Your Launch Needs An Interactive Demo - Here's How to Build One That Converts w/Natalie Marcutullio

Natalie: This is Wes, and you are listening to project marketing to you.

Host: Welcome back to another episode of Product Marketing for you. Today's guest is Natalie. Now, Natalie is a PMM who's built full funnel GTM from scratch more than once. And right now she's head of product marketing and growth at Novatic, where she spends her time helping SaaS companies actually close deals with interactive demos. She's got a very specific point of view on why most demos never actually build pipeline and what separates the ones that do. So if you've shipped a demo and had no idea whether it was actually working or you think interactive demos are just a, uh, nice to have, Natalie's got the data and the framework to prove you wrong. Okay, quick break and then we'll jump into my conversation with Natalie.

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Natalie: Product marketing for you. Product marketing for you.

Host: Natalie, thank you for jumping on. I feel like I've been stalking you and your team for a better part of two or three years now. So I'm really, really excited to get you here.

Natalie: I'm so excited to be here. And it's funny, I feel like I've been following along with the podcast. I was just talking to you. So I feel like I have been stalking your success in the past few weeks. So it is mutual.

Host: Thank you. And, uh, yeah, I think it proves that, uh, especially in today's age with AI overtaking everything, um, and the era of thought leadership just for the sake of it is over. And it's really about shining the spotlight on the PMMs who are operators at an exceptionally high level. Um, and those are now the superstars. And it's so great. I'm seeing so many great PMMs kind of emerge out of this next wave. Um, but specifically why that's important is why we're talking today. Uh, interactive demos now, for context. I love martech. I love my technology that I could get to go build stuff with. I'm a Novatic fanboy. Let's get that out of the way here. This is not sponsored. So Like, I just love the app, the platform. I'm a three time customer now, so I know the ins and outs of this. But one thing I've always wanted to know is get it from the expert herself. Um, how in the world do we go build these things from scratch in support of a product launch? Right, and the cool thing about this is it could be reused across the board for different use cases. Persona workflows, your lifecycle marketing workflows. Like, it is so universally able to be plugged and played. But there is a nuance to how do I do unwell and then how do I make sure that I'm tracking and doing the right steps by steps. And that's what we're talking about today. Am I off base here, Natalie?

Natalie: No, I was going to say, like, you're basically doing my job for me. Next time I have to go promote something, I'm going to hire you.

Host: Let me do it. Let me be another customer 4x times over here. Uh, and then you can absolutely run with anything you want with that. Um, at the end of this too, do not forget me. There's a lot of cool benchmarks that Novattics put out that you had a very, very strong hand and guiding force. Uh, on that one, I wanna make sure that our listeners get access to that which I think you graciously offered. Um, we'll touch on that in the end. But first of all, where in the world do we even start? Like, we have a launch coming, we know that we want to show it off and a lot of people are, a lot of companies are introducing like AI chats functionality, um, or AI powered, however we want to position it. Um, but they need to be able to quickly show context in a manner that is controlled to some extent. Um, and interactive demo is what hits the mark. Where in the world are we honestly even starting at this point when it comes to sketching out what we need to support a launch from an interactive demo?

Natalie: Yeah, I'm actually going to start with where not to start because I have made this mistake before. I've made so many demos, I've seen so many customers do it, but I've done this where we have a new product coming out and our instinct is, oh, I'm going to go click around the product and record of how I would use this, imagining almost like a tutorial. And where that falls short is you end up then getting really into the weeds versus taking a step back and being like, why are we building this? What's the high level message so opposite of that where to start is one, first of all, decide what the goal is. Where are you going to use this demo? If it's a launch, is it more for a public facing launch? Is it on a website? Is it a landing page? Are we sending this to customers? Is it sales enablement? Because depending on what the ultimate goal is, that will also depend. How long should I make it? How in the weed should I go? What value props am I showing? So just step number one is talk to the team and say, like, where are we going to use this demo?

Host: Oh, so many good things. So like, I've embedded GIFs out of the ones I made with the Vatic, um, in emails to go along with a larger push to a landing page. I've done it right smack dab on the homepage, I've done it on product pages, but they all hold slightly different context. And that's why I love it. I love it so much. Okay, so we understand the channels and that could be one of a billion different ways depending on the launch. Right? The launch dictates how you distribute. Right. Um, what about the user journey? Like, what is that looking like and how does that impact how you're thinking about building this interactive demo?

Natalie: So it depends on whether or not this is a live feature or if it's in beta or maybe you have no information. In an ideal sense, you probably gotten some customer feedback already. Maybe sales has been pitching the product. Go listen to those sales calls, talk to your reps and just figure out what are the two to three main. Aha. Uh, moments that are really getting prospects excited. Really try to keep it focused on like two to three main things. And you can always again, create other demos down the road if you want to make them larger. But I would start there if you don't have any customers who've used it, uh, yet, maybe go back into like, what were the feature requests? Did this demo get built? What were the main things that kept coming up from customers of why they wanted it, but really focused on, like, okay, if nothing else, this is what I know we need to show and confirm that with sales or cs, early on it is so much easier to send a sales or CS rep or leader. Like, hey, here's the three things that are going to be included in this demo. Anything missing or anything I should think about versus having to redo it down the line.

Host: No one wants to redo those demos. Um, and that's so crucial, especially with, you know, we're moving fast as it is, if not faster than the speed of Light, it feels like, but looping in at the start. It's a common theme actually amongst all of these episodes, especially when it comes to launches. Also include US PMMs early, please. If you're listening to this and you're not a pmm. Um, okay, so you've got your user journey kind of mapped out. You understand you've been working collaboratively, you know which channels to distribute this from. How in the world are we actually thinking about capturing the actual product now? Because there's some nuance here, like there's some sizing, which Novattic helps automatically with a cute nice little button. Um, there's some features to think about, like y' all offer HTML editing which I've used and abused so much because there's sensitive data I want to edit. But like, before I go into full feature, like blowout here, what are you thinking about when you're capturing the product from your point of view?

Natalie: So I am going to caveat where this is where number one is really important on deciding on the channel. You. If you are putting this front and center on a very important landing page on the website, that's where I'd recommend. You probably want to invest in something that is going to be that full HTML captures again. It's going to look and feel like the real product. To your point, you can edit the data, but if this is going in like a knowledge base or maybe if it is more internal training, that's where maybe screenshots, videos might actually be an easier solution. So that's why I do say figure out the channel first. Ideally, if this is public facing, we saw from our data that 86% of the top 1% of demos on our platform use web captures. I think to your point, largely because of the data editing, it does help the story if you can show that the data behind it, not just the text on the screen, feeds that story and looks real. It's like the difference between seeing an empty dashboard and one fold with charts going up to the right. Usually the ones with the charts going up to the right look better.

Host: Imagine that context matters too. And the other thing, I'm a retired sales engineer, so I lived and breathed this before interactive demos were a thing. Um, but we had to go through hours of painstaking effort to create these environments where they were beautifully created with fake, fake data. Literally. That process with HTML editing takes you minutes, um, to make sure that A, you're not exposing customer data that you shouldn't, um, but B, that it's relative to the industry and the channel that you're sending these out to, which I love. Um, if you can't tell, I love, love this tech. Uh, okay. Um, from that point after that, what are we thinking next? We've got it built, you know, we've got it going. Where are we heading next in terms of like polish, specifically the words I think is next. I've always had a problem with pre scripting. I always do it afterwards. But like what's your recommendation when it comes to the actual words on the screen?

Natalie: So I would again first recommend capturing it. I know some people who vary who like to script it out first. Maybe your preference? I like capturing it first because then again I can go gut check with my sales team, be like, are we showing what we want to show before I invest too much into writing? Then once you have done that, great. I would then write the more detailed demo script which is line by line, screen by screen. What do I want to say? I'm going to again go up to those like two to three aha moments and that should be the core of the script. And a little trick here. I. If you are going to use AI to help with any speeding this up, you can use it to repurpose maybe a demo script from a rep or some tools. Like we have a AI writing assistant that will help you write that first draft. I am going to preface but no matter what AI use, it's going to be a first draft. So you're probably going to want to do some editing and polishing. But that's where if you do have some of those existing assets, whether it's knowledge based material, whether it's again those scripts or those aha moments, you don't have to start from just like ground zero, looking at an empty page.

Host: Yeah, I mean and some of us aren't naturally gifted with writing. So like the AI draft to get you 8% of the way, there is always a good thing. Now I've always wondered, because I've struggled with this too, how many steps is too many steps as we're thinking through this because you know there's some rule of thumb that says let the copy or the content dictate the steps. But there is best practices and y' all have done the work. What does that look like in terms of like don't do more than this and don't do less than that.

Natalie: So it's funny, we put out this report every year. We call it the state of the interactive product demo. Truly, for the past four years, this is the one thing that stays consistent five to 13 steps, which is usually about a minute to two minutes. Again, that should probably cover about like three main features. Less than five, it's probably going to be too short. That's not a lot of information to give at once. We've seen time and time again, once you get past that like 13, 15 step mark, that's when the drop off really starts to happen. And even internally with our own demos, we see around step eight. Again, depends on your audience, the feature you're showing, where you're showing it, but really aim to that five to 13 steps. And if you're thinking, you know, this is a huge new product line that we are launching, there's no way I can fit that all into 13 steps. What you can do is break it out into multiple, we call them flows. But you can almost think of it like chapters where then uh, you can let the user up front decide what do they want to explore. So if you have again, if two to three aha moments does not seem realistic, if you have nine, for example, okay, break those up into three different flows and then upfront let the user say I'm interested in exploring this. Or throughout the demo you could also have a little option where someone can choose what they want to explore more, but keep each of those individual chapters to 5 to 13 steps. I think the biggest mistake we see with demos is just ones that are way too long because you're also probably at that point if you're writing a really long demo, that's when it becomes more of a tutorial and a click path rather than a story and value focused.

Host: Yeah, when you say the chapters. Right. And for those of you who haven't built one of these before, most platforms give you the ability to kind of break these things into chunks. Right. Is there such a thing as too many chapters where you maybe like in my use case, I want to build something out for my CS team on customer sales team and it's more of a platform overview because there's a lot of stuff going on. Is there too much when if I'm breaking it down or is there just kind of like let it rock.

Natalie: I'd probably recommend between let's say three to six chapters, especially if you are going to let users choose up front, then I would really recommend staying closer to like 3 to 4. I don't think you want to give users like 10 options up front. If you are going to go beyond six chapters, that's when I'd maybe graduate into something like a demo center. Now this, we're Getting into interactive demo building 2.0. So if this is your first time building demo, do not worry about having to create a whole demo center. But that's where our customers, if they do have like 12, 15, I've seen 40 different chapters that they want to show. They'll actually have a dedicated landing page on the website that says, hey, here's all of our different interactive demos. Go explore the feature use case, Persona you are most interested in. That's how I break it up. If you are going to go more than those six chapters.

Host: I do love demo centers. You can do it. I've done it by Persona, I've done it by use case, I've done it by platform overview. Um, do you have off the cuff. We didn't even plan this. Do you have off the cuff one or two great examples of demo centers that you could point someone to if they wanted to go check that out.

Natalie: Oh, easily. One is the closed demo center. So what's very fun is they've. They branded the whole thing to be like a construction site. So if you go that everything is. They have these like yield sign brandings. It all feels very cohesive. But they have it by like Persona. They have it by, um, different types of individual features I'm imagining in my head right now. But that is definitely. Go check that out. Another good one is Insider. They have a lot of good filtering capabilities. That's what I do recommend. If you do again, if you have 15 plus demos, um, you can then maybe go and have filters where it's like say, okay, I want to break this up by both Persona and maybe Product line. You can even get really specific with which demos you show.

Host: I was just trying to think. I was trying to look up and verify user evidence. Is my favorite the demo Ranch. Um, just because it's so fun. M Branded, they do such a great job. And I remember that was, uh, the whole team just lights out, right? And they're with y' all too. So it's not like cross, cross promotion out of there. Um, okay. We are rounding the corner. We've got this thing built out. It's beautiful. It's in line with best practices. It's 13 or less steps, not more than five though. Our script's gone through. We've polished it. Um, there's one question I keep on coming up because it's. We all know, uh, everyone wants names and emails. Marketers sometimes say, hey, no, this is more of an intent play and a nurture play. To gate or not gate. What is the stance Here, Natalie.

Natalie: Okay, so I'm going to say generally it depends but give my blanket statement first. According to our data and again I talked about, we do this report every year. We see similar stats every year. It is usually about 65 to 70% of the top demos on our platform are ungated. We also see they drive higher engagement makes sense. If you have a form upfront, you're probably not going to get as many people to go through it if you don't have a form. If you are going to gate. I've seen it again and depending think of it like give get scenario. If you have a more extensive demo or you're showing off more feature functionality, maybe that's when you gate. If you are going to gate, we highly recommend just using one field. Ask for their email, maybe give some social proof up front or explain why you're gating it or what they'll get out of going through this demo. And then you can always enrich on the backend. We also have seen more and more customers. I mean there's so many like identification platforms these days and even we have a feature that we can identify the contacts in your CRM if you have a uh, script on your interactive demo. So there are also a lot of ways to get around necessarily needing just a form to identify someone these days. I understand. Sometimes you gotta do it. If you are gonna do it, keep it one field. Make sure you're offering a lot of value for what you're gating and try to explain up front like what they're going to get out of going through this demo and giving their information.

Host: That's great, great advice. And for those of you listening, you're not evil if you're gating. There's industries, there's situations that also call for that too. Uh, which is really intriguing. Um, so think about that. Okay, we've got everything. We'll set up. There's a little bit of few cherries on the top that you were telling me about and that I love doing because as a product marketer I still want to be on brand. I want to keep things on brand and strong. What are those things that you could do to really push it from a good to a great experience in the demo interactive process?

Natalie: Yeah. One of the biggest things that I see is just like make sure it matches your brand tone and colors. You can actually change the theme itself. So those little text callouts, you can change those to make sure it matches your brand colors, make sure it looks good with your website. I didn't actually Include this. This is uh, an additional little tip. But I'm also a big fan of text variation within each step. You have to think every single step. You have to earn their attention and keep them going. So if you use a lot of the same like big block of text, big block of text, they're going to get familiar with that and probably just tone it out. So I'd like to use a lot of headers, bolding certain points, uh, make sure that you're moving the text callouts in different areas. Like don't just have it in the middle of the screen every single time. Maybe sometimes do it on top, right. Sometimes have it pointing to something. We call it beacons, but basically just flashing lights to guide where you want to look towards. Definitely making sure you have multiple CTAs throughout the demo too. Another common mistake I see is someone builds this great 13 step demo and there's no option for a user to convert until the last step of the demo. Someone might see two features and be like, I'm in, I'm sold. We usually recommend maybe gate or not gate, sorry, put a CTA halfway and you could always say like, hey, liking this demo, go talk to our sales team or keep going. It can be a very non intrusive cta. We've also seen options where people just have a consistent like sticky CTA throughout it. Or even options where if you try to escape the demo, like an escape view, you give another option of like, hey, maybe you've seen enough, want to go book a live demo. But just try to give people options beyond just the very end because most people aren't necessarily going to make it to the very end and they might be hooked halfway. Why not get them when they're interested?

Host: Yeah, that's a great point too. And one of the things that you ah, had mentioned too is just because you hit a launch date and you get the interactive demo out the door doesn't mean your work is done. Um, I know you all have some great statistics. You could actually watch and see view through how many times it's been started. Um, but the key is to iterate. Much like everything else we talked about in this season around product launches, the deal and the job is not done on launch day. Sometimes it gets actually more intense afterwards as you're thinking about iterative cycles to improve and of course take that and learn for the next launch. Um, Natalie, there is, you mentioned the report, um, and that comes out every year. I'll link that to directly in the notes, but give me the best 30 second overview of what this report is going to get us as we go through and read this.

Natalie: Yeah, so basically every year we look at the, again, top 1% of demos on our platform. And I actually go through those demos. I look at the websites, I click through them, so I know what they look like. And, and we just say, like, what do these demos have in common? It's really that simple. We do provide benchmarks also at the 10% and 25% range. So if you're new to interactive demos, do not worry, you don't have to bench your mark yourself against the top 1%, which is a very small cohort. And you can. So to your point about iterating after launch, you can see, okay, it's been, you know, two weeks. Am I hitting that 25% benchmark for completion rates, conversion rates, engagement rates? If not, then we have a lot of best practices in there that can help coach you. What would get you to that 25, 10%. And speaking of gated versus ungated, it's all ungated, so you don't have to give us any information to see it. You'll have access. And even if you're not using Novattic, no worries. Most of the best practices apply across any sort of interactive demo platform.

Host: Perfect. And that's phenomenal. Natalie, you also, because I can do this whatever I want. Um, y' all offer kind of a free entry point into this world. If you're listening to this as a pmm, you're like, hey, I've been wanting to do this, but I just haven't done it. Um, I believe you get one or two free demos with nomadic jumping on. Um, and then there's good plans from there. Um, that's just novatic.com, right. And then the CTA is up in the right hand corner, if I remember correctly.

Natalie: Yep. If you go to Novattic, try it free. And the one thing I will plug is you do get access to our HTML builder, even on the free plan. So you can try things like editing your data, making it look and feel real, and getting off that really polished first demo entirely for free.

Host: And y' all don't even realize until you use it how valuable that is for shaping the data and making it great. Uh, Natalie, you've been incredibly gracious a to show up after be hounding you. It feels like forever. This is so great. Um, um, where can the peoples find you? Predominantly, I believe it's LinkedIn, right?

Natalie: Yeah. I always joke I'm on LinkedIn too much. But if you ever want to chat demos I seriously I look at them all day more than happy to give some feedback or advice or just chat product marketing in general.

Host: Love that. I will link your profile in the show notes too if anyone wants to connect with Natalie that'll be there as well as access to uh the benchmark report as well as I'll drop in the the names of the demo centers to go check out because I think it was a really cool give some really good inspiration. Natalie we crushed it in great amount of time. Right on time. 20 minutes. I'm really proud of us because I could have talked about this forever. I'm sure you could too.

Natalie: Thank you.

Host: Thank you for being so gracious for joining me today.

Natalie: Thank you so much for having me.

Host: Sweet. And if you're still listening thanks for listening to another episode of Pride Marketing for you. Look forward to having you back again soon.