Financial downturns are an inevitable evil that companies will end up facing at one time or another. Such times are especially difficult on SaaS companies, whom depend heavily on product subscriptions.
Product-led growth has been in the headlines lately, as more and more companies seek to adopt the method. PLG is a low-cost, high impact growth strategy. By allowing your product to “speak for itself”, so to say, you can save several stacks of dollars on your marketing efforts.
When displaying your services or platform and what your business can do for a customer, one of the most effective ways of getting your sales points across is through a product demonstration. However, when running live demonstrations, you have to expend company employee hours, while only capturing the audience that can be at your presentation at that moment.
Many companies have moved to product demo experience platforms, which allow you to showcase your product on your website. Walnut, Demostack, and Reprise are three notable ones, though we have tried them out and noticed numerous differences – and the bottom line is that one could have more benefits than the others.
Walnut Overview
Walnut launched mid-2020. It allows businesses to create a personalized and interactive product demo in just a few minutes. Focusing on demonstrating the unique selling point of your brand, these demos will highlight all the best features of your platform, constructing a convincing demo that is highly likely to convert.
With these demonstrations, Walnut gives sales reps the option to customize the demo for every single prospect. Depending on who is accessing the demo and where from, what you can offer will dramatically change. You can even guide people through the process with annotations, helping you make your demos as user-friendly as possible.
Teams are able to create effective sales demos with Walnut, without the need for having coding capabilities. What’s more, Walnut provides analytical tools which will then feed information to the sales team, helping them to optimize the demos over time. With this form of in-app testing, you can refine what you’re offering and ensure that your business gets off on the very best foot with new customers.
Benefits:
● Interaction - Within your product demos, users can navigate for themselves, using the in-app demo on your site, to learn more about your product in a user-friendly and efficient way. With this, you can boost the number of users that experience your product demo before continuing down the sales funnel.
● Customizable - No matter who your client is, you’re able to replicate sales demos and rapidly personalize them, making sure that your customers feel valued when they see a demo. Considering that 73% of customers prefer a personalized experience, this will instantly ensure that your product goes down as well as possible with them.
● Analytic Development - Within all the demos that you create, Walnut will generate, store, and display core analytics around each of the demos that you release. With this, you’re able to learn more about which of your product demos are most successful, allowing you to rapidly get to work on continually refining your idea demo.
Reprise Overview
Reprise prides itself on being a product experience platform that allows companies to create no-code demos. Whether you want to create live sales demos or guided demos, this platform aims to let you do it all.
They focus on honing in on the buying experience of your product, aiming to boost conversions and sales within your platform. As it allows you to create a product demonstration that you can host on your website, customers are able to try the product before having to arrange a call with someone on your sales team.
This brand is typically aimed at enterprise-level services and at more technical audiences than “DIY”-loving salespeople, wanting to become the go-to for several types of teams.
Benefits:
● Range - With Reprise, you can produce a range of different product demo videos, selecting different types depending on if you want to guide a customer through your platform or let them discover how it works themselves.
● On-Site - You’re able to place different demos throughout your website, allowing them to trigger whenever you want a specific message to be delivered to your customers.
● Pre-Sales - Instead of having to only work through your sales team, these on-site demos will allow your customers to get an idea of how your product works before they put themselves in contact with your sales team.
Demostack Overview
Demostack is mostly about creating a hassle-free setup process, allowing brands to quickly replicate their product into a new environment. As an autonomous process, aimed mostly towards pre-sales teams, they want to become the next generation demo environment.
From there, you can present your brand in whatever light you would like, connecting directly to the core offerings of your platform.
Demostack hopes to save you time, though there is a limited selection of real-life customer testimonials, G2 reviews, and other types of validation, compared with the aforementioned platforms.
Benefits:
● Ease - You’re able to rapidly use this tool to deploy an effective product demonstration.
● Personalized - You’re able to personalize your story within this application, creating the exact format of demonstration that you’re looking to send.
● Pre-Sales - Pre-sales benefit the most from a new type of a demo environment.
What is the difference between Demostack, Reprise and Walnut?
Although some of their value propositions and core offerings may seem similar, there are several noticeable differences.
The core difference between the platforms is how you create the demos, and what you can do with those demos after you’ve created them. Each of them allows you to potentially create a new set of product demos to be used in a sales call or on your website, though some tools require more heavy lifting than others.
Reprise and Walnut tend to go for the easy, codeless and DIY approach for sales reps - though customers testify that the onboarding and support at Reprise aren’t a walk in the park - while Demostack aims to be a new generation demo environment, for the good or bad.
Walnut seems to be taking this one step further and allows you to access a continual source of ever-updating information about and around the success of your demo. From the total time a customer engaged with it, to metrics about viewing time and further factors, everything is condensed into one location.
If you want to create product demonstrations quickly, then either one of these services will work well. However, if you want to employ data-driven analytics and continually shape your demos, then the in-app analytics tools that Walnut provides will put you ahead of the curve.
Both Reprise and Walnut offer a range of personalization tools that make life easier for sales managers. Reprise allows users to access either guided demos or live sales demos, allowing you to connect to the process in a live and active setting.
On the other hand, the personalization within Walnut, which allows self-guiding demos, is much more focused on the potential customer, allowing you to create customized demo presentations within seconds.
While both allow for personalization, there is much more flexibility and customer-facing personalization when it comes to Walnut.
As three effective tools, they allow managers to represent the very best of their products, but doing so in different ways. For speed and personalization, our team selects Walnut.
Our decision for recession-proofing your company
When seeking an all-in-one product demo experience platform, the leading three choices are Reprise, Demostack, and Walnut. While each of these products offers a range of fantastic tools and features that allow product managers to create sleek and effective demos, they are not carbon copies of each other.
Yet, for a comprehensive experience that combines the best of the aforementioned with analytical tools, Walnut is your winner.
