Name: From demo to deal: Building buyer-first enablement in the self-service era
Uploaded: 2025-11-18T20:30:15.276Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 20 s
Description: From demo to deal: Building buyer-first enablement in the self-service era

Transcript for "From demo to deal: Building buyer-first enablement in the self-service era": Hello. Hi. We are live. Welcome. Welcome, everyone. That's how it look. Perfect. We are looking good. Welcome to sales enablement collective webinar on from demo to deal, building buyers first enablement in self-service era. Today, we're joined by Simon Harvey and Eric Rotten, who will both doing a, short introduction of themselves before kicking off the session. Just wanted to flag that, I will be here if you have any issues as well as, looking over the sales enablement collect the Slack channel if you had, any other questions or troubleshooting. Many of you guys might know. I'm Christina. I'm one of the community managers here. And, yeah, I'll be backstage, if you need anything. Just so you know that there will be some polls. So do look at the chat box, when that is, initiated as well as the q and a function, which is next to the chat box, that you can find. If this isn't your first time here, then then you should know exactly what I'm talking about. If it is your first time, it's so great to have you here. Just so you know, the recording will be sent out after, after the session, so keep a lookout on your inboxes for that. And without further ado, I think that is enough from me. I'll hand it over to you both. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Christina, and hello, everybody. Excited for this presentation here. Would love for people to just chime in in the chat where you're calling in from. Be interested to see. I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I wanna start with just a quick intro of myself, and then I'll have Simon introduce himself, then we'll get into agenda. So as you can see on the screen, I'm an account executive here at Arcade. I wear many hats, but my I primarily work with our enterprise customers as they're using Arcade to enable buyers and sellers across the whole buyer's journey and sales process. I'll show some of those examples today throughout the presentation. Prior to Arcade, I've spent most of my career working in early stage organizations. I've started a private equity firm as a regional manager where we were constantly acquiring new businesses and new technology that was rolled out to hundreds of sales reps. So we had to enable them on how to sell these new products and new markets and had some experience in agencies. I ran my own agency for a few years, worked with a bunch of different organizations, and most recently, I've been in early stage SaaS organizations from c to series c. And so I've seen firsthand kind of the evolution of of sales and and how buyers are buying in our world. And I'll pass it over to Simon. Thank you very much, Eric. Yeah. Nice to meet you all as well. I'll add my country onto the list here. I'm dialing in today from, Zurich in Switzerland. So, the other side of the pond at the moment. So it's coming up into the evening my time. Yeah. A bit about myself, as you can see on the screen there, I'm the owner and founder of a company called Demodia. And, you know, if you've ever worked in an organization where you feel like your business is doing all the right stuff, you know, you've got the right products, the right people in there. You've got good processes and technology, but you're not getting sales. Things just aren't happening. That's basically what I do. That's what I fix. So for the last twenty plus years, I've worked in sales and marketing and product marketing roles, basically helping, people like you to sort of design and implement go to market systems, you know, things that align the sales teams, align marketing, align operational teams, and and turn in those sort of complex sales motions into something that actually generates, revenue at the end of the day. So that's my brief intro. Amazing. Thank you, Simon. Next, I'll get into a bit of our agenda for today. So you see the whole thing is about demos throughout the the sales process. So we're gonna be covering three main topics, as we go through here today. So the new buyer reality, what this means for sales enablement, and particularly how people are really just wanting to see the product. And there's this self-service era going on, a product led growth, and, of course, we all still have different sales process we need to go through and, how that will work. And then a big majority of what we'll focus on is storytelling as a new enablement playbook. So lots of great examples throughout there, from me and Simon that that we'll talk about, that we'll, mostly focus on today. And then we're gonna end with some of the ways that you can measure impact of of storytelling and all of this. And I wanna kick off, Simon, if you could explain a bit of, like, what is the most significant change you've seen over the years, when it comes to how buyers buy and the sales enablement playbook? Yeah. I mean, I as I guess, as I said earlier, I've been going back sort of twenty years doing sales and marketing stuff. There's been quite a few sort of changes from sort of era two to era three. I guess, the sort of the the the situation as it was when I first started doing, sales and and enablement, let's say, fifteen plus years ago doing that. Yeah. Most people were led through a sales process. They had a sales guy there. They spoke with a salesperson. And, you had a salesperson that was basically in control of the conversation the whole time. I think the biggest sea ship that I've seen is obviously the Internet. You know, 70% or more now, of those sales and those interactions are taking place online. You know, they're taking place in the websites. That's probably the biggest thing. You know, the reason for that I don't know. There's there's a lot of people say that people want control of the sales process. I think that's sort of, that's right to a certain extent. You know, they don't want to speak to sales guys. I'm not so sure that's right. To me, the thing that that's actually happening is that we're just seeing this shift in the speed that people wanna move at. You know, buyers wanna decide when and how they engage. It's not that they're trying to avoid salespeople, but they just want to be able to explore products, explore the value that they're gonna get, explore the problems that they've got, and how to solve those themselves and at their own speed. So I guess that's probably what I would answer your question with and say that's the the biggest thing that I've seen. That makes a ton of sense to me. And I would say that there probably is people avoiding salespeople. As a salesperson myself, I definitely feel that. And people just want to see the product now, especially. with the evolution of just, like, product led growth and the way people can hop into a trial and experience the product themselves, I've noticed this huge shift in just the way that I have to adapt as a salesperson and the way that organizations are adapting where we would love to get on a call and do all the discovery questions and go through, like, a really tailored, you know, customized demo. But the reality is that a lot of the selling happens when we're not even in the room, when sales folks are. not there. So we have. to really play with that balance of getting people on calls, but also equipping the buyers with what they need to to go sell internally. And, of course, you know, what we're focused on in the sales enablement world is how we can equip all of those people. And I'm curious what you've seen, Simon, as, like, the shift for enablement teams in particular. Like, what does this mean for an enablement team today that versus what it was even just five years ago? I'd I'd say the thing with enablement from my experience has been that, originally, we started off creating pitch decks. You know, we started off creating PowerPoint presentations, playbooks in some sort of PDF form, you know, training material, that sort of thing. Again, I think the big change that I've seen is that, as enablement people, we're now really the gatekeepers of of much more of that go to market process. And particularly, when it comes to the the narrative behind that, You know, I know we're gonna talk about storytelling later on. That's what I spend a lot of my time doing, but that's probably the biggest thing that I've seen is that sales enablement folk now, they don't just control one part of the sales process quite late on, but they actually control the narrative that goes across the whole of that sales process right from that first touch that you just described on the website there, through demonstrations and self serve media in there, on into sort of initial business development type connections and things and and into then more the more traditional sales sort of space. So it's right the way through that process. And I think that's important. You know? The reason I think is because if buyers are stuck with this sort of situation where they're going through a buying process, you know, they're they're on the website, and they're seeing one thing happening. And then, yeah, they go into a demo. They see something completely different. They go into a sales, call. They see something completely different again. They get lost, I think, in the process in there. And, you know, I I I always give the example of it being like films. I like to to talk about films a lot, as you'll come across if you if you've seen these presenting about sort of storytelling and stuff generally. But I give the comparison here. If it's something like, you know, Bridgerton, for example, if you're familiar with that, if you've ever watched that on, Apple TV, you see these these glamour and glitz and things, and that's like the sort of the the marketing end of the story. It's very structured. It's very refined. There's a lot of time and effort gone into that, And it's guiding people through in this sort of nice process. And then suddenly, you get to this massive shift. And it's a little bit like almost pressing the channels and going from watching Bridgerton to watching Squid Games or something. You're suddenly into this really fractious world where, you know, it's a life or death situation. And as a as a customer, you're just gonna be eliminated if you happen to answer a sales question wrongly. Yeah. That's that's the thing in there that I think, again, is changing. That's why enablement is or as enablement people, we need to keep control of that overall narrative just to make sure that, yeah, it's bridging from one part to the next at the end there. So, yeah, story breaks, you lose that flow. I think that's that's what I see. Absolutely. And I'm excited to dive in, to this buyer's journey and also, like, the demo journey that that goes along with this. Simon has a really great, kind of breakdown of of how that'll look. Wanted to get some interaction from from the audience, get to know you all a little bit. And I wanna understand like, I'm gonna open up a poll here. Understand what your go to market motion is. Like, our yeah. You can see the poll now, hopefully, and can chime in with some responses there. This will help us tailor to the best of our ability throughout here. Getting some votes coming in. Share the results in a little bit here. Don't be shy, everybody. I imagine a lot of businesses that, at least, that I work with are have a combination of these different ones. So that's why we really emphasize the priority. What what's your your focus as a team? And it looks like we're getting a lot of complex sales. Honestly, not sure when I should close the poll. There's still people voting. Yeah. It's always good to see. Yeah. A lot of complex sales, more panel channel and partner sort of stuff here than I was thinking the beast. That's interesting to see as well. Yep. Amazing. I'm seeing the votes slow down a little bit. So I think, unless there's any last minute votes people wanna put in, close this out. And if someone in the backstage could help me with sharing that. Not sure exactly how to do that. But, yeah, it looks like a majority of the folks were complex, high ACV, consultative sales motion. Then we do have the next up is self-service and ecommerce. And next from there would be the high velocity, lower ACV, simpler products, and then partner, which we're gonna touch on some ways that we can help with all those, and how how this will all align. Simon, do you wanna speak a little bit about this buyer's journey here and and how you see this playing in with what we're talking about today? Yeah. I mean, I think this is probably something that that most people on the call here should be familiar with. But I think it's just interesting to try and dig into these areas a little bit more, particularly when it comes to, as I say, the the storytelling aspect of this. So beginning of the journey, we've got sort of top of the funnel awareness type phases in here where, really, as a buyer, you're trying to identify what it is that your problem is that you have as an individual and what it exactly is that you need to solve that. So the the far left hand edge of edge of this, you know, buyers are looking for ways that they can solve very specific problems. They're looking for answers to that. And, yeah, the the interesting thing I think here, Eric, so often I hear people when I'm going into sort of, help or sales organizations, I hear them talk about problems, and I hear them talk about these really high level complex problems. The trouble with this is at this point of time, the actual buyers really don't understand what the problem is that they've got. So if we're talking about the fact that, you know, you don't understand how to manage your sales process or you've you've got whatever your specific technical term is, your widgets don't fit with your goblets or whatever, you know, nobody really understands what you're talking about there. It's a little bit like sort of going into a doctor's, and the doctor tells you you've got zippophobia or something like that. You've got no clue what they're talking about. And that's the trouble that I see here with this awareness stage is so many people understand they gotta talk about a problem here, but they talk about the problem at this really high level. And the key thing here is to think about whenever you're talking about this, talking about the the way that the customer feels the problem here. So back to the doctor example here. When you go into the doctors, you know, the first thing the doctor says to you is what's wrong, and you explain in a way that you you understand, you know, a way that means something to you. So you talk about the fact you've got a headache, you've got, your arms are all aching, you've got a cough, you've got chest pains, you've got back pains. And, you know, the doctor will turn around to you at that point in time and say, you know, you've got pneumonia or something. You know, the expectation is not that you know what pneumonia feels like or looks like. You describe that. And that's the first part, I think, in this awareness stage here. It's about describing the problem. It's about talking about the problem in language that the the customers can understand. Then as we move to the, the right hand side in here, we get to sort of define stage. In the define define stage, you know, they know the problem, and they know that now you can solve that problem in some way. But now they're starting to look for your product. This is the the part where they're starting to dig around. They're looking around for the ways to best solve that problem. So this is now within the sales process, the point that they're coming into your website, and you can start to actually educate them a little bit more. We're talking about demos. So this is where you can start to introduce demos into that process, talk about exactly what it is that you're doing, and how that's gonna work. And then as you get to the end of the process, basically, you get to sort of the validate stage here. You know, before they buy, they wanna try things themselves. And as they get to the end of this process, you know, once they've purchased it, they need to know how to use this this sort of thing. So the implementation stage is is very important, and that's a continual stage these days for many SaaS businesses. You know, you're continually needing to show value. So so that implementation phase is is certainly much bigger than it ever used to be, for for many more SaaS based organizations, certainly. Amazing. I'm gonna just dive right into the demo journey side of this too, Simon. I think I had another question to ask you, but I think you've already started talking a bit about the demo journey. And this is really where we're gonna focus a lot of our time today. Anything else you'd wanna add here about, like, where, you know, how demos can be added to those different phases of the the buyer's journey and, with this with this visual in mind, I guess? Yeah. So, I mean, if you think about the process we had before, the the, journey starting on the left hand side. And, again, like with the previous diagram, we're moving across towards the right hand side as you engage more in here. I think the key things that I I wanted to illustrate in here, which is why I sent you a copy of this, is the the the evolution of a demonstration, basically. So on the left hand side here, you're starting off with something that's really, really simple. When you're going through and you're demonstrating here, people aren't interested in features and functions or the detail. They're interested in, you know, a fifteen or thirty second or maybe even shorter little snapshot, of what it is that your product does and how that's gonna work. And typically, that will be delivered, you know, maybe by the web team or something on the website. So it could be just like a little animated screenshot or, even just an individual image, you know, component parts shown, often a mock up type screenshot in there. So simplicity is key on this vision demonstration just to get across an idea. As you start to move across to the right, now it's sort of the point where you're starting to talk a little bit more about products. So this might be sixty seconds, two minutes, something like that where you're showing off very small snippets or features, but, again, in a very, very simple way shown within a business context here. And, again, typically, what I see is that it's engineering of some sort that's bringing that in. It's just the product management type people that are helping to introduce that into the flow. As you move to the right then use cases, this is the typical demonstration, I think, that most organizations put onto the website. It might be a talking head type video in here that goes through, But better, certainly, what we've seen is, interactive media actually has far better engagements and actually far better follow ons afterwards. You know, if you actually invite somebody and you invite somebody to participate, they get used to clicking through these things. And when they get to the end and there's a call to action inside there, you're far high far more likely to get an engagement on a call to action than if it's just a a YouTube video or something that you've sent someone through to. So something to think about for those that are are working with marketing. As you go to the right, technical demonstrations are now where we're starting to really get into features. So everything to the left of there, it's we're talking story. We're talking little features. We're not really talking about product too much. We're talking about getting people into the idea of what it is we can do. And the technical demonstration is really the first time that we're diving in and showing off, you know, proper features. So this could be a ten minute, fifteen minute little demonstration that goes through what the product is. So it could be something that's self led online, or it could be something that's driven through a presales or business development type person. Then as you move on to the right, this is your typical sales demonstration, so proof of concepts in here or a trial of some sort led by the sales department typically, and, you know, very, very detailed. This is really, you know, proper feature function type stuff. And then finally, as I mentioned earlier, you know, onboarding, you can't forget to do that. So that typically tends to be services in here. So there's a couple of things actually I wanted to highlight in here. The first is just the flow and how as you start on the left hand side, you know, you're really talking about story and high level ideas. And as you move to the right hand side, you're moving much more into technical, nature and technical information inside here. And so there's that sort of crossover at the use case and technical demo where you're starting to switch. The other thing I wanted to highlight in here is, for me, there's just a massive involvement. I mentioned earlier, sales enablement is now the sort of gatekeeper of this whole narrative process. And as I went through that, I said, okay. Well, on the left hand side, you've got vision, which is done by the web team. Then you've got sort of engineering or product marketing, that's doing the capability type bits. You've got general marketing, maybe that's doing the use cases. You've got presales that are taking the technical demonstrations. You've got your sales, business development people that are running the trials. You've You've got services or support or whatever that's running the onboarding process. So that scope has really changed dramatically, and that narrative needs to be consistent all the way across those. So that's, that's what I was sort of, wanting to talk about and what I was wanting to highlight there. And, yeah, I'd just be interested. I don't know what your thoughts are, but I'd just be interested in knowing what anyone else's, engagement is like. You know, who else are they working with in this process? Great. You did a a poll. I just opened up a poll here of who you're who who you're collaborating with us in your roles to kind of create this content across that buyer demo journey. And as we I'm imagining that most of the folks are going to, you know, given the the audience here that we're really focused on once this becomes an opportunity, once we're past the marketing stage. And that's where we'll we'll focus a majority of the rest of the time here. I did wanna show a couple examples here of what we've seen as great examples in that vision and capability and use case stage and how some of our customers at Arcadia are using this. So let's start with Zapier here as a pretty good example just on this page where on one of their product pages, it's tables. They start with exactly as Simon's describing, more of a video. So really just explaining and the capability. When it gets into, they have a bunch of different use cases where they provide more interactive demo. So this is actually Arcade's product right here where they've been able to spin up different demos for the different use cases, interesting for them. So it's simply a clickable demo, can kind of go through and see what that experience looks like. And, of course, there's a lot more complexity the deeper you go into to these. I'll share another one top of funnel that I think is a great example of Salesforce getting a little bit deeper into the different use cases as I'm sure all of you know Salesforce. They have a ton of different products, and a way that they've been able to do this is branching out within an interactive demo like this of which use case is relevant to you. And, Simon, I think you had some some thoughts to share on this, exam how this can be helpful. Yeah. I think the the interesting thing I wanted to to sort of call out when you showed me this earlier, you were also talking behind the scenes about what what had I seen that was a small change that someone had made that that made a massive impact, you know, on that sort of thing. You know, how did they they change it? And I think what you're showing here is is great because it shows the idea of the fact that you've got this whole end to end narrative again that's going on. And that's a key thing that I'm seeing is that you've gotta have that narrative in place, and it's gotta be consistent through these stages of the process. Again, back to my story examples, if you're familiar with something like James Bond, you know, the writings of Ian Fleming, each one of those stories stands alone in its own rights. You know, one minute he's off in Majorca chasing around for somebody that's, gonna drop a nuclear bomb. The next minute, he's over in Aruba or something like that, trying to get on a spaceship that's gonna launch a nuclear weapon or something or a laser from space. You know, every film, every book is standalone in its own right. And, certainly, the one change that I've seen that's impacting is so many organizations create marketing and sales materials in that fashion. They create individual standalone stories, which may be fantastic stories in their own right. But when it comes to actually connecting those stories together, there is no connection between them. You know, any any individual one of those is just completely stand alone. The best thing I see organizations do is to think more like JK Rowling does when she wrote Harry Potter. You know, think about the story as a series of events that's going on, and start off with one chapter or one book as to whichever way you wanna look at it. And within that book, you have a a story arc that goes through, that that talks about the way that the character individually evolves and a problem that they overcome, and it gets to the end with some sort of climax there, that's the end of the book. But throughout that, that character has been evolving. And by the time you get to the end of that first chapter, there's another hook that leads you into the next book, and there's another hook that leads you into the next book. So it's like sort of, as I say, JK Rowling with Harry Potter leading you from one book to the next. Each book has its own individual story, but across the the whole set of books, there's this art going on about Harry Potter becoming more powerful, becoming a better wizard inside there, Voldemort coming in, growing back from nowhere, and eventually taking over. If you follow that approach when you're starting to create sales, marketing, go to market materials, generally, it's far easier to keep the customer hooked because they're already waiting and asking for the next piece of material, the next thing that you're gonna deliver them. Whereas if you take the James Bond approach, the Ian Fleming approach of doing everything individually, every single time you want them to engage, you've got to sell to them and say, well, this is why you should download this white paper. This is why you should come and watch this webinar. So, you know, it's far easier to to follow the Harry Potter approach than it is to take the James Bond approach. That sort of was, we were talking about earlier. I love that analogy, and it's so real. Just tying it back to this demo journey, I personally experienced this so much when I'm either buying or selling something where the initial marketing content is just so wildly different than what ends up happening in the sales process. And just talking with you and experiencing this with Arcade is just and all the customers that I've worked with, it is a big task to be able to string that story together. I have a few examples of some people that I think have done it well. But before I go into this, Simon, I am curious just, like, how you work with organizations on the whole process. I think you you're doing this with some people now. You you kinda take them through the. process. You broke up a bit there, Eric. I didn't catch your question. Sorry. Oh, I'm curious to hear, like, how you've helped people with telling that whole, I guess, Harry Potter story. Oh, it's the story narrative. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, this is something, again, been working on for years. But, I mean, we we started off originally looking at something called the hero's journey, if you've ever come across that before. The hero's journey is basically it's a process that anybody that's involved in film writing or creative, writing of any sort learns at school or university. It's about 15 steps in total, but what we use is a simplified version of that story. At the start of that process, what we wanna do is identify a hero. So the hero is basically gonna be your customer. It's gonna be your buyer, basically. And you explain the situation that the hero's in and identify very early on in that process what exactly it is that they want to achieve. So if you think about any film, you know, within the first five or six minutes of the film, they're basically going through and introducing the hero, and you get their backstory. You find out what they're after. So we then go through with company to to organize and understand who the hero is and what they're after. Then we start to look at the problem. So no story begins until there's actually a problem, until there's something that can't be solved, you know, something that gets in the way of the hero achieving their goal, basically, achieving their aim. And so the problem steps in there, and that's exactly the same with a business. You know, we've got customers that want something, but something's getting in the way of stopping them. And so we go through the process I was talking in with you about earlier of trying to dig into the problem, understand, you know, what are the symptoms of that problem, and what's the big problem that we can talk about in here and explain that in clear language to the, to the customer. Next step in the process is we then introduce another character into the story. This character is the mentor or the guide depending on your terminology. And the guide's job is really to show them exactly how to solve a problem. This guy's been there before. He solved these problems before. He's worked with these sorts of people before, and he will show you how to do that. And the guide in these stories, in the business stories, is your company. It's it's your business, basically. So you see this happening all over the place. I love going through this process with, with companies because you start off at the beginning by saying, I'm gonna destroy every single film you're gonna watch because now you're gonna be watching the film, and you're gonna be looking for these individual things at certain points in the narrative plot. So, you know, think about Star Wars. Great example. Within Star Wars, the first six or seven minutes, what happens, we're introduced to Luke Skywalker. We're introduced to Tatooine where he's sort of working there on the, the farm with condensers or whatever it is, I think, with his, his step parents or aunt and uncle. And, he goes off one day and, but actually, we we find out that he's he's earning money basically because he wants to get out off the planet. He wants to go and explore. And he comes back one day and he finds that basically the farm's burnt out. The robots have been smashed up. His aunt and uncle have been killed. So we got this great big problem. You know, how is he gonna earn any money to get off the planet? And then who should come along? Again, if anyone wants to write in the chat, feel free to. We get a guide that comes along into there. And who is this guide? Well, this guide takes the form of, initially, Obi Wan Kenobi. So Obi Wan steps in and introduces him to the force, and then the favorite character of everybody steps in. You know? He then introduces him to Yoda, and Yoda is the one that then trains him up on this. And they go through that sort of training process, which is exactly like as a as a salesperson. You know, you're trying to convince the customer that your approach is the right way to go and taking lots of different ways. But, you know, just like Luke Skywalker, your customer doesn't believe that that's the right way to go. He takes a lot of convincing. And eventually, you know, you have to push forward a call to action. You have to make a commitment. You have to ask them for commitment, basically. And, again, like Star Wars, there's a key scene, in the original film, you know, the nineteen seventy six one, where they're on the Death Star. They've released the tractor beams. The Millennium Falcon sat there on the, on the landing bay, if anyone can picture that in your mind. Luke Skywalker standing on the ramp, looking out of the back of the Millennium Falcon. And on the other side of the the landing bay there, he sees Darth Vader. And, suddenly, sort of Obi Wan Kenobi comes into the picture as well. There's this big sort of lightsaber fight there. Fantastic. And Obi Wan sees Luke and says, okay. I believe that you're actually good enough now, and he lets Darth Vader kill him ultimately in there. So this is him giving him call to action saying, you know, I've been your guide. I've done what I can do to help you. Now you need to commit to this. And that leads on to the final part of the story process here, which is ultimately the transformation. And this is what so many storytellers or particularly brand storytellers forget. You've got to talk about what the future looks like, and you don't just have to talk about positive things in the future either. So you need to explain what the world will look like when they've actually engaged with you, when they've taken your product onboard and used that. But it's equally important that you convey that message of what the life will look like if they don't do that. You know, what does failure look like for these companies? So that's, you know, long long story short, but that's the, or should I say short story long, whichever way, but that that's the process we guide people through in there, certainly. That's amazing. It is it's so relevant. I and I I'm coming back to the poll too of all the people that are and, actually, I'll open that up or how do I do this? Share it. I don't know how I'm doing it. But we we have a lot of different folks that are being that we're collaborating with and need to tell that cohesive story across the buyer's journey. And Hannah, I think, had a really good comment in the in the chat about having that whole story from start to finish. It's not an easy task to do. I'm gonna. show a couple of examples of people that I think are doing this pretty well. These are a couple of customers of Arcade I'm gonna talk about is, WalkMeInWebflow. Just to see this in action. And I think they take an interesting approach where they sort of start with the end in mind in a way where they're later in the journey, where sales engineering comes in and, really, even product folks need to be involved with, like, that the endpoint you talked about, Simon, of, like, where they're going. And then throughout the whole rest of the process, we have other folks coming in to help kind of close out that story or pull it all together. So WalkMe's example, for context, they were acquired by SAP. And when they started working with Arcade, they had a huge, team that they needed to enable. So SAP, as I'm sure you've all heard of, they're a pretty large organization. So they have thousands of account executives and sales engineers, and then they have all their partners that they needed to enable on this new product, WalkMe. I just have one specific example that I'm gonna walk through, but they've done this with, I don't know how many hundreds of different product lines and different ways of presenting this across different use cases. I think it's cool how they do it with Arcade is they've created, starting with the sales engineering or what they call demo engineers, they create this internal training where they had to enable people across the globe. German is a big presence, so they're using, like, our translations in here to to be able to translate this. And this first demo is very in-depth. It's really just for internal use for people to learn the talk track. I'll switch it back to English since I'm sure most folks do not speak German here. And there's some really some details of, like, how to go through what the demo would look like, how to kind of click through this, what the talk track should be, all the value propositions. So this is very in-depth. If I pull this back to the demo journey deck, we're talking, like, pretty late in the in the journey. And then earlier stage, they needed to be able to not have the SCs jumping on every call, but what they did was created use that same demo to create, basically, a click through for AEs to jump on the call. They've already learned the talk track. They've been enabled on how to go through this demo. And then they can pop this up full screen and kind of go through that demo, ask their discovery questions, and handle the conversation without the distraction of things popping up. They also have a little menu to jump around if people ask questions about a different part of the product. So this is really for the AEs to qualify, and then they pull the same story up towards the top of the funnel. So we're talking again, pulling it back to this, the use case capability and vision. Or once the sales and demo engineers have created these assets, they actually pass it over to marketing where they've created a couple of different assets. So this is on one of their landing pages now, where it's really just high level use case diving right into more of the kind of high level explanation of of what this product is all about. And then the last part of this walk me example is actually a new product that Arcade were kinda testing out with them is just more of a a video. Again, the super high level use cases. Any thoughts on what you're seeing here, Simon, tying this back to to your journey? It's interesting. Yeah. It's the first time I've seen this in detail, so it's it's actually quite interesting. It was going through my mind in here. Yeah. I mean, I love these. I love this style of presentation insight. The the one thing that jumped out to me, though, you you started off by showing the sort of the the partner and sales enablement things, and it was going through this idea of, you know, enter a title, click here, and fill this in, which I think is fine when it comes to training a salesperson or particular presalesperson on how to deliver a demonstration. The thing that jumped out to me was when you got into the marketing space at the bottom, though, and this is a problem that I see so many organizations struggle with, that they go back into telling the product story instead of telling the buyer's story. You know, as a buyer, I'm not interested in click here and do this. What I want to see in these little narrative points here is I want to see the value that this is delivering to me as you go through this demonstration. You know, if you clutter this up with with too many different things and you don't explain what the the relevance of these things are, it's like being overloaded. I've I've got another great example, if you've got a minute, that, I'd like to talk through when I when I see this sort of demo. I come from The UK originally. And, in The UK, unlike over here in Switzerland where I am now, that we drink proper pints. You know? They got pints that sort of size, things that you can hold in your hand. When you tell a story, when you're going through demonstrations like this, every piece of information, every sort of feature that you show is like giving somebody one pint to hold. So I'm at the bar here with my my first pint. It's good. I can hold that. I can carry that across to the, the table on the other side of the bar with no problem at all. If I get two pints, I can probably carry those across to the table without spilling it. You know, that's like giving me two sets of features inside here that I can talk about and remember. I'll do that. Now if you start to give me three points and this is a crowded bar, you know, I'm gonna really struggle to get that across the the bar without spilling a good chunk of this beer, and that's not a good thing. And, you know, unlike what most people think, you know, if you've not gone through this sort of experience and seen it yourself, you you'd think, okay. They're gonna remember the first thing that I talk about or remember the last thing that I talk about in this demonstration. But, actually, the reality of the situation is it's like giving you four pints. You know? Now you've given me four things to remember. What happens? It's almost impossible to pick up four pints. And if you can pick up four pints, the first person that jostles you, you don't just drop one of those pints and spill a bit. The whole lot ends up in a mess on the floor, and you forget everything. You know, you've lost everything. And that's what I'm thinking when I start to see these sort of click tools that get into too much detail that call them sort of marketing level. Think about the pints in here. You've got a couple of key bits of information, a couple of key things that you can get across in these. Keep it simple because if you'd overload the information, people are just gonna forget it at the end. So there you go. You asked. Makes sense to me. I love that. Actually, we have a question in the the chat that I think it seems relevant for this. So somebody asked, how should we balance letting buyers explore with making sure that they they see the right parts of the story? Which I think is just you've already partially answered there, but how how do you balance that if you have, let's say, someone on the product team or someone that wants to show all these technical details? How do. you manage that conversation to or pick the right things? I I think those people have a right to have the the different demonstrations. It's about how you you pick them up and how you introduce them at different points of the sales process. So, absolutely, you're gonna want a product marketing or product management person that's gonna wanna show off their new features. You know, that fits in somewhere into the technical levels here or into the post customer support area. So there's absolutely a place for that later on in the story. The other thing that I think is is at the beginning of the story, though, it's about still taking little snippets of that, but it's about the positioning of those. Instead of positioning this as being the latest feature that we've released, and you can do this, this, and this, Think about it as as a new problem that you can solve, a different way of achieving something, a new impact that you can deliver, and and use that sort of language when you're delivering it. And instead of talking about click here, click here, see this, fill this in, talk about, well, this is actually now gonna show you and enable you to do this. You know, by filling in this data inside here, you're gonna get a far better view of what's going on within your sales process. And at the end of the day, that's gonna mean that you can actually judge which sales motions are working better than others as an example. So think about it that way, I would say. Very interesting. that answers your question. Yeah. Which actually makes me wonder too about the kind of, like, something I think about a lot, which now are totally off script, but this this seems super relevant is, the, the way that people segment. Like, we we talked about, like, Salesforce earlier. They have all these different, like, segments. People can go down different journeys. And then, like, in the Webflow example, I haven't even shown yet. They have a lot of this, like, branching capability where people can choose their own adventure and kinda decide what they want to to share. Mhmm. How, like, how do you think about segmentation or, like, to be able to tell these different stories if if company has many products or many personas, like, how do you work that into the whole whole storytelling or demo journey? I I think this is this is good again, and and thanks for jumping back to this slide. I think there's a lot of people here said they were involved in complex sales. Typically, to me, that means you're selling enterprise level software or you're selling to larger organizations typically with with larger buying budgets and buying centers. The left hand side of this, area here, what you've got to think about is you're not selling at this point to an individual. What you're doing is you're selling to a representative of an organization, and that organization has a problem that they are site trying to solve, and you've been trusted with coming up with a solution of that. So on the far left hand side, you can come up with a story that's a a more sort of general story. And as you move to the right, it's like adding your cast of characters into the story. Each of them has their own different twist and their own different things that they need to learn. So as you move through to the use cases in here, you know, if you're selling a financial system that's to do with billing or something along those lines, you know, on the left hand side, you've got this organization that's struggling with with billing. They need to be able to change their billing model or something like that to adapt to market changes. As you move to the middle, then you might be looking and saying, well, okay. The use case here is related to the finance manager that wants to understand how quickly can I get my invoices processed or the invoice processing clock that involves, you know, how much data do I need to put into here or the IT person now that's thinking about, how am I gonna actually implement this within my business and what's the support case gonna be? So it's the same story that you're telling. You know, the the vision is is or the story is still the same. It's about having a a billing platform, and, ultimately, we're going to solve the the billing problems that you've got in your business and enable you to issue more bills and, you know, potentially turn your billing process into, a revenue generation process if you get your billing right. But you're gonna tell that story in different lights as different characters or two different characters within the story. That's, that's the way I tend to look at it. I love that. And it makes a ton of sense. It's like a lot of folks will talk about the different personas that they work with and the different ways to even have, like, a specific talk track for the those people. And since we're talking about kind of the shift here, I wanna bring it back to something early on in our discussion. We talked about or maybe it was just me saying this that I've noticed this huge shift where I can't be in the room as an account executive or salesperson. I can't be in the room with everybody that is involved in this decision. So what we have to be able to appeal to those different personas and actually have a pretty good example that I wasn't sure if I was gonna show today, but Veeva Systems is one of our customers that has a pretty complex product, complex sales process. If you're not familiar with them, it's basically a CRM system that they sell to, other, what what is it, pharmaceutical companies, the medical device companies, that sort of thing. And they have a bunch of different personas. So this is actually a collection that they put together where it's really personalized to a specific customer, but they have a huge library of demos that they put in here that are kind of out of the box can for the different personas. And this is this one in particular is built for, like, an onboarding of of a new client. So they're meeting with, like, the admins or the the champions, but they put together arcades or interactive demos for the pharmacy rep and what that would look like or the back office, the admin side. And I'll I'll click into one of these where, again, they have this, like, branching capability where people can actually choose themselves. Like, what are they most interested in? Do they care about territory management going down that path? Or are they actually most interested in the the manager approval side of this and can kind of go down that path? What's been super interesting for me is that a lot of the insights that that I get whenever I send out an arcade is who has viewed what. So I can in between calls, actually, I had a meeting this morning. I'm gonna send out one that has a bit of a branch capability where then before our next demo, I'm gonna be able to see who viewed what, and understand kind of how I might be able to pull that back into my conversations and kinda help accelerate that deal. Anything that's coming up for you as I'm going through this, Simon? No. I was gonna say I really like this example, actually. I mean, it reminds me of, of a project we've worked on. I mean, I've, done work with quite a lot of larger organizations like, you know, PwC, SAP, and a company called OpenText particularly that that rings to mind here. And they have, as an organization, about 300 and something SKUs, 300 and something odd products that they their sales department sells, which you can imagine as a sales enablement person is just a nightmare to try and actually support all of those those different product lines. And, yeah, the trouble that they were having was very much they were creating all of these enablement materials, and they were just not getting used. And so this is one of the things that that we actually built with them was, basically, a sort of a demo library. We call it the test drive site that they work with there, where their salespeople can come into that, presalespeople can come into that. They've even actually opened up access to that to their channel partners, and they can access a subset of these, materials. Basically, they can come in, they've segmented all that by the various different problems that customers have, by the different product lines, and then people can jump around through various different forms of navigation to actually find a demonstration that's appropriate to the particular role that they're after or a playbook or something that's related to that. The other thing that I really liked about your example there, which we found as well, I said in one of my earlier questions, traditionally, sales enablement has been renowned for creating all these PDF documents, all these great big frameworks that a sales guy has to read through. One of the things that we found with the OpenText example there was we got multiple hundreds of percent uplift on enablement materials as soon as we made that stuff interactive. Yeah. As soon as you give somebody, something that they can actually click on and take themselves through there, just much like you were showing, You know, it's amazing how much more interested people get. So I think that was that was really cool. that's amazing. I've seen that OpenText example for I I I don't know if we we have time to to share that today, but it it was really in-depth of thinking through all these different paths of, like, when you need this. And I think that was one of the best things I saw with that. And what we see from our customers is, like, you're not I can speak as a salesperson. If there's just, like, an asset that I'm supposed to read or a video that I'm supposed to watch, I'm trying to close deals out here. I'm busy. I'm not going to reference that until the moment that I need it. That's just the reality. As soon as a business comes up and they're like, hey. I wanna learn about this. That's when I'm triggered to go and find that asset. And if it's there, I will use it. But to try. to, like, force things down an ace throat that if they don't see it, the need for it in that moment, I think it's just so crucial to to be able to have that library available. And I guess on demand was the word I I was looking for whenever whenever. you just need it in that moment. I'll tell you the other thing that we found that was really interesting. As soon as we moved it into this interactive sort of structure as well, again, with, excuse me, with a a PDF or a PowerPoint or something, when a sales got a presales guide excuse me a sec. Sorry. Downloads that. You've got one point of reference. You've got that click in the download, so you you can see that they've actually read that. As soon as we moved it to these interactive situations, what we actually found was that we can actually track what they're looking at inside these systems as well or inside these these articles as well. So that did two things for us. Number one, I go on about the story inside here. It was a great way of tuning your story because you can see as you go through, you know, an enablement deck or a corporate overview presentation or something like that that people are learning, you can instantly see the drop off through the slides. You can see, okay. This is good. We've got a fairly level amount of people watching this all the way through, or we've got a massive drop off here, which means that, you know, we've we've opened up with a problem here, and this problem just isn't resonating with our audience. They've dropped off way too quick. So I think the the analytics stuff behind oh, that's exactly it. Yeah. This sort of thing is exactly what I'm looking at when I'm going through this. You know, this sort of drop off at the beginning here of the different slides that people are going through, you know, immediately tells me that there's a problem with the story. You know, these later parts in here just aren't resonating with customers. They're skipping through all of this sort of stuff. So this was this was really interesting from this perspective too. The second thing I was gonna say about moving into this interactive form that we found was that it's great to have materials, but as enablement person, you know, we need to make sure that the materials that we're using are actually useful. And how do you do that? Well, you know, traditionally, the metric that you track is downloads. You know, how many time are people opening this thing up, looking at it, whatever? But the reality of the situation is actually the most interesting thing is how many pieces of information actually result in a sale moving on to the next step. So if it's a demonstration, how many move on to a discovery call? If it's a discovery call and you're supporting that with a case study, how many people then move on to a proof of concept in there? So the the most interesting thing, and again, something that we're able to track with here, is much more the sort of the calls to action, to be able to sort of go through this and see what's actually causing some sort of action and moving people onto the next step. So that was interesting. Makes a ton of sense to me. I know every sales leader, including myself in previous sales role sales management roles is like, we're looking at the drop off between steps. And this is great for understanding that story, but for the actual measuring of impact, for the a lot of the sales enablement folks, I'm sure you're you're looking at those those metrics of what the conversion is from stage two to three or three to four. And that's I think where I see most of my customers starting to measure this is whenever they launch a new initiative, a new enablement, new piece of content, then they can get a baseline and then measure has that improved, has that really moved the needle in those those sales stages. And I know there's so much more we could dive into here. We've had a couple of questions come in the chat. I'm curious if anyone has any other questions they wanna throw out there for for Simon and I the last few minutes we have. I see a couple of questions in there. I don't know who's, you're going to jump in and answer those or read those out at least. You got better eyes than. me. Yep. Clark asked one earlier is, support to acknowledge that often the customer is the classic reluctant hero. How can you help them win the battle they don't even know they're in? That is a greatly worded question. That that is a really I I love that question. But this goes back down to the fact that they don't realize they've got a problem. The reluctant hero doesn't realize that they can be doing much better than they are. And it's about how do you explain the problem to them. If you jump in there and you explain this big, highfalutin technical problem, they're just gonna look at you and say, yeah. Okay. I've maybe heard of that before, but I don't know. It doesn't impact me. If you take a few steps back and you explain the problem in language that they understand, I e the feelings that they're struggling with, you know, your business processes are slowing down here. You're losing this. You're spending too much time doing this. You know, your staff are complaining about these things. Explain the problem in the language, and using emotions and feelings that they actually can see day to day. That's the way that you talk through to these reluctant people, and you can sort of work them on board and build that vision and explain to them what the bigger thing is and that they need to actually address that because it's having more of an impact on the business than they actually realize. That is awesome. And difficult to do. I will say too from, like, personal experience, this is always my biggest frustration where I will see clearly that there's a problem that these people should solve, but they don't see it yet, or they're just like, I can figure it out on my own. The other thing I love here, there's a guy called Chris Voss, if anyone's ever heard of him before. He's an ex FBI negotiator. If you haven't read it, there's a book called Never Split the Difference. So go out there and take a look at this. He attacks this. He he talks about as you know, he's moved on from doing negotiations from hostage situations to to basically negotiations for sales situations. And he gives you some really good ways of actually asking questions and talking to people without actually explicitly saying what's wrong or telling them what's wrong inside there. You know, getting them to explain to you what the problem is in their own words such that suddenly they get this, oh, shit. That's the actual problem that I'm struggling with, and now I understand where you're coming from. So I'm not gonna try and go through all that now, but definitely worth a read. That is huge, and that's actually worked for me pretty well. What one thing I've done a lot of is, some concept I forget where I even learned it, but, like, a reverse demo, especially for really technical, products or replacement products if you're in a competitive market. I've had a lot of people I will just say, can you just share your screen and show me, like, your process or show me what this looks like? And that contrast is brilliant for especially whenever there's folks in the room, like, you have your VP or director that is not in the day to day in the weeds, and you have the end user that deals with this problem day to day, if you can have that end user just show you, like, two to three minutes, like, what that process looks like, you can really dig in there. Obviously, good discovery questions are always helpful, but if you can see that in action and then discovery questions are always helpful, but if you can see that in action and then show immediately after that how your product can change the game for you and, of course, always tie that back to to the value. Mhmm. We have one other question. We have three minutes left. There's questions Steve Smith asked, which almost feels, like, planted for for me to promote arcade. But, it says if we wanted to build an interactive demo library like the examples you've showed, how do how do we know where to begin? So first, sign up for arcade and just get started. But, I do have some some legitimate thoughts outside of just, arcade. But, Simon, do you have. do you have I'll let you jump in first. If you won't, go for it. Okay. Yeah. And this is honestly, like, one of the biggest challenges is, like, where where do we even start? So I always try to walk my prospects or customers through what project or initiative is currently happening that we can attach this to. So a lot of times, it is like a new product launch that's coming out or it's your executive that's just like, we need to sell this new product. We need to improve this particular KPI or metric and build from there. So, ideally, we'd be in the scenario, like, what Simon does with a lot of his customers is, like, building out the full journey of, you know, the whole story from start to finish. But the reality a lot of times is we just need to show an initial example. So finding that specific thing, whether it's a project or initiative, or maybe a key feature or product that you just know does really well in your market, and just create one asset for that particular use case, and that's usually the best way to to get it going and get people to start see seeing the vision for for what this interactive demo could do. Yeah. I think I I would take a very similar path in here. I think to me, if I was looking to with to where to start, it would be where's the low hanging fruit on my conversion path. You know? To me, these demos, particularly the interactive ones, are a great way of getting people to convert because once they've converted, you can then move them on, you know, through nurtures and stuff in the process. So, you know, to me, great place in here was think about, you know, at the moment, where are you sending people through from your Google AdWords, and and how do you hook them through with a demonstration? Or, you know, you don't even have to show a product demonstration. It could be a talking head that's with some animated PowerPoint slides that you're showing in this space. So there's a whole load of things, that you build in there. But, yeah, look for where that quick impact is going to be. Look where you can actually, get some conversions through there. That's where I'd start. That's a great call out too with the ad. I mean, that's one of the best testing grounds. I've done that with the callous customers in a trial where you get a ton of traffic on a good landing page, and it's so measurable, the impact that you can have. So if you need metrics, that's a killer way to do it. Just sure you have a product screenshot or a video there. You could replace that with an interactive demo and immediately have some data within even a couple of days. I know we are at time here, and our, system science were running over. So I believe this is it. We'll be following up with, anybody that that is interested here and continuing the conversation or, yeah, Reach have a good plan. out on LinkedIn. You'll find me on LinkedIn if you want. Please feel free to connect, to ping me a question. More than happy to take anything else offline, definitely. Amazing. Have a great rest of the day, everybody. Thanks very much all. Thanks for joining.