State of Interactive Product Demo Software: The Good, the Bad, and What’s Behind the Brands

Sales is a fast-paced world where innovation never rests. In this dynamic landscape, traditional sales techniques are getting a makeover. Enter the game-changer: interactive product demos. This exciting field of sales technology has been making waves, transforming the way businesses engage with customers and supercharging their sales efforts.

Gone are the days of boring presentations and dull brochures. Interactive product demos are stealing the spotlight, empowering sales teams to create captivating, personalized, and unforgettable experiences for potential customers. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, these demos allow customers to dive in, explore, and truly experience the value of products in real time.

So, what's the big deal with interactivity? Well, it bridges the gap between abstract concepts and real understanding. Unlike traditional demos, interactive product demos let customers roll up their sleeves and actively engage with the features that matter to them. Whether it's software or physical products, this game-changing approach allows potential customers to navigate, play around, and see how a product can solve their unique needs and pain points.

Customization is the name of the game when it comes to interactive product demos. Sales teams can tailor the experience to suit each prospect's preferences, goals, and concerns. By addressing specific pain points and showcasing the most relevant aspects of the product, sales professionals can build stronger connections and boost their chances of winning over potential customers.

So who are the main players in this emerging field and how do they stack up against each other?

We’ll go through them all here, including Walnut, Reprise, Demostack, Navattic, Storylane, and Consensus.

Walnut

Walnut is an interactive, full-funnel demo platform that is likely one of the first to market. It seems to place emphasis on sales and marketing teams. The platform offers a robust set of features, often publishes amusing videos on social media to tell their story and vision, and has garnered significant attention from audiences on LinkedIn. Online testimonials for Walnut often discuss the platform's quick onboarding process and ease of use, particularly when capturing different customer dashboards.

The good:

Your GTM team can use it regardless of company size. Your marketing team can use it to drive better leads with embedded product tours on their site that act exactly like the product, and your presales team can quickly spin up tailor-made demos that showcase the relevant features for each prospect. Sales teams can quickly share or deliver demos that keep prospects engaged, and customer success can build interactive tutorials to improve product adoption. Plus, because it directly impacts sales, you’ll quickly see your ROI.

The bad:
The price is slightly higher than some of the solutions on this list, while they seemingly spend a lot of their resources on marketing campaigns.

The vision:

With its #WeAreProspects campaign, Walnut positioned itself as the solution to fix the current frustrating SaaS sales process. And it delivers on that promise by letting revenue teams give prospects exactly what they want when they want it.

Reprise

Another one of the first interactive demo software on the market, Reprise came out strong but has struggled with keeping things scalable and user-friendly. The product is mostly split between the ability to showcase the product as an embed and its ability to capture your product for live demos. While its use case can be for companies of all sizes, the pricing mostly lends itself to larger enterprise companies, with the tagline on the website saying it’s for “enterprise sales and marketing teams”.

The good:

Reprise offers a good interactive demo for top-of-funnel use and provides users with a lot of control over their guides. For sales demos, with a small amount of R&D help, the final results can be great.

The bad:

Users have complained a lot about the complicated UX, which makes it difficult to actually achieve the results you need without the help of developers. Likewise, with its focus on enterprise business, the product proves to be less valuable for mid-sized companies and startups.

The vision:

Reprise brands itself as the solution for storytellers, helping sellers tell the story of their product the way they want to.

Demostack

Whereas Reprise and Walnut can benefit multiple areas of your go-to-market teams, Demostack only targets pre-sales engineers—and does a pretty nice job with it. By easily creating a replica of your SaaS product, Demostack allows reps to present demos that act like the real thing. This can help your team save time and resources building demo environments - but heads up - some market testimonials say that they are frequently pivoting their tech mechanism to find one that is operational, thus creating friction with its customers.

The good:

Demostack’s solution is a good option if you want to improve your presales. It takes a very short amount of time to create product replicas, which means a very short time to value.

The bad:

This solution might be the least innovative of the bunch. That’s because product replicas require sales reps to click through the full product to show prospects each feature, which can lead to a frustrating demo for prospects and a lot of unnecessary feature dumping. Likewise, because only your product is being replicated, you’ll struggle to show prospects how your product integrates with other tech.

The vision:

Demostack brands itself as the solution for presales teams, helping them spin up demo environments quickly for their sales team.

Navattic

Navattic is a good solution for smaller companies looking to embed a fairly basic product tour on their websites. Unlike the first 2 options on the list, Navattic’s solution only focuses on the top-of-funnel but is less helpful for sales teams. While it is less costly than the others, its capabilities are more limited.

The good:

Because they are singularly focused, they offer a very solid solution for marketing teams. They offer a cost-efficient tool that integrates nicely with many other software.

The bad:

The offering is limited in terms of support and resources and can be prone to bugs. Numerous customers have complained about issues with the technology with some clunky features that don’t always work as they should. Likewise, the result is never fully interactive but acts more like a dynamic screenshot than an actual demo of your product.

The vision:

Navattic aims to be the leader of the top-of-funnel interactive demo solutions and help SaaS companies better market their products.

Storylane

An even smaller, top-of-funnel-focused team, Storylane offers a similar solution to Navattic. Use it to quickly create some simple interactive guided product tours that you can embed on your website and drive better leads.

The good:

The product is fairly easy to use and the packages include customer service and support. This leads to a quick time-to-value.

The bad:

The offerings are limited to marketing and the solution tends to act like a cheaper and more limited version of some of the other interactive demo software. Also, because it’s the smallest company on this list, they offer a smaller support team.

The vision:

While they mostly support the top-of-funnel now, they aim to scale their product to be useful to the entire go-to-market team.

Consensus

Consensus recently joined the interactive demo space, after trying to help sellers build and manage video demos for over a decade. They are focused on high-lifting enterprise customers, but most of their clients are still using video demos instead of interactive demos. While they may provide a solid interactive demo solution in the future, at the moment, this offering is quite limited.

The good:

The platform has been up and running for over a decade, which can be a good sign of stability, performance, and potentially fewer bugs than its competitors.

The bad:

This is more of an old-school solution for video products than an innovative demo platform.

The vision:

Consensus seems to be aiming to step away from its original video product and into interactive demos.

Final words

Incorporating interactive demo solutions throughout your go-to-market efforts is like having a secret weapon in your arsenal.

By simplifying the sales process for your prospects, these solutions provide immense value that goes beyond just showcasing your product. Some of them empower your sales team to deliver personalized experiences, bridge the understanding gap, and build strong connections with potential customers. Others empower your marketing teams to provide site visitors with what they want to see to drive better, stronger leads. And some do all of the above.

Interactive demos make complex concepts digestible, allowing prospects to visualize the benefits of your offering firsthand. With their ability to adapt to individual needs and pain points, these demos streamline the sales journey, making it smoother and more engaging. So, if you're looking to supercharge your sales efforts and leave a lasting impression on your prospects, dive into the world of interactive demo solutions and unlock the true potential of your go-to-market strategy.