How do you ensure your product is demonstrated consistently across all of your Solutions Consultants? Furthermore, how do you enable your partners to successfully demonstrate and communicate all of the value of your product to their stakeholders?
The solution: Best-Practice Demo Videos. Ideally, these videos will be 5-minute product demos for each main feature in your product (Tell-Show-Tells or Chunks, depending on your preferred demo methodology).
In this blog post, I’ll explain how best practice demo videos can benefit your Solutions Consulting organisation and how to implement them.
Background
For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, you will know that I have recently instigated and implemented a demo video automation tool in my organisation. This allows Account Executives to send out pre-build overview demonstrations to prospects which allows Solutions Consultants to focus more on the discovery and demonstrating the key differentiators.
A happy, accidental benefit of this project was that we ended up with a large library of great product demo videos, each between 2 and 5 minutes long. Of course, these were intended on being only client-facing. What we didn’t anticipate was the huge benefit of utilising these videos internally for best practices, onboarding and continuous improvement within the Solutions Consulting organisation.
4 Ways to Use Best Practice Demo Videos
Below are the top 4 ways we utilised these best practice demo videos:
1. Onboarding
In any growing organisation or with any level of churn, there will be onboarding of new Solutions Consultants. Part of the onboarding boot camp (more on that in a future blog post) will include product training. However, this can easily get very technical and will likely be the same training that someone joining the Professional Services or Implementation team will receive.
By utilising Best Practice Demo Videos, it shows a tried and tested way of actually demonstrating each piece of functionality for a new joiner, ultimately reducing the time to value of a new hire. We have also found success in including selected demo videos in the onboarding boot camp for Account Executives to allows them to get an overview of the product and see how it would be demonstrated to their prospects.
2. Consistency and Continuous Improvement
As well as new hires, it can be immensely useful for experienced Solutions Consultants to revisit the Best Practice videos to ensure products are being demonstrated consistently across the team.
Studies have found that people forget up to 70% of what they have learnt within 24 hours of learning it so having video content available allows users to go back over material regularly to ensure they can recreate a best practice demonstration.
3. Partner Enablement
As well as enabling your internal Solutions Consultants, Best Practice videos can also be utilised to enable any other external organisation which sells your software on your behalf. It can be a challenge to maintain control of external parties to ensure they can effectively communicate your product’s value to their clients. By utilising videos in a self-service platform, it allows partners to demonstrate products and features consistently with how you want them to be demonstrated.
4. New Product Feature Training
The final step is to ensure the process for creating Best Practice Demo Videos is included as part of the Go To Market process for each product release. When there are new features or functionalities, I have seen first hand the importance of creating best practice videos early to ensure they are presented and demonstrated consistently from day one and that every Solutions Consultant fully understands the value proposition they bring.
Next Steps
By using Best Practice Demo Videos, they can help enable Solutions Consultants, Account Executives and Partners, as well as increasing the level of consistency across the Solutions Consulting team.
The next step for my team is to utilise video to record demo chunks for very specific client needs. When working with a configurable solution for large enterprise clients, we sometimes come across a use case that may not reappear for a couple of years. Therefore, it will be beneficial to be able to look back to see how we demonstrated this use case the last time.
If you or your team have found success in utilising Best Practice Demo Videos, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!