Speaker 0: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for, uh, using interactive demo intent signals in Salesforce. My name is Christina Anderson, and I am your moderator for today’s session. Before we get started, I would like to remind you to please use, uh, the chat and the q and a as, uh, you follow along with today’s session. Uh, we definitely want to hear from you. And without further ado, I would like to introduce today’s speaker. We’ll be hearing from Nelian Pradeep from StoryLane to teach us all about using interactive demo intent signals in Salesforce. Nelien, why don’t you join me on stage?

Speaker 1: Alright. Thank you so much, uh, Christina, for the introduction. So, yeah, nice to meet you all. I’m Nalin, uh, from Storlane, founder and CEO of Storylane. Excited to talk a little bit more about, um, interactive demos, what they are. They have been recently been, like, very popular as you all might have heard about it and how you can use those signals inside your Salesforce as well. Yeah. Excited to get kick kick us off. So, um, so I can go ahead and share, uh, and go through it. So, um, I’m gonna get get started with that. So

Speaker 0: Perfect. And I’ll give you the floor.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And I’m just going to go ahead and share the option there. Is that a share let me share an upper right. Yep. I think it should work now. So it wasn’t giving a permission. Give me a second. So you should be able to see my screen, hopefully. Yep. Yep. Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you so much. Yes. So so yeah. Thanks so much. So yeah. Sorry for that little bit. So the share didn’t had some permission request.

But, uh, but, yeah, as I said, I’m Nalin, founder and CEO of Storylane. So, uh, excited to chat a little bit more about, like, interactive demos and how those signals could be used, uh, right there. So inside of Salesforce itself. So, uh, quickly, uh, first, I wanted to talk about, like, um, um, what interactive demos are, and, uh, it’s been used for the last few years, uh, in lot in the GTM motions and marketing and sales as well. Then I wanna cover a little bit about the signals.

So first jumping in. Firstly, thank you to all the sponsors. It’s been an incredible couple of days of the events. Solene is a sponsor here at Martin Riemann as well. So, uh, and, um, hopefully, it’s been a fantastic event for you all, and, uh, thank you again on that.

So just to split out the agenda over the next twenty minutes. Right? So, hopefully, some of you have heard about interactive demos. It’s been there for the last few years. I’ll cover what are those, show you some examples of those, kind of what signals you get with them. Right? And then talk about, like, why they are important today. Uh, they are important today, uh, especially in this buying journey, in the cycles as well. And lastly, talk about how you can leverage them inside Salesforce itself. And, um, before I jump in, one quick check I’ll do, making sure the screens are visible, everything. Yep. I have multiple tabs open. Yep. Sounds good.

So what are the interactive demos? So you will see interactive demos is basically, uh, what people uses on marketing websites and sales cycle. Bias to make today demand a way for you to see the product so that they can interact with your product and touch and feel their product. Right? So it’s a more active experience that you wanna provide the buyers rather than very passive, very video kind of an experience. Right? So I picked a couple of examples over here. One of them, like, Central One. They’re a public company. Gong, you’ve heard of these, uh, uh, you know, some of these, uh, logos yourself as well. They all use Salesforce, and they all use demos, interactive demos from Storyline, and they use it on the website. They use it on sales cycles, and they use those signals as well. And these are designed for your buyers right from your marketing website all the way through the funnel when they start interacting to sales and doing your POCs.

First, I’m gonna show you an example of it, talk about interactive demos, and then jump into the signals part as well. So when you see this, I’m just going to switch to another tab. Hopefully, you’re getting seeing that. Yep. So here is an example of SentinelOne. So if you go into their website, you will see many demos that they put. They capture signals from, uh, every interactions that happens on these demos on their website. So any of these are, like, when you click on them, they are guided walk through of what their product does and what the different features are. Right? So these are, like, exploring of what what their product is broken down by different feature sets. And as a user interacts through it, as you can see, as a user, I’m coming and interacting through it. There are a lot of signals that can be generated, which companies are viewing, which accounts are viewing, as well right from your marketing website. And these kind of signals are very, uh, engaging signals, and these basically are, like, more important than someone visiting your website homepage. Right? Someone is very deeply involved in your product and and sifting through your product features and understanding what they are doing. Very top of the funnel on your website, you start gathering these signals. So here is an example which I’m just clicking through it, and all these signals have been captured by Storyline. And this is one example, and you can click through it, start looking at different features of their product itself. So you start getting all these signals of what people are interacting with them. They just they just they don’t have one interactive demo on their website. They have, like, um, uh, 20 different demos broken down by different feature set. So this is, like, uh, their own landing page.

So another example is like Gong. Right? So you will see in Gong’s website, um, you will go into the Gong website, take a tour of the product. They have an interactive demo telling them about, like, uh, how the revenue intelligence works as well. So as you click through the product, again, these are signals that you capture, understand how someone is interacting and where they’re engaging. This has been one of the biggest drivers for them in terms of the signals from top of the funnel itself. So these are examples of them. So I just wanted to show you what they look like. So you kind of sense, like, they are not a very passive, but the user clicks through it, interacts with it. You can add voiceovers to it, videos to it as well so that you can stitch the right experience and user is more engaged. Now these signals, uh, are very important, and and that’s what we capture over them. So that gives you a sense of interactive demos.

Now jumping into why they become important recently. Right? So buyers today demand a lot more of seeing their product more like a show, don’t tell approach. So it removes a lot of friction from your buying journey circle. Right? So be it from your website or in your sales process during your POC. So even when they want to adopt your product during your onboarding or implementation, there’s a lot of friction that comes in. And buyers don’t wanna talk to sales, and they wanna do it all by themselves. And the more they touch and feel the product, it’s better. What we have seen, and this is a study from Gartner, uh, last this year that they published, is, like, there is a lot of increased conversion rate in buying, reducing the friction, uh, from top of the funnel. Or when you start using these demos in your sales cycle, either before they get on a POC or after they get on a POC, you reduce, uh, you increase your deal close beta itself. And, also, you are able to serve lot more demos because your velocity of your sales cycle also increases. So one of these are a few of the things that Gartner has published recently as well, and these are the data points that we are seeing across, like, 2,000 plus of our own customers who use demos on their websites or in sales cycle itself.

So when you see these kind of metrics, when you see these kind of adoption that happens, and because at the end of the day, you want to reduce the friction for your buyers. That’s one of the reasons what’s driving it. Now it’s not something that you want to use it only on top of the funnel. And the reason it’s becoming more and more important for GTM teams today is because it’s not just marketing, but it can be used across throughout your funnel itself, either be it on your website or marketing site or be it in presales and sales or be it in adoption site. So we have seen many different use cases. So few to highlight over here, marketing. I showed you a couple of examples with website embeds itself. Right? And you will see, like, people use this in events and conferences and trade shows, find them in campaigns, uh, put them on g twos or trust radius, different marketplaces where people are researching about your product, or put them on blogs, contents, and create those kind of landing pages. Of course, it’s also used in presales, in sales cycles, using in your POCs, using in live demo sandboxes, or sharing these demos. And once a buyer comes through it, then the most important part starts is is like with your CS when they are adopting the product, telling them what the features are, allowing you to upsell your features as well. So a lot of these use cases we are seeing not just one point solution but throughout your cycle, right, as a customer journey.

Now that’s one of the reasons why you’re seeing lot more importance on interactive demos being used because it’s not just one point solution for a single thing, but multiple things. Now this breaks into, like next thing is, like, now they’re being used throughout the cycle, then a lot of signals get generated. You need to unify, accumulate this data itself. Now that’s where we see, um, where we are collecting all this data and coming all in one place inside Salesforce.

So let me jump to, like, what type of signals we collect here itself. Right? So when when you’re on top of the funnel, we have some different sets of signals, metrics that we like to measure or like to look at it. Uh, when you are in your down in your POCs, when you’re evaluating your product, then there are some slightly different set of signals. But what you will start looking at is, like, very high level. You will start seeing, like, the engagement rate. Right? Somebody is interacting with your demos. Uh, what does the engagement looks like? Uh, what are the things that they’re clicking through inside, uh, your product? Or if they completed the entire journey of the features of the product or very simple things like time they spent on the demos and time they spent on specific features, or how many times they viewed these things, and, uh, when did they last view. Lot of these data points and signals become absolutely critical. And now these signals are something that you can feed them in, uh, into your, like, Salesforce, and you can take them out through our APIs itself.

Now when interactive demos you you everybody’s familiar with a lot of different signals generally. Right? So, like, people see signals from g twos. People visiting your g two profile page, you get signals with the account. If somebody clicks on the email, you get signals like that. Or if visiting your pricing page, you get signals because with, uh, ABM tools, you get a lot of these signals. Now we strongly believe, and we have seen it ourselves and a lot of our customers have seen it as, like, the most important signal of all of these is, like, engagement with your product itself and the demos itself that you’re sharing with them. If somebody is opening an email, it’s a fantastic signal, but, yes, but how much time did they spend interacting with your product or engaging with your product that you shared with them? And that’s what the signals are, and these are very valuable signals. And these signals is what we send all the way to Salesforce.

So looking at those data points of what the signals will look like. Right? So you might have many different demos that you’re serving to your customers, like information around, like, uh, these are, like, data points that we sent and create them as custom fields inside your Salesforce. The data points are like, uh, every opportunity, every new lead that comes through your Salesforce, you will get these kind of metrics on on every opportunity itself. Information like the demo they completed, they click on any active CTA. You could put a CTA like they clicked on a case study or they put on a meeting link or they could have, uh, opened a chatbot. So these kind of CTA click, uh, information will come through it. You will have information on how much time they spent in these demos or when they last viewed the demos. Or if you had, like, many different demos, I would recommend you saw in central one example that I showed briefly. They have, like, 20 different demos. So you kind of get the signals of exactly if they viewed four demos or five different demos and what they spent time on. So you start looking at, like, all those data collated in one place.

Now how do we collate this data? So that’s what Srulline does for you. Right? When you start looking at multiple demos, multiple of these things, then you start capturing data points from different sources. We do capture them throughout the journey, and then our job is to unify the signals account level. Right? So we are able to understand, like, at account level which companies are viewing the most and then which demo they view the most as well. So we unify those signals on our side. And then when when we see some signals around, like, when somebody’s engaging a lot more time, we activate them by sending a notification to you within Salesforce or sending those data that of course, we send the data to Salesforce, but also we send notifications to you as well.

So these signals, um, can get a lot more. Right? You probably have, like, hey. A lot of, uh, signals are coming when somebody visits the website. Even we see our demos when they put on the website, there’s a lot of data that comes in. So that’s where the unification of signals becomes important, account level itself. One of the things that we do is, like also, we have a Salesforce app, right, sitting inside a store length Salesforce app itself. So for example, um, I’m gonna show you a Salesforce app and, uh, what that can do with that and, like, what the signals will look like. I’m gonna jump into another tab, which will show you that information.

So you should be able to see, uh, the Salesforce app over here just real quick. Yep. And inside of Salesforce app, let me make it a full screen here. So Surin has a Salesforce app. So let’s say you want to capture the signals right inside the Salesforce. Now the best and simplest way to do that is, like, when a sales, uh, wants to share these demos with someone, then or irrespective if it’s from the website or if you wanna share this, all you have to do is, like, use a store link demo Salesforce app, click on it, and then what this will allow you to do is, like, you will be able to see the whole bunch of list of different demos that, uh, you want your prospect to view or engage. You might want to share one of demos to your prospect. All you have to do is click through the Storeland demo, see the list of demos that are available, take the demo link. It automatically identifies uniquely based on the opportunity that, uh, needs to view it and send these demos itself. Now when you send these demos and signals to them, you can simply go ahead, capture those data, and send it across. Now when you send it and when somebody engages with these demos, right, of course, you get those notifications, but, also, you will get the data points within Salesforce. So somebody like Tom, uh, viewed this demo, you want to collect all the data points. And if you viewed multiple times, you get all those signals and data points right inside the Salesforce here. So think of a case where, like, hey. Right sitting inside of Salesforce, I’m able to click through an app, open it up, store lanes app, use the demo link, and I’m able to share this and get the signals right inside. So these are very powerful ways to capture the data right inside your ecosystem itself rather than leaving this and coming inside, like, uh, inside inside the store in app itself. So this is an example of what you can do within the store Salesforce app itself. So, hopefully, this gives you a kind of an information around, like like, the data points that we collect over here as well. And there’s a lot more details around this in our documentation, which I will leave it in the in the chat as well section. So you will be able to go and look up our documentation and then information around, like, all the different signals that we provide right inside the Salesforce itself. Take a pause here. And, uh, Huddl gives you a little overview of what demos, how you can use it within Salesforce, and take some questions as well over here.

Speaker 0: Thank you, Nelan. That was, um, a great session. Um, and I looked to how you tied in the fact of how powerful, um, interactive demo intent signals are for sales, marketing, and customer success, like, across the entire, um, go to market funnel and, um, also giving them the ability to, uh, collaborate with one another. Um, and then I also too loved how you emphasized that these interactive demos promote a friction experience on the, um, on the customer side. Um, so in terms of, um, getting started and what you would encourage teams to start thinking about as they conceptualize an interactive demo. What would you recommend?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Quick question. In terms of interactive demos, I would start with thinking of what kind of data points and signals you’re collecting, and has it been really useful for you? Top of the funnel. Let’s start with the marketing. Right? Is it been, like, using are you able to measure qualitatively, like, uh, good signals in terms of, like, lead prospects coming in? I would simply start with doing demos on your website, as simple as that, at the top of the funnel to get started with. And having those demos, uh, couple of examples I showed to you as well, to drive those signals and educate the buyers very early on. Right? So So what we have seen is educating the buyers very early on is super critical today in this market. So very reluctant they are to get on a call to talk to someone. They do the research. They they do the research by, uh, uh, reading about your case studies on your website or looking at the marketplaces to learn about what you do versus what your competitors do as well. Right? So what I do re friendly recommend is get started with putting the demos on the website and start using those data points and signals coming from that to leverage a multichannel approach to targeting these accounts as well as companies that have been bridging. And it takes time. Right? They are researching, and they understand what your product is doing. They’re looking at the marketplaces and understanding. And all of these are important decisions a buyer makes, um, today, uh, before they start talking and having conversation with the POC. So that’s why I recommend starting there.

Speaker 0: I absolutely love that recommendation of starting at the top of the funnel. And I think and of what you said about the fact that it takes time, um, because, you know, as teams are getting used to implementing this, they need to be able to, like, start small. Right? And think about, like, okay. Like, what what are we seeing? How are people engaging? And then where might we also want to iterate on this process and create our next interactive demo? And may maybe it’s on a landing page next time for a particular campaign that they’re solving. So no. I I loved, um, I I loved your answer there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And and couple of things I will add to that is, like, um, I mean, starting with the website is great, but also just to add to what you mentioned about landing pages, using it in ads is a great way. Right? Understanding the conversion metric that’s come from it, like putting it from a Google Ads or a LinkedIn ads, right, that people are running through it right now and, um, uh, driving them directly to the landing page for the demos, which we have seen, like, huge uptake. So the likelihood of people clicking on your ad to view your product is much higher as compared to clicking on an ad to see some just like why you are better. Right? So that’s what they demand today, and it’s it’s very important to use them, uh, you know, depending on your product, and we highly recommend those as well today.

Speaker 0: Yes. And I definitely think you touched on it too in your presentation when you talked about how a lot of the buyers are doing their own research, and, um, they may not wanna always talk to someone right away. But, um, because you kind of, like, open up this experience in this world of your product, it gives them the ability to have that kind of, like, that self serve experience, um, that they can then take their own step, make their own notes. And then I I definitely could see how it would further just accelerate that funnel and, um, generate more hand raisers for sales and also prioritize sales’ time to really, um, spend engaging with prospects that are really ready to buy right now because they’ve already taken that time with interacting with the product.

Speaker 1: 100%. 100% agree with that. And I think we we talk about the top of the funnel. Right? So I think that’s why we recommend, like, not just top of the funnel in the marketing, but also, like, as they start engaging in your POCs. Right? So you wanna enable your champions, so show specifics, uh, specific sides of your product, uh, that you couldn’t cover in your POC cycles as well. Right? So you’re able to engage with them either before or after or during those times as well. Right? So So use them throughout the journey is what we’re seeing and then what we recommend as well. And and then one of the biggest use case we didn’t touch too much, I think we didn’t talk about much was, like, adoption of the product. Right? That allows you to, uh, you know, expand your account, upsell your account is more comes around like customer success, onboarding, account management. How do you expand your product lines itself? Right? You’re constant everybody’s constantly shipping products. Uh, everybody’s constantly expanding their offering that they’re doing. To educate your buyers what you’re doing is also a bigger use case of what we’re seeing as well.

Speaker 0: I love that. Um, so so far you’ve mentioned adoption, uh, starting with the top of the funnel. You also mentioned how valuable it is to use interactive demos alongside your ad campaigns. Um, are there any other, like, big best practices that come to your mind that you would like to recommend to the attendees today?

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. Big we have a I’m sharing the playbooks that we have used in terms of, like, some of the use cases that we have covered as well. So definitely, uh, the best practices I would recommend is, like, we have, like, a a set of playbooks. Like, you don’t want to use the same kind of storyline that you have, uh, like, how you are gonna tell the story of your demos. Uh, we know the marketing or sales use case the same way. So you wanna make it engaging. You want to segment your products into, uh, different, uh, different ways that you want to share it. And, um, so that’s what we recommend. And start with the marketing, definitely, and start using those engagement signals and drive it down, definitely. And we also got recently, um, you know, uh, there’s a product marketing course, uh, that we did together with Storylane. Uh, we recently went live with that as well. So that is another place where I recommend any of the marketing team members to look at it, uh, kind of understand, like, take a course of that. And then, uh, so that will also be another way to get started with interactive demos. So it’s a it’s a quick course, uh, which covers, um, you know, information about, like, how do you get started, what are the best practices, what are the right ways to use your demos itself. These are the few things I would recommend. Here is a coursework which, uh, I think in the chatbot, um, I’ll put it up in a in a minute, but that’s something that I would highly recommend for someone to start with as well.

Speaker 0: Um, I I love that. And to like, that also taking a course, like, anytime, um, team members take, like, um, courses that are offered from, uh, the vendor that they’re working with, It just furthers enables your team and increases adoption internally. So in that way, they really maximize their use of, um, of the platform. So, um, one of the thing that I wanted to kinda, uh, uh, pick your brain on is the idea of, like, mapping out the journey and, uh, and also mapping out your, um, your interactive demo. Um, In what way like, what would your recommendations be in terms of the strategic, like mapping out experience and how have you seen Teams approach that in the best way?

Speaker 1: Uh, so in terms of mapping out the demos in terms of stories, so what I do recommend is I think that’s a great point. So before answering that, I’ll just, um, give me uh, I’ll show you what the coursework will because it part of your answer is also there. So this is the coursework. I just shared the screen, so hopefully you should be seeing it in PMA Alliance as well. So to answer your question, when you go through this coursework, also what you will see is, like, uh, you’re maximizing, like, not about the features telling. Like, again, the use cases are if you’re using on the marketing. Right? You’re not a feature dumping. Right? You’re trying to show that value for them. So you’re trying to understand, uh, the right storyboards that you want to create, uh, within our platform so that you’re telling visually plus, like, with the audios and videos that you wanna add to it to tell the right story of what your product is doing. The benefits and the value is more important rather than the feature dump there. So the reason I shared the screen is also I’d like to show you this course work that you can go through it. And with that, you will be able to understand, like, hey. What are the right ways to show the demos for different use cases? Right? And then, uh, in terms of maximizing the impact. So if it’s a marketing very shortly, like, you want to show the value of your the benefits of it, right, rather than talking within once of the feature. Now when somebody is engaging with you on, uh, during your POCs, uh, cycles and you’re sharing them, you want to meet more deeper about your product there. Right? Because they are more deeper in your sales cycle. They’re talking to a salesperson at that point. Right? And they are in the POC. You wanna talk about the specifics and the features, uh, at that stage. Right? And then, of course, when you’re talking about the adoption stage, again, you’re talking about, like, little bit of how tos as well that comes in over here. How do I leverage certain features? So you look at these in different stages and start creating the storyboards, but using the one platform in different ways as well there.

Speaker 0: Um, I love the fact that your course covers that and that it gives them the ability to start thinking from that, uh, strategic aspect. Um, we have time, uh, just, like, to discuss one more question. Um, one of the thing that I wanted to ask you about and because you touched on it a little bit is the power of having those demo those interactive demo intense signals, seeing that at the account level. And let’s say, like, you already have an account that’s a customer and they’re already using one of your products. And now all of a sudden you’ve seen a few people that work at that company start to do interact with an interactive demo of another product. Now your team can take action and start to initiate, like, some cross selling campaigns across marketing. So, um, I I just I just want to, um, get more of your insight on that of, like, the insight at the account level and the amount of power that it has there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks. Uh, so account level signals are, um, basically, what you will get is, like, at a company level, you want to understand, like, where they’re interacting with them. Right? So if you start seeing those account signals, uh, you probably already use, uh, apart from, like, leveraging within Salesforce, you have, like, ABM campaigns that you’re running on these time. Right? Simple things that we have seen that works well is, like, you are able to take those data points and you want to understand, like, if somebody’s engaging multiple times or multiple sessions over the last three, four months. Right? Uh, you can drive them to run them in the LinkedIn ad campaigns, send those campaigns to them, or you are able to run them on a targeted specific, like, maybe an email targeted campaigns. Right? So what we also do is, like, we take this and run them on LinkedIn campaigns. Right? People visiting our demos. As simple as that. Right? You can export the data and use them. So since those those information will be right in your Salesforce or any of the marketing stacks that you’re using, we integrate with them, so you’re able to pull that and leverage it. So that. So things that work, I would start with something smaller, like running ABM campaigns quickly on these account signals to see what works best, especially on these things quickly as well.

Speaker 0: That’s great advice. And, yes, to to the point, like, um, a solution like in like the Storyline and interactive demos, it’s very powerful when you start to look at from look at it from the account based marketing aspect. So, um, for everyone watching and though those on the, um, on the session today, I I would definitely highly recommend, like, thinking about, okay, like, from an account based marketing aspect, what are some of the ways that we could pull that interactive demo lever to really accelerate, um, set those accounts deeper along the funnel. And then those target accounts that are already customers of yours expand your relationship with them.

Speaker 1: Yep. 100%. 100%. Agree with that. And I think and a lot of them are probably already aware of these, and many of them are not aware of these interactive demos. Traditionally, videos have done and then very less signals you get from the videos, and you’re not able to repurpose them. So one thing I do recommend anybody, uh, in this, uh, hearing this is, like, trying out these interactive demos and starting from the marketing just to summarize and start leveraging them from there onto your sales and adoption side as well. Uh, start from there. And, um, again, talking about, like, videos itself. Right? So the signals are very low. Now you can easily create these demos and start curating them for different spin of personas. So the signals are something that you wanna leverage there from this. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Definitely. Definitely. Alright. That is all the time that we have for today. Um, Nelen, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, for opening our eyes to the world of possible in terms of interactive demos. And there’s resources, um, for Storyline in the chat. And then also be sure to check out their virtual booth. They have one, um, on the sponsors and resources tab. And thank you to all of you for joining today’s session. Um, we hope you enjoy the rest of your Marjorie Men, and be sure to check out the closing keynote today. Alright. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you.