Lessons Learned from a Year of Product Demos at Drip – Anna Jacobsen – MicroConf 2016

0:00[Music] [Music] I love because I feel like I talked with a lot of you on skype or via email and now I actually get to see your faces and meet you in person and it's pretty awesome so my name is Anna and I work in customer success at drip and I've been there for about a year now and one of my big focuses has been product demos and what I'm going to talk to you today is what I've learned in the last year giving product I must at drip and I'm going to show you a few things first I'm going to show you the timeline of our

0:44evolution of our product demos so from when I started at drip to where we're at right now it's been a little bit of a process and a few different iterations and I'm excited about showing you each one of those next I'm going to show you how I have built a system to automate this in some ways that has really reduced the burden on me and also has a lot of to scale to other team members in our sales team and finally I'm going to give you some resources that you can use for your own product demo process and it's going to include things like the workflow that I use the copy that I use

1:19in my scheduling emails and a few other things and then some takeaways so let's jump in so back when we first started offering product demos Rob was actually getting a lot of requests to his inbox and he would handle those requests via screencasts and that's actually what I I jumped into when I jumped into a trip we had those screencasts in place and they were effective to an extent because and when the request was what could come in Rob would be able to handle that and it wouldn't be it be an async thing he wouldn't be taxing his calendar but obviously there's some limitations to that you can't have the

1:59question-and-answer back and forth and the rapport isn't built as strongly so the the first move that we made when I came aboard is we made that in-person thing so it became our v2 was a one-on-one demo and so probably just handles requests off to me and I would schedule a time with the prospect and we would do that demo and that's there are some pieces of that process that I use to this day and it be that live automated it's kind of our MVP 2.0 there in the process that I retained to this day is the the question piece at the beginning of the demo has some

2:38consistent questions including tell me about your company how are you currently doing email marketing and what future requirements do you have a few others these questions are designed really to get the prospect talking to build a rapport with them and for me too let's also prequalify them so if at a certain point they the question I asked about you know are you doing inbound marketing versus outbound marketing if they answer it outbound then it's probably not a great fit for drip and we can end the call early and maybe even refer them to a platform that would be a better resource for them moving to the next version so Version

3:16three it was a very slight change we actually introduced calendly at this point so I wasn't scheduling in a in a one-off way each time I got a request and that took a lot of burden off of me actually took several hours out of my week each day sorry I don't of my week and so if you haven't used calendly I love it there are some alternatives to it that work just as well but calendly is really clean and simple I just opened up web hooks which is pretty awesome so I'm gonna get into a little bit more about how I use County in a little bit

3:43but moving on real quick - for version 4 so this is one of the biggest changes we made in our workflow process I'm sorry our demo process at this point I'd kind of took a look at what was working in version 2 in version 3 and what wasn't and what wasn't working is that the initial conversation that I had was fantastic there was the rapport built and as we heard earlier from clared we had that trust built and that was really important but once those questions were over I would launch into features and it would be about 20 minutes worth of here drips of main features was kind of a

4:18sequence that I would show each prospect and there were some problems here because I noticed that the conversation that I was having with that person would almost immediately drop off there would be very few questions to me during that process and that was concerning to me they there were very few signals that I could for the sales process and I didn't really know how it was resonating with them and I also realized that some of the things that I was showing them may have been overwhelming stuff because maybe they didn't need all those features maybe they just needed a few of them so what I did at this point is I

4:47took the answers that they gave me in the question and answer process and I said okay well if you're a high-touch sales process you're going to need to see our lead scoring feature first not our forms feature and so I kind of revamp the sequence of features and folks focused on what they would use most first and in that if it naturally came up but they need another feature introduce that and so if they were high tech sales I would say here's our lead scoring feature here's how you can see how your opens and your clicks can increase somebody's lead score you can send people off to your CRM who have a

5:17higher lead score and have only those people talk to your salespeople and that was a big WOW moment for people so things were going swimmingly for quite some time well actually one more thing I forgot to say about 4.0 so I would really up with the features that I showed them but I also introduced an education piece so when I say education I don't really mean showing how to use each of Dripps features I'm talking more about email marketing education an example of this would be if I were showing the list pruning a feature which allows you to say okay well you know if someone hasn't opened or clicked X

5:49number of emails let's get them off my list I wouldn't show them just how that would work but I also would say if you aren't doing this these are the consequences so list health relies on people people who are opening not opening and clicking your emails taking them off of your list and if you're not doing this then your sender reputation is going to sink and your emails aren't going to get to the inbox and so at this point it wasn't just a product demo now they're getting some value out of it where they're leaving the demo a better marketer than when they started talking to me and this leads us to February of

6:24this year and that's where most of you know that launched workflows this year which has been pretty awesome yeah pretty awesome feature it's powerful it's simple and I did struggle for a while on the best way to show this to prospects because it is so powerful it's not a one-size-fits-all presentation and if I had tried that I think the power would be lost a lot of ba-ba-boom it would have been weakened so what I decided to do was I really needed to focus almost exclusively on workflows instead of looking at other features because that would allow me to have enough time to build a custom workflow for each prospect obviously to

7:03build a custom workflow you have to have a pretty intensive question and answer phase and so I started digging even more to their marketing stack and their particular marketing funnel and so at the end of a demo with me someone would have a funnel that was built just for them in drip that would reflect maybe the things that they'd already had in place but also would have maybe tightened up their process a bit because now they can see how all the art of automation would contribute to removing removing some of the holes in their funnel which is pretty amazing because at the end of the call the value-add had

7:37escalated even further from v3 sorry before to b5 not just on getting educated but now they have a tool that they can use to improve their marketing which was pretty awesome like the response to this was great people would then the conversations would get longer but as I reflected on this I realized that there there was a missed opportunity here because if someone had paid me to do this kind of work for them it would be almost as if I were their consultant they would pay me money for this the the value when these demos were so great that they were walking away with some things they could use to

8:17improve their marketing and I thought if this is living in my demo account and they never never sees the light of day after this that's a real problem so what I decided to do was each demo gets its own new trial account the workflows built into that trial account and at the end of the demo they would now get an email from me with a link to login and it would say something like sorry here's a link to login enter your credit card information and if you would like to access the workflow that we built together on the call to custom for you you can have it for free for 21 days you

8:52can take it to another platform you could use it for your own marketing or you can use it in drip which pretty awesome because the whole goal of a demo is to get people to convert to trials right and here's an easy on rap to put people into a drug trial but it also increases your customer success because at this point you have a user who has a really solid workflow built for them they have an understanding of how to use the product and they can hit the ground running there's no real question marks in their head when they open up their account something they've already seen before so that's the

9:27evolution from screencasts to custom built demos in trial accounts when I jump into execution and at this point I'm going to just really quickly move through some of the tools that I use and some of the automation I use and don't worry about trying to take too copious of notes because you can download the slides at the end so real quick I'm going to show you the the drip workflow that I use for this it has some campaigns and some goals again check out those slides at the end you can get better detailed but you can see how when someone requests a demo with me they're

10:01entering the workflow at that trigger point with that form submission and they get some tags applied for segmentation and then you can see that there's campaigns there and goals and if someone does not schedule it to me I can cue to hit them up with emails until they're not reachable the last email that you're seeing there is one that's a video recording of my demo and so this is the copy of the first email they get with me and that link goes to calendly and then there's a PS at the bottom to start a trial calendly if you haven't seen it it's pretty slick one of my favorite

10:35parts is it does integrate with drip as of last week and so that means you can set goals based on whether someone schedules or not but I also really love that they allow you to send reminder emails which is helpful to reduce no-shows so if someone is about to have a demo look at it email like 30 minutes before and it's pretty awful to have people no-show because time is of the essence and my calendar calendar is not infinite so having people reschedule has been a huge boon for me and then also that link to zoom kind of brings up the WebEx tool that I use I've tried Skype

11:09and joined at me and they've worked to some extent zoom has been the best in terms of the fact that it doesn't really hammer my CPU like the others but also allows me to do like remote control of stuff like that and so really quickly I want to jump into takeaways so if you have a sales process or a demo process and you aren't using an automated tool like calendly or automated emails to schedule do that right away because that will make you a lot happier if you do not have a demo process of any kind maybe you are doing some screencasts occasionally a really easy way to get

11:48started with demos is to record maybe a 10-minute version of your products features as soon as someone requests a demo from you maybe it's a button on your site you have an automated follow-up email that goes to them and that's a link to the video and you say if you have any questions feel free to schedule a time with me and so you're already pre-qualified pre-qualifying your requests and not talking to people who may not be interested or watching the video so that's all for now I do have these slides posted on my Twitter account so it's the pins tweet on top at energy Jacobson and I would

12:20love to talk with you if you have questions about the drip sales process or you want to talk about yours I'm gonna be here all week and you can also email me at mana a good job Tom thanks guys [Applause] you