Who is the application for and how does it work? Will my business benefit from this app? Am I going to earn money thanks to that software product? – these are only a few questions that come to prospects’ minds when they are at the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Members of marketing and sales, as well as customers success teams, are vital people in both sales and post-purchase also known as customer retention processes. Do you want your prospects to become paying customers? Would you like your existing clients to stay longer with you?
You must have the absolute trust in your employees as it depends on their knowledge, understanding of your product and the ability to present its features and benefits in an attractive and compelling way. This means they have to know the product inside out to be able to showcase it to clients and prospects.
Did you know webinars are a great product demo tool? Plenty of companies have been using them for quite a long time.
Need a proof?
When gathering data for our State of Webinars 2019 report, we checked what types of webinars were the most popular and the most frequently conducted on our platform in 2018.
And guess what?
It turned out 39% of all the webinars hosted on the ClickMeeting platform were product demos & employee training online meetings.
If your company develops and sells a software product and you keep wondering how to run useful product demos, both for clients, prospects and team members whose role is to communicate it further, then this article is for you!
Read on to find out how webinars can help you every step of the way and what specific product demo purposes they can serve.
According to the Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2019 report, 94% of video marketers say the video has helped them increase user’s understanding of their product or service. From the same report, you can learn that 96% of users say they have watched an explainer video to understand a product or service better. These are almost all survey participants!
No wonder they have been looking for helpful and knowledgeable tips in video tutorials. Today, traditional reading materials won’t do any more. The more complicated a product or service, the bigger the need to present and explain it online, in a visual form.
It is particularly important when it comes to presenting software products – web or mobile applications and SaaS platforms that are complex and comprise plenty of features seeking a clear explanation.
Nowadays, users expect you to take them by the hand and lead them step-by-step, presenting the most important features of your solution. They want to see with their own eyes how a feature works and how they can benefit from it. A traditional guide or user’s manuals – even the most detailed ones – may not be enough.
If you are responsible for internal communications with franchisors, business units located in different countries, or shop networks, you might have been wondering what tools to use to run product training of new employees or product update meetings for your team. Don’t look any further as you have just found a perfect tool.
Teaching your product to new employees is a must. Especially if they are supposed to promote and sell it or they will be a part of your customer service team. Often, the onboarding process has to be quick and productive, so they can start working as fast as possible.
How to explain the tiniest details of your software to people who have never seen it before, time and cost-effectively? The challenge may be even more significant if your team is dispersed around the country or numerous offices are scattered around the world.
With webinars, you don’t have to worry about it. You can run an online meeting from any location and invite participants living in the most distant parts of the world.
Products and services keep evolving. New features are implemented; the old ones are removed or modified. Your marketing, sales, and customer service teams must be up to date with any changes to the product to communicate it to your audience correctly and to solve their problems.
Similarly to onboarding training meetings, product update workshops might be problematic with teams scattered around numerous offices and company branches. Imagine helplines, often located in different cities than the companies’ headquarters. Or sales teams responsible for different regions, also working away from the HQ. How to keep them updated without spending huge amounts of money on travels? That’s simple. Invite them to recurring (weekly or monthly) product update webinars.
On good webinar platforms, you have plenty of tools at hand to let you teach your product effectively, for instance:
A feature that 25% of ClickMeeting clients took advantage of in 2018 was the On-Demand Webinars tool. It lets you save your webinar and share it with users who couldn’t make it on time. It’s a great tool to use for newbies’ onboarding training sessions whose content doesn’t change but very often must be repeated. You can run yours once, record it and then give access to the recording to future newcomers. New employees can also watch it anytime they want to revise their knowledge.
What is outstanding about product demo webinars, is that you can organize them at every stage of the customer journey. You can pursue your specific goals at every stage of the sales funnel and enjoy considerable benefits. Let’s take a closer look at the steps you can take to win and retain customers.
According to Wyzowl’s report, 81% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads. You can follow their example or go one step further and, instead of a plain video, start using webinars to win new customers.
Webinars are a great tool for showcasing your products to new audiences as they are like real meetings. They are much more than a tutorial video on YouTube people can watch, but they cannot ask you any questions. They are much more than an email campaign with a 10% discount offer for new customers that may entice them but will not clear any of their initial doubts – whether the product suits their needs and if it solves their problems.
So, find out which prospects have shown an interest in your product – filled out the registration form on the landing page, downloaded your e-book or report, or subscribed to your mailing list – and invite them to a product demo webinar. Show it to your prospects and strike them with a variety of features it offers. Convince them this is what they have been looking for and they are going to love it as soon as they purchase it.
If you want to convert your webinar attendees into loyal customers, pay particular attention to the custom branding when working on it. Make sure the webinar layout is consistent with your brand’s identity so that participants recognise you at first glance. Let them remember your logo and colours to build trust and strengthen your brand’s image in their minds.
After you have successfully convinced your prospects that your product is what they need to accomplish their goals, it’s time to show them around your platform or app.
As said before, even the most detailed traditional user guides or manuals might not help when people are in a constant hurry and can’t be bothered to read lengthy pieces of text.
People want to see how things work, and they want to see it now.
So, the better your onboarding process, the bigger the chance new customers will stay with you, use actively your solution and extend their subscription for another period.
Sometimes, at the initial stage of a software solution development, you can use the product for free. Often, users register and then remain inactive. Meanwhile, the app owners are trying to win investors to make their business grow. It’s crucial for them to have active users to ensure the investors their solution has the potential to develop further. Besides, active users at the early stage of solution development provide a valuable feedback. Thanks to the information you can gather from them, you can learn whether you are heading in the right direction and should tailor your solution to real users’ needs.
Have your users set up their accounts but haven’t taken any action so far? Perhaps they wanted to test a new app, learn if it would satisfy their needs but then got lost among the plethora of features, got discouraged and gave it all up.
It’s time to win them back!
Invite them to a series of onboarding webinars during which you will discuss every feature available in the user panel and show them how it works. Again, don’t forget about custom branding, use the chat to develop a strong relationship with your attendees and don’t forget about the survey to their valuable opinions and suggestions at the end of your meeting.
When products are being developed and modified, not only your team must be up to date. Think about your customers. They have been with you for a while now, using their subscription plan and the features available in it. They may not be aware that you have just added new tools they can benefit from and apply to accomplish their own business needs. What if they spot a similar tool in your competitor’s solution, unaware of the fact they have it within reach in their account panel?
You may lose them for good.
Don’t let that happen. Instead, use your mailing list to send regular emails to your current customers; invite them to a series of “What’s new in…”webinars to keep them updated on the novelties. Use the screen sharing feature to make it easier for them to find new features. Run a Q&A session to learn what else they need to know and run a survey to check what other tools within your platform they use most frequently and what improvements they would like you to introduce.
So, you have loyal, long-term customers who keep extending their subscriptions. From the customer satisfaction survey, you have learnt they think your platform is great and using it is a sheer pleasure.
It’s time to let them know there are much more benefits awaiting them outside their subscription plan and encourage them to have a try. Let’s imagine you have an email marketing platform. Your customers use the basic plan where they can access only the email editor. In the pro plan, they can have a landing page creator to develop simple sites their email recipients will land on after they have clicked the CTA button. As a result, they can run complex email marketing campaigns with all the tools they need, available from their user panel.
Don’t wait till they order the landing page creator from your competition. Host a webinar and use the presentation tool to show them several examples of landing pages developed with your tool. Then share your screen to show them step-by-step how easy and straightforward it is to create a simple landing page. Answer their questions and clear their doubts via chat or during Q&A session. And finally, encourage them to upgrade to the higher plan.
Your product is the most valuable thing your SaaS company has. Make sure both your team and your customers know it well enough to, respectively, present all its benefits and be aware of the features they have within reach and profits they can have.
Don’t waste your time writing another manual or user guide. Contact our customer success team to learn what the best pricing plan is for you and start designing your very first product demo webinar.
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