore instances of their environment for a set period. Being able to use the technology on their own makes them more likely to be engaged and get an honest feel for the software.
- More Engaging: Practical experiences that allow customers to interact with a personalized environment are simply more engaging. This will make your company’s technology stand out from the crowd, versus your competitors who show a Zoom screen share presentation.
- Interest Simulation: The ability to see a product based on your own desires versus following what the salesperson shows you.
- Providing Evidence: The products, samples, videos, brochures, images, and other tools used in the demos are often referred to as evidence devices because they provide concrete evidence to support the claim. As long as you can show what your product can do and make it concrete to your customers, you’ll be in a better position.
Sales Demo Software
Storylane
Storylane is an innovative no-code platform that enables you to build interactive product demos in just 10 minutes. It caters to both marketing and sales teams, allowing them to craft immersive experiences for their prospects and buyers.
With Storylane, you can easily showcase your product through clickable demos that capture audience attention and cater to every stage of the buyer’s journey. With its streamlined approach, Storylane helps you shorten the sales cycle by up to 30%,
Reprise
Reprise is a demo creation platform that sales and marketing use when they need to sell a product with it. Reprise provides a code-free, enterprise-ready platform. This allows teams to control demo narration and provide custom product experiences without technical involvement.
Tourial
Tourial software allows you to create self-guided product tours using the product storytelling platform for higher quality conversions. Tourial is named after “tour”, the main point of the product demo, and “tutorial”, a way to convey knowledge to those who are experiencing something new for the first time.
Walnut
Walnut’s product demo software makes it easy to create interactive product demos and gain insights into how they are used.
Heropa
This platform will be used to showcase software applications in sales demos and conduct customer testing and proof-of-concept. This allows prospects to thoroughly evaluate the software while improving the consistency and efficiency of the sales method.
Demostack
Demostack is a sales demo software designed to provide users with a demo experience, rather than just selling their business. It creates the best demo environment for all users and provides the ability to reach the right prospects in the right way.
Tailored (no longer available as sales demo software)
Tailored is a sales demo software that can turn a software demo into a personalized experience.
Navattic
Navattic is a sale demo software that helps sales and marketing teams to deliver interactive product tours by enabling the creation of interactive demos. It provides a detailed analysis of the engagement rate for a single demo. Sellers can target leads via Navattic and share embedded emails with demos. It lets you automate unqualified demos by sharing their self-guided product experience. With Navattic, you can empower buyers to gain in-depth insights into the views collected from a single demo and the most interesting parts of each.
Storylane – Category Leader For Sales Demo Environments
What is Storylane
Storylane is a user-friendly interactive demo platform designed for marketing and sales teams. With Storylane, you can easily create and share interactive product demos that captivate your audience and showcase the unique features and benefits of your product.
For marketing teams, Storylane is the perfect tool for creating self-guided demos that you can embed on your website, include in your email campaigns, or incorporate into support guides.
Sales teams can use personalized HTML demos for live sales demonstrations and leave-behinds to enable champions to get internal buy-in quickly from multiple stakeholders.
Storylane Features
Some of the features Storylane offers are as follows:
- Buyer Reveal: When embedding interactive demos on your website, Buyer Reveal helps you identify the anonymous visitors that engage with your demo and uncovers information such as their company name, employee count, ARR, and industry.
- AI Assist: This can help you create, refine, and translate guides in over 25+ languages, saving a lot of time in the process. You can also add AI-generated voiceovers to your guides automatically.
- Custom lead form: You can add your custom forms from your CRM into Storylane to capture and send valuable prospect information seamlessly to it.
- Personalization tokens: With Storylane’s Token variables, you can change the name, company, and logos of a prospect or create unique links that you can share with each prospect.
- Video export of demos: Allows you to export your storylane demos as downloadable videos
Storylane Integrations:
Storylane offers native integration with most CRM and marketing automation platforms. Some of their popular integrations include – HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Intercom, Google Analytics, Segment, Zapier, Slack, and API.
Storylane Pricing
Storylane offers the following pricing plans:
Plan Name | Startup | Growth | Enterprise |
Features | Unlimited Storylane Demos & ViewsKey FeaturesScreenshot captureWalkthrough widgetsMulti-flow and checklistAnalyticsZapier IntegrationHubspot Integration | Record Screens + VideoEverything in Startup, plus:Record HTML (application)Demo HTML EditorPersonalizationClickable Live DemosCustom Lead formsAdvanced AnalyticsDedicated SupportDemo Reveal | Record Screens + VideoEverything in Growth, plus:Custom PricingMulti-TeamMultiple IntegrationsSSODemo CoachingCustom BrandingAPIDedicated Slack Support |
Storylane starts with a free plan letting anyone build interactive product demos. No credit card is required. While the Free Plan is good for a test run, you only get 1 demo that you can publish from your account.
- Solo: Free
- Start-Up: $40/user per month
- Growth:$100/user per month
Pros
- Easy to use
- Reasonable pricing
- AI assistance for creating demo tooltips
Cons
- Limited features in the free plan
- Limitation on 250 buyer-reveals in the starter plan
Key Considerations When Buying Sales Demo Environment Software
Although your needs will be different from another’s, there are some core features and things you should consider while choosing the right sale demo software before buying it. Listed below are the key points and features that can guide you better in your sales demo software buying process.
1. Know your needs
Before you start buying a sales demo tool, it’s important to know what you need. List out the features that are important to you. Understanding your needs will help you narrow down your options and choose the best tools for your business.
2. Look for the features included
Once you know your needs, start investigating. Compare the features of the tools available with the requirements you are looking for. If the sales demo software you are looking at has more features than what you are looking for it will be a win for you. Decide on what is best suited for you, a single standalone tool or a suite of tools to set up your sales demo environment.
3. Participate in the product demo
Once you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s important to try out the sales demo tools you’re interested in. By trying out the tools before you buy, you can be sure that you are making the best decisions for your business.
4. Hear from the team
Talk to your sales team before making the final decision. Their feedback is invaluable as they are the ones who use the tools daily.
5. Check for customization options
The best software will make it easy for you to tailor your demos to your needs. If you may need customizations in the future to add more functionalities, check out the options that align with it.
6. Know your budget
Lastly, an important aspect is the cost factor. That also depends on the number of users. You cannot choose software just based on cost but can choose something that fits your budget and yet delivers what you need. If you are starting early, can opt for free tools out there. Or if you have a team spread globally can opt for a cloud-based solution that might have a subscription plan.
The content of your product demo should not be general, as everyone’s needs are different. With the right sales demo tools, you can build a customized experience based on your specific issues and how your solution appeals to your customers.
Tourial – Popular Sales Demo Software
What is Tourial
Tourial is the sales demo software that is almost near the top of the sales demos environment category. It is a tool that provides a simple way for marketers to create self-guided product tours using the product storytelling platform, resulting in higher-quality conversions. Tourial gets its name from the word ‘Tour,’ which is the whole point of product demos, and ‘Tutorial,’ which is a way of transferring knowledge to someone experiencing something new for the first time.
Tourial Features
Some of the features Tourial offers are as follows:
- Tourial uses the screenshot capture method to create the tours. The screenshots provide a product walkthrough that can be augmented with user interface patterns.
- It consists of tooltips (for context), modal windows (for additional detail and large files like video and images), and hotspots (dots and icons that draw the user’s attention to click on an element to learn more about it).
- Prospects get the chance to see the software and know what it might look like before using it. The ‘feel’ aspect is almost entirely absent, given the basic screenshot approach used to make
Tourial Integrations
Tourial has key integrations with HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.
Tourial Pricing
Tourial offers two pricing plans as follows:
Plan name | Performance | Growth |
Usage based feature | Tourials – 10 live Tourials Users – Unlimited users | Tourials – 50 live Tourials Users – Unlimited users |
Advanced features | White Label URLs Insights Dashboard HubSpot Integration Tracking Scripts | White Label URLs Insights Dashboard HubSpot Integration Tracking Scripts |
Support | In-app Support | In-app Support Slack Connect Channel |
Pros
- Simple and easy to use.
- The support is not just offered via email or the help desk but also in the FAQs, knowledge base, phone support, and chat.
- Training is done live online and with proper and complete documentation.
- Users can give their demos colors that reflect their brand colors.
- Tourial is in the process of introducing a mobile-optimization feature, something many of its competitors do not have.
Cons
- Limited integrations
- There is no free trial or free version offered.
- There are no prospecting tools or lead management.
Walnut – An Alternative In the Sales Demo Environment Category
What is Walnut.io
Walnut’s platform enables B2B companies to scale their demo personalization in order to improve their buyers’ experience and conversion. By using Walnut, sales teams can easily create tailored, interactive, and failure-free demos for each prospect while guiding them to the product in an engaging way, without coding. Thanks to the platform’s collaboration tools and advanced analytics, sales teams can constantly optimize their demo process and exceed their quotas. Walnut is best suited for teams of sales/marketing on the lookout for a fully customizable platform delivering consistent, seamless, and effective demos.
Walnut Features
Some of the features Walnut offers are as follows:
- Supports personalizing every aspect of your demo for each prospect, including text, images, features, and colors.
- Guide prospects with annotations.
- Lets you make bulk changes that enable replacing text elements and images easily.
- Provides reusable demo templates.
- Enables sending links of your personalized demo to your prospect in your outreach emails, LinkedIn messaging, etc.
- Team collaboration and management.
- Provides embed demo functionality to use your demos in all your online materials (website, landing pages, and more).
- Access control
- Customer engagement management
- Customizable reports
- Lead capture, generation, and qualification
- Training Management
- Workflow management
- Performance metrics
Walnut Integrations
No data available
Walnut Pricing
Walnut provides custom pricing for their software.
Pros
- Allows you to create personalized and guided sales demos for each prospect and to tell product stories without coding a single line.
- Gives your visitors the opportunity to interact with your product right on your website, emails, landing page, blog posts, and any marketing materials to increase conversions.
- Let’s teams collect and monitor the clicks of your potential customers to see how they utilize your demos and optimize them accordingly.
- Enables your team to maintain high demo creation standards and learn from each other thanks to demo templates, organization tools, and feedback sharing capabilities.
- Replicate your sales demos in a matter of seconds and customize them for each client.
- Enables you to instantly capture the product’s screens from a web browser
Cons
- Can be slow
- Lags at times
- Not very intuitive to use
Demostack – A Top Competitor in The Sales Demo Software Category
What is Demostack
Demostack- a sales demo environment category leader, is the demo experience platform that helps you accelerate revenue with enhanced product storytelling. Demostack helps revenue teams showcase products in the best possible way, without any hassle. Demostack is best suited for sales engineers.
Demostack Features
Some of the features Demostack offers are as follows:
- Supports providing a guided walkthrough of your product demo.
- Let’s deliver personalized demos on every call, and let buyers play around with your product on their terms with a shared leave-behind.
- Allows customizing the content to your buyer’s use case, persona, or vertical with a few clicks.
- Enables cloning your product into a demo environment
- Provides editing capabilities including editing text, charts, colors, images, icons, lists, tables, removing elements, update the master.
- Sharing live demos, and guided demos. Supports secure link sharing, embedding, and tracking.
- Lets you create custom demos in minutes using charts, charts, and other details to create impressive product stories that involve people.
Demostack Integrations
Demostack integrates with CRM such as Salesflare which helps automate your data to build better relationships and make more sales. Demostack also integrates with Startup Credits.
Demostack Pricing
Demostack provides custom pricing for their software.
Pros
- Ability to configure variables and update existing clones
- Customize any aspect of the user interface
- Robust ability to customize text and data, without changing underlying demo data.
- Ability to update a demo without re-do the whole thing.
- No linking together screenshots to recreate your product experience.
Cons
- Does not support cross-platform demos.
- Does not provide team collaboration capabilities.
d.
Navattic – Another Option For Sales Demo Software
What is Navattic
Navattic demo creation software helps teams create interactively and instantly. With Navattic you can create, customize, and share interactive product demos for instant conversion. It helps marketing and sales teams build, track, and share interactive product experiences in real-time. Users can create a lightweight reproduction of the original demo environment, overlay guided tooltips to facilitate smooth navigation within the product, and share something special via links.
Navattic Features
Some of the features Navattic offers are as follows:
- No code, drag and drop functionality make building tours easy
- Add text, pop-ups, or additional images to show users the value of your product
- Sharing capabilities via a single link
- Simple editor to make quick updates to your tour
- Dashboard Overview
- Setup Basic Analytics
- Explore Admin Controls
- Generating Monthly Reports
- Lead generation, tracking, and qualification
- Tailored product-led campaigns
Navattic Integrations:
Navattic integrates with Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Intercom and Marketo
Navattic Pricing
Navattic requires a call with the sales team. If you’d like us to get you pricing, just fill out the form to the right.
Pros
- The system usage follows a targeted approach by bringing customers on a full journey in a matter of minutes.
- Enables implementing new captures and workflows with ease.
- Responsive customer support.
- HTML Editing: Provides the ability to retroactively edit HTML elements on the capture without having to record a new demo.
Cons
- The software does not provide the ability to undo deleting a step within a guide.
- Does not support demo creation ability for solutions made to deploy for a mobile application as of now.
- Projects workspace is not well organized.
What is Reprise
Reprise is a leader in the sales demo environment. It is a demo creation platform company that enables software companies’ revenue teams to bring their product to life with customized demos, website-based product tours, and email-able product experiences. Reprise enables business users on revenue teams to capture, edit, and deploy an application that feels identical to their production environment. Reprise is more suitable for teams if sales/marketing is looking to record demo flows and develop product screenshots together.
Reprise Features
Some of the features Reprise offers are as follows:
- Guided demos live sales demo.
- Campaign building for product launches and showcasing key features such as capturing and connecting screens from your production and development environments. Customizing the data, including text, charts, and graphics.
Reprise Integrations
Reprise software lets you connect your demo data with CRM and automation tools such as Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, Google Analytics UA, and HubSpot Analytics.
Reprise Pricing
Reprise offers two pricing plans as follows:
Plan Name | Reprise Starter | Reprise Starter+ |
Pricing | Free, forever | $1,000/month |
Best suited for | For individual teams that need one high-quality demo lightly customized for a single vertical or persona. | For smaller organizations that need product tours and/or demos lightly customized for verticals or personas. |
Features included | 1 Replay (5 screens max)1 User 50 views/monthText, image, and link editing Bulk edit Standard guides Analytics (aggregate) | 3 Replays 5 Users 500 views/month Text, image, and link editing Bulk edits Standard guides Analytics (aggregate) |
Pros
- You can easily record screenshots just by using the plugin.
- Allows creating guides and navigation across product pages.
- Ability to create multiple replays.
- Messaging capabilities
- It uses interactive demos to replace specialized demo environments.
Cons
- Limited to recording clips of images and videos in the browser but not from desktop or mobile apps.
- Does not allow team collaboration.
- Does not enable quick creation of demos.
Sales Demo Environment Software To Consider
Out of the above software, all of the sales demo software tools can get the job done for you. Your needs will be met with specific features you and your team desire.
Ace your sales game by getting the sale demo process right. The demo is the most important step in getting your prospect better understand your product and tie it to your prospect’s needs. A suitable sales demo environment will make it a smooth process to have the big picture in front of your prospect and help you close the deals faster and hassle-free.
It’s important to know that if you’re not generating enough sales demos, you may have a problem with not booking enough meetings which means you should consider adding SDR outsourcing or sales management outsourcing services to improve the top of the funnel. An inside sales consultant could also be of help.
Sales Demo Environment Software Alternatives
Ranking Sales demo software is not easy. The truth is the products are quite similar. You’re better off taking a look at the sales demo environment software alternatives when evaluating this relatively new category.
- Reprise
- Demostack
- Tourial
- Walnut
A good sales demo is tailored to your prospect’s problems. It allows the viewer to see how the product solves their specific problems. A good sales demo is rooted in understanding what challenges a prospect face and how the demo shows these challenges can be overcome.
Demos in sales are the demonstration of the product in action so the prospect can better understand how it fits their needs or solves their problems.