B2B SaaS buying journeys are complex. Between independent research, ad campaigns, web sessions, events, sales outreach, social media, customer reviews, product demos, and more — buying journeys involve countless non-linear touchpoints across multiple channels and stakeholders.
While this may seem daunting at first, each of these touchpoints reflect unique buying intentions that may be leveraged to improve the customer experience and drive bottom of the funnel conversions. In some cases, the buying intent is obvious: if a customer submits their email ID to download an eBook, we know who they are and what they’re looking for. This challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that buyers are increasingly cautious about submitting their true email addresses. Professionals are educated to keep data safe and share contact details only if they’re absolutely sure of the need. Buying intent is generally the sum of incremental steps taken along the buying journey before reaching this inflection point. Recognizing these hidden intent signals — and the buyers behind those signals — is easier said than done…well, until now.
This article explores interactive product demos as a high-intent touchpoint in B2B SaaS buying journeys. Specifically, we highlight how tools such as Factors.ai may be used in tandem with Demoboost to identify otherwise hidden intent from a ubiquitous element in SaaS today: the product demo.
Interactive Product Demos: Scale, Distribute & Analyze
Product demos have been at the cornerstone of SaaS buying journeys forever. They’re an effective way to showcase your software’s features, functionalities, and benefits all while addressing key use-cases and pain-points. Although live product demos continue to take place over real conversations with sales reps, businesses are increasingly adopting product demo softwares to support pre-sales efforts. This may be a result of B2C buying behaviors bleeding into B2B deals: Rather than submitting a demo form, finding a convenient time, and then speaking with sales reps, buyers today expect instant access to the info they need. Only after they educate themselves do they engage directly with sales reps. Businesses have adapted accordingly.
Product demo softwares help businesses build automated interactive product demos that are available to prospects on-demand. Interactive product demos are async product walkthroughs that users can access and navigate themselves without the involvement of sales reps or support personnel. Automated product demos are typically designed to be user-friendly, allowing potential customers to explore the product at their own pace. Among several other benefits, automated demos are scalable, easy to distribute, and provide helpful usage analytics. They may be embedded on websites, outbound emails, brand awareness campaigns, and more, so interested buyers have on-demand access.
So far so good…but you may be asking yourself: “but wait, who’s actually engaging with these demos?”
This would be a valid question. In the case of live demos, we know exactly who we’re showcasing our product to — they’re right there in front of us! But unless we gate an automated product demo (more on this later), how can we identify and analyze companies engaging with this touchpoint? In other words, what’s the full extent of intent signals from interactive product demos and how can we capture them?
Intent signals from product demos include information about who is engaging with the demos and what they're interested in. This helps marketers and salespeople know which companies are interested in their products and what parts of the demo they find most engaging.
Until recently, capturing this intent was a challenge. Intelligence and analytics tools could do their job on most web pages, but their functionality was limited within interactive product demos.
Demoboost solves for this by uniquely supporting third-party tags (SDKs) inside its interactive demos. The following sections highlights how this ability may be leveraged by tools such as Factors.ai to:
- Identify and enrich anonymous companies engaging with interactive product demos
- Capture valuable intent signals beyond page views and clicks from demo engagement
- Qualify, score, segment, and activate accounts based on demo engagement
But first, let’s establish why capturing intent signals from interactive product demos is so important.
The Importance Of Intent Signals From Product Demo
There’s no doubt that the interactive product demo is a crucial touchpoint along the buying journey. Gartner’s analysis of buyer interactions finds that a supplier’s interactive tool (35%) is only behind the website (37%) and social media (36%) in terms of buyer engagement. Given that interactive product demos typically sit within the website, we can confidently claim its significance in the purchase process.
But even beyond the data, B2B marketers and sales folk would certainly be interested to capture intent signals from companies engaging with high-intent touch points such as pricing pages, paid landing pages, and in this case, interactive product demos. These intent signals help identify sales-ready accounts, determine winning touchpoints, and prove go-to-market’s wider influence and ROI.
In a way, intent from product demos acts as a wonderful replacement for lead gen forms. Of course, marketing teams would love to place a lead gen form within the product demo as the resulting sign-ups wouldn’t need external intent data — we'd already know a lot about them via the form! However, given that buyers are increasingly growing to appreciate friction-free buying flows, capturing intent from ungated assets such as interactive product demos ensures the best of both worlds. This is where the Demoboost x Factors.ai integration comes in.
Demoboost + Factors.ai: Intent Signals From Product Demos
How it works
Factors.ai is an account intelligence and analytics software that uses industry-leading IP-lookup technology to identify, qualify, and activate anonymous companies engaging with websites and more. Tools like Factors work by placing a small piece of code (Javascript SDK) on the header of a website to de-anonymize website traffic, track account activity, and tie the dots between channels, website & CRM. Demoboost is a product demo software that offers all-in-one demo automation and demo-building functionality to reduce CAC, shorten sales cycles and increase win rates. Factors.ai now integrated with Demoboost to deliver the following use-cases:
As previously mentioned, such analytics tools have had the ability to track who clicked or landed on a product demo page. From there, however, users wouldn’t have visibility into what visitors are exactly engaging with inside the product demo. To solve for this, Demoboost’s open platform allows users to embed third-party javascripts within the product tour to capture account-level intent & engagement. This means that users can identify companies engaging with their demos as well as capture the extent of engagement — especially upon integrating Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar as well — at an account level.
Demand capture to demand generation: The implications of this are significant. Typically, interactive demos have served the functions of evaluating product pre-sign ups and improving lead quality. Now, in addition to this, interactive demos may also be used to identify and retarget high-intent accounts based on demo engagement.
Use-cases
Integrating Factors.ai and Demoboost results in a wide range of use-cases. Here are a few of them:
1. Identify & enrich engaged accounts
A fundamental use-case of integrating Demoboost with Factors is the ability to identify and enrich otherwise anonymous companies engaging with your interactive product demos. Along with analyzing demo engagement with Demoboost, you’ll also know the accounts behind the engagement via Factors.
2. Score & prioritize accounts
Given that several companies are likely engaging with your product demos, you may use demo usage insights from Demoboost in tandem with cross-channel engagement scoring across LinkedIn, G2, web sessions, and sales touchpoints to holistically score, qualify and prioritize high-intent accounts.
3. Relevant ABM campaigns
Once you identify and qualify high-intent accounts engaging with your product demos, you may then leverage this list of accounts for relevant account-based marketing. Rather than casting a wide net, you may initiate personalized ABM campaigns based on companies interacting with your product demos, website, LinkedIn ads, G2 review, sales touchpoints, etc to drive more conversions from existing efforts.
4. Personalized email & LinkedIn campaigns
Outreach and targeting is the next logical step after building your target accounts list. But rather than targeting every account with the same messaging — or tediously, manually orchestrating personalized campaigns, you may instead automate tailor-made campaigns based on engagement captured from Demoboost and other touchpoints. Configure your automation rules within Factors and every time an ICP company, say, completes more than half the interactive product demo, they’ll be pushed into a bottom of the funnel LinkedIn retargeting campaign or mail sequence to seal the deal.
B2B buyer journeys involve a wide range of fragmented touchpoints across several channels. Factors.ai’s Demoboost integration empowers GTM teams to capture another source of intent data from interactive product demos to complement Factors.ai’s larger range of first-party intent signals across website, LinkedIn, G2 and more. As it stands, interactive demos are a mainstay amongst SaaS websites — and with this integration, marketers & sales folks have an opportunity to make the most of the data generated via these valuable touchpoints.
