Have you ever gone to a website and thought “wth do they even do?”
Have you done multiple demos with a company because you were struggling to understand the real value?
Have you forgone a purchase in life simply because you didn’t understand how it worked or how it would help you?
We all have.
That’s because knowledge drives confidence and confidence drives action.
In SaaS, this is even more important. Software is complex which makes it hard to market and sell because it takes a while for prospects to really “get it”.
This lack of efficiency is what we call the Buyer Education Gap.
The Buyer Education Gap is the simple theory that buyers take a long time to gain the knowledge they need to convert, to buy, or to take any action. Time kills everything, so the longer it takes to educate, the more drop offs you’re going to see throughout the funnel.
It’s hard to argue with the fact that revenue metrics have been falling the past few years as a result.
B2B conversion rate benchmarks are the worst across industries (1%) according to Intellimize and Contentsquare.
And sales cycles have gone up 24% in 2023 according to Thomas Tungaz.
As we put more emphasis on efficiency metrics, we have to optimize our ability to really educate prospects quickly and effectively.
How to close your Buyer Education Gap
Create more videos that get the job done
You don’t need a fancy production team. Yes, those are important for creating top of funnel engagement and conveying brand/ROI messages efficiently, but as for your product, you could simply record yourself going through your features. Seriously. TBH, we don’t do this enough in SaaS. We’re too brand conscious. We think recordings lack professionalism — but who cares! If your video recording clearly conveys “how” your product works in action, then make more of them.
Do more 1-many demos
Host a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly webinar where you demo your product for 20-30 minutes and then open up the last few minutes to Q&A. Then take that list of attendees and do a casual follow-up to see if there are more product questions they need answered — maybe a more in depth demo ;)
Create more interactive demos (duh)
If you have a product in which your audience would get a lot of value by clicking through it, seeing how various workflows work, getting that “try before you buy” feeling, then interactive demos will help. Interactive demos let your prospects try and feel your product without having to sign up or talk to sales for a demo.
Create Demo Centers
With Demo Centers you can take all your product videos, interactive demos, PDFs, or any other content, and create a hyper-personalized experience for your prospects. By layering prompts on top of your content, your prospects can choose what’s important (or not important) to them, and then you can drop them into specific content tracks that you create.
Demo Centers and interactive demos have helped numerous customers increase conversion rates, drive more pipeline, and optimize their marketing/sales dollars.
- WorkforceHub – 34% win rate for Tourial-sourced opportunities (the highest of any sourced opps)
- Quinyx – 400k in Tourial sourced revenue in 6 months
- Winmo – Closed $80,000 deal sourced directly from interactive demos
- Happy Cabbage – 32% more demo requests & 166% more inbound pipe
- CINC – 200% growth in last two years influenced by interactive demos
- Assignar – 33% of interactive demo leads scheduled a demo
- Interplay Learning – Closed a $90,000 deal sourced directly from interactive demos
- Aforza – Closed $1 million deal from an account-based interactive demo
- BoostUp – 70% of inbounds viewed interactive demos before converting
If you have questions about Demo Centers or Interactive Demos, give us a shout!