We live in a try before you buy world.
Most of us download Kindle samples before buying the book, listen to audio snippets before adding songs to our Apple Music playlists, and wish Costco would resume sampling so we could try out the new queso dip before bringing home 2 gallons of it.
The truth is there are innumerable demands on our time and money, and there has to be a demonstration of worth before we hand either of them over. Your B2B buyers are no different. They want to try the queso before committing, and you need to be ready with the cheese.
Hold the cheese
There was a time when requests for custom product demos struck fear in the hearts of sales and marketing alike. They were labor-intensive to produce and had a high margin for error when rushed. Have you ever been in a room when a demo glitched in front of a prospective customer? I have, and it was not a good time.
Because of the work involved, companies only built custom demos for prospects who had progressed to the bottom of the sales funnel. Following this protocol was the best way to justify the resources needed to create and deliver a reliable demo.
The inaccessibility of custom demos made it challenging for sales and marketing to generate qualified leads. Early sales teams had a harder time turning cold calls into prospects, and marketing bore the burden of proof instead of letting the product speak for itself.
In the end, preventing customers from experiencing the product upfront created longer, more expensive sales cycles and less effective marketing.
Demo today, close tomorrow
Today, sales and marketing teams have access to a new product category that makes creating interactive demos and leave-behinds much easier. Some, like Reprise, even allow sales and marketing teams to create demos that range in scale, from a light version to an in-depth experience.
Here’s a scenario. Imagine that your marketing team can quickly generate and upload an interactive product tour onto the company website or integrate a personalized demo into a live webcast without fearing it will malfunction. In the meantime, your early-stage sales and lead gen teams can easily create and send product demos to a shortlist of potential prospects to try before they buy.
The leads gathered from both of these efforts will be better qualified and come with demo-usage insights that shorten the sales cycle with targeted follow-up.
It’s all pretty exciting!
Welcome to the future
We are living in a product-first, product-led era, where end-users have become decision-makers. It’s no longer effective to rely on benefits and solutions to generate interest. Sales and marketing need to be ready with the queso, ready with the demo, upfront.
And we can! Because demos are no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. Instead, they’ve become an accessible, scalable tool that can and should be part of your early sales and marketing outreach—allowing your product to speak for itself and delivering user insights that strengthen future sales engagement.
I invite you to see it for yourself. Create an interactive demo of your product in minutes–for free–with Reprise Starter.
Grace Tyson is the VP of Sales at Reprise, an enterprise-ready demo/product experience platform for teams that need to tell product stories through demos and product tours to drive product-led growth and close deals faster.
