5 Ways to Automate Demo Creation

For most SEs and SCs, building a demo is a painful process.

They have to request a new instance from engineering, then work together to customize it to a prospect’s needs. That setup can take weeks, only to be repeated again when the demo falls out of sync with the latest product release.

As one SE leader told us in a recent webinar, “By the time our team built one custom demo, our product had already shipped another feature update.”

Demo automation makes that workflow more scalable, enabling presales and sales teams to build interactive demos in hours (not weeks), without the help of eng teams.

In this post, we’ll walk through five proven ways to automate demo creation, with real workflows and ROI examples from solution engineers using Navattic.

Demo automation is the process of building, personalizing, and sharing product demos without engineering involvement, using no-code or low-code tools.

This helps get demos out the door faster. And when prospects can explore your product earlier in the sales cycle, it shortens qualification time and accelerates the path to purchase.

Demo automation also keeps demos consistent. Every experience reflects the latest product release and messaging, so teams don’t waste time rebuilding outdated environments.

With engagement data built in, presales teams can see exactly how prospects interact with each demo – insights they can use to tailor their follow-ups and make live conversations with buyers more relevant.

1. Use Templates and Modular Demo Flows

Though they may come from different industries or use cases, most prospects care about the same set of core features and workflows. The differences come down to minor details or one-off edge cases.

So, rather than reinventing the wheel with every demo, try templatizing the parts that rarely change, things like onboarding, reporting, or more generic feature spotlights.

When a new prospect comes in, SEs or AEs can clone one of those templates, make a few tweaks, and send it off.

Mark Rida, Director of Solutions Engineering at Saviynt, shared that creating reusable content like this has become a top priority for his team:

“My role has really turned out to be asking myself how I can create better SE operations. How do I get them collateral that I know they can reuse and deliver quickly to AEs so they can almost be self-sufficient?”

2. Have SEs Create a Library of Demos for Sales Reps

Even with templates in place, customizing demos for each prospect can eat up SE time.

A good way to cut down that time is to create multiple reusable demos and store them in a library that SEs, reps, and other GTM team members can access.

Having one place to go for approved demo flows reduces confusion, maintains consistent branding, and improves cross-team collaboration.

It also cuts back on always needing to have an SE on early-stage demos. And it gives everyone a sense of what the prospect is actually looking for.

Emily Casaccio at Haloo explains, “These demos give us a much better idea of what to expect from the deal so that the thirty-minute sales call can be laser-focused on actual deal-making rather than trying to figure out who they are, what they're doing, and what they're interested in.”

3. Enable Auto-Personalization with Dynamic Variables

Reusable demos still need a personal touch.

With demo automation tools like Navattic, you can insert dynamic placeholders for variables like “company name” or other elements related to a prospect’s persona or vertical.

You could even add a rep’s calendar link in a consistent rep contact card to encourage the lead to book a live demo.

If you want to get fancy, you can use Navattic’s logo API to pull in a company’s logo into your capture.

Personalization variables like these are ideal for mass outreach campaigns, since you don’t have to rebuild demos for each buyer.

For more personalization ideas, read Outbound Sequence Ideas with Interactive Demos

4. Automate Demo Handoffs and Notifications

Once demos are out in the wild, SEs and AEs need to track how buyers are interacting with them.

With demo automation software like Navattic, teams can set up Playbooks that trigger Slack alerts whenever someone starts, completes, or fills out a form during an interactive demo.

Those data points can also sync directly to your CRM, giving the entire team visibility into which stakeholders are active on the deal and what features they’re spending the most time on.

Navattic customer, MoEngage, built this into their workflow:

“We set up Slack notifications to alert SDRs whenever visitors fill out a form in a Navattic demo. Now, within ten to fifteen seconds of their demo engagement, an SDR has been assigned to reach out to them.”

Reaching out while a prospect’s interest is fresh can turn a passively curious lead into a real, qualified opportunity.

5. Tie Demo Performance to Your CRM

We’ve already mentioned a couple of times that demo automation tools track who on the buying team is looking at your demo, which screens they linger on, where they drop off, and which flows convert best.

That data is not only helpful for tailoring live conversations but showing exactly how demos influence active opportunities.

The more you can refine your demos and tie them to KPIs that matter to leadership, the more buy-in you’ll get across the GTM org.

As Mark at Saviynt put it: “Whether it’s ROI measurement or a percent gained in operational flow, a positive business outcome is key. Once you can relate the capabilities you’re presenting back to those outcomes, you can tie demo performance directly to a greater strategic initiative.”

It can also help you improve your demos (and your win rates) over time.

• If you notice one or two of your demos correlate with higher closed-won rates → tell your SE and AE teams to start with those over any other demos.
• If prospects keep dropping off in the same place → take a harder look at your copy or screen captures. Maybe there’s something missing or the verbiage is off.

Presales teams using demo automation are seeing meaningful gains in SE productivity and deal velocity.

Take Productboard, for instance. Instead of bugging SEs to find the correct interactive demo to send, reps browse Launchpad and drop relevant demos straight into prospect emails or LinkedIn DMs.

Mathieu Govoni, an AE at Productboard, shares, “What I appreciate most about Navattic is how easy it is to share interactive product demos. It’s a great way to let prospects experience value upfront - especially early in the sales cycle.”

This approach shortens time to first live demo and reduces reliance on SEs early in the funnel.

Haloo does something similar, sending interactive demos before a live conversation to support discovery. SEs can see which features prospects interacted with most and tailor their calls accordingly, shortening qualification time and moving deals through the pipeline faster.

Emily Casaccio at Haloo shares: “Since implementing Navattic, we’ve decreased the length of the sales cycle because we can see, based on engagement with the demo, which clients and prospects are actually interested in and engaged, which means they have more buyer signals.”

The team at Dropbox takes this a step further.

They built a “choose your own adventure” demo that lets buyers jump straight to the features they want to see and explore them at their own pace.

Giving buyers that flexibility has decreased repetitive SE demo requests, kept content fresh across teams, and increased buyer engagement throughout the cycle.

“Navattic tours have been particularly valuable given the complexity of our demo environment, and our product tour has been incredibly successful from day one,” says Jonathan Paredes at Dropbox.

“We had over 280 unique demo visitors in the last 30 days and saw a dramatic reduction in repetitive, generic live demos, freeing up time for the SE team to focus on complex enterprise deals.”

The fastest path to better demos isn’t hiring more SEs. It’s automating the repetitive work that’s dragging them down. To start:

Identify your most common demo use cases. Analyze your latest wins: where did prospects have their aha moment? Building standard demos around those features is your highest-leverage automation opportunity.

Create a reusable template. Build one strong demo for each main aha moment that can be easily personalized. Include a short intro screen to frame the story, then add text callouts that mirror your standard talk track, and close with optional other avenues for deeper exploration (book time with sales, case studies, etc).

Once these standardized demos are in a centralized library, anyone on the GTM team can combine, customize, and share them.

Automate handoffs and notifications. Integrate demo sharing into your existing workflows. Make it easy for reps to find your demo library where they already work (like LinkedIn, Salesforce, or email) and personalize it for each prospect.

Set up notifications so SEs and AEs are alerted when a prospect starts or completes a demo, so they have context going into their next conversation.

Track and iterate with analytics. Use your demo automation’s built-in engagement data to see which demos are shared the most, where drop-off is, and which have the longest time spent.

Ready to automate your demos?

Try Navattic free or explore Launchpad to streamline demo creation.