Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Demo Centers at Tourial!
It’s been several months of hard work, working closely with customers (and non-customers), and it’s now officially live!
The Demo Centers product creates a central focus on the one thing that’s been a real struggle across the SaaS and tech industry: Buyer Education.
Why the focus on Buyer Education?
We’ve been watching the market the last 3 years, and we see tremendous opportunity for companies to educate buyers more efficiently. Here are some stats that helped us uncover this:
--> B2B Buyers only spend about 5% of their time with vendors during their entire research and evaluation process (Gartner, 2020)
--> 70% of B2B buyers want a personalized, B2C-like experience (Microsoft, 2020)
--> There are 6-10 stakeholders involved in the average mid-market and enterprise deal (Gartner, 2020)
--> 83% say websites don’t provide the info they need (Tourial, 2022)
Even though B2B is full of some of the most innovative minds, buyers always evolve faster than our go-to-market.
When it comes to Buyer Education, there’s a gap. And it’s tied to the amount of time it takes someone to gain the knowledge they need to make a confident decision and take action (ie. convert on the website, take a second demo, purchase your software).
Right now, everything is just taking longer. There are many factors that contribute to this, yes, but even before things started stalling this year, buyers were doing more aggressive research during their buying journey and stalling deals due to their “lack of knowledge” on the product or not understanding its real value / potential outcomes.
The Buyer Education Gap illustrates the stall in performance that is taking place in the tech industry as a result of companies not focusing on better buyer education. That’s not to say that the information isn’t available – there’s more information now than ever before, and buyers know it. The problem is that it isn’t being delivered correctly, it’s not believable, and there’s actually too much information out there to make confident decisions.
Demo Centers are where we continue to solve for that.
What are Demo Centers?
Demo Centers are a personalized content hub for your prospects to find the most important info they need, share with their team, and provide you with data on what they care about.
Personalized experiences
The real meat of the Demo Center is the prompting structure. Think of it like Typeform or Turbotax where you can ask questions or prompt viewers to make selections about their interests, needs, use cases, etc so that you can present them with the best content possible.
Content Hub
Any type of content goes. Video, interactive demos, PDFs. Add them as content groups for prospects to view in the preferred order for them. You decide what content makes sense for them to view, put it in a content group, and then present it to them based on their prompt responses.
Prospects can share with their team
We want to help you break down those internal silos that your buyers have and constant repetitive demos that reps run. So all these experiences can be saved and shared through a custom URL.
Prospects provide you with data on what they care about
And here’s the big one – Engagement data that you can use as Discovery Data. We want to provide you with more than just website data like page views and visits – it’s not meaningful enough. We’re capturing every engagement signal in the Demo Center experience, sending it into your Marketing Automation Platform, formatting it, and allowing you to leverage it for better, richer discovery.
Our results testing it out
Like anyone does with this type of tool, we’ve been “dogfooding” or “drinking our own champagne” with Demo Centers.
Since experimenting with various versions and layouts starting in May of 2023, we’ve seen website conversion rates increase from 1.55% to 2.75% (77% increase)
We’ve seen a 60% engagement rates, and 11% of website visitors go to our Demo Center first.
And last, our sales cycles have decreased 47% from 55 days to 29 days (this one is very hard to measure and there’s a lot that goes into this, but we feel good about Demo Centers contributing to a large amount of that improvement).
What’s next?
Stay tuned because we’re iterating quickly. If you want to stay in the know, sign up for our newsletter and we’ll keep you posted on new additions to Demo Centers!
If you’re interested in checking out Demo Centers and Interactive Demos, give us a shout here, and we’ll set something up!