Customer Show + Tell: Jonathan Paredes: Scaling Dropbox’s Demo Capabilities

In our Customer Show and Tell series, we feature presentations from Navattic customers about how they're using interactive product demos. These talks were given initially at Navattic’s User Event Meetup in April 2025.

Jonathan Paredes, the Solutions Consultant at Dropbox, shares how they have leveraged interactive demos to transform our approach to product demonstrations and marketing events.

As Dropbox’s product offerings have evolved beyond cloud storage to include AI-powered solutions like Dash, the team needed innovative ways to demonstrate value, generate awareness, and shorten sales cycles.

When I first joined Dropbox, my manager was trying to come up with ways to scale our team because we kept running into the issue of giving generic demos that our customers were not getting the full value out of.

Traditionally, Dropbox has been a cloud storage file-sharing company, and it has evolved a lot over the last four years. We've expanded into the AI game and released a product called Dash, an AI-powered, universal search tool that runs on connectors and aggregates your team’s data into one view.

With Dropbox being a storage platform, it's been a big problem introducing the product to our customers and the general market.

Because it's an AI product, it has introduced a longer sales cycle. We kept asking ourselves how we could shorten that for our smaller team.

To address these challenges, we developed three strategic approaches to interactive demos:

1. Product Tours

We created comprehensive product tours that offer flexibility to prospects. We wanted to show different aspects of the product, so we created a choose-your-own-adventure, using the checklist to create a full product tour.

These tours have been particularly valuable given the complexity of our demo environment. It takes a while to get that demo environment going, so once it was built, we decided to create this tour and start leveraging it immediately.

Whenever the product is updated, we can update the screenshots in the demo. So, the demo is actually evolving as the product is.

2. Event-Based Demos

Our interactive demos have become an essential tool at conferences and industry events. Our product marketing team has been using these demos to create QR codes at our booths and display them on flyers, note cards, and other similar items. We also leverage mobile support, so customers or attendees can walk by, take a picture, and view that demo on their phone.

3. Persona-Based Demos

Our understanding of use cases has matured, so we've created more specialized demos. Now that we've been talking to customers more, learning more about use cases, who's using it more internally, our sales reps can identify where those workflows lie, and we can pick and choose these demos to target those people.

If they identify that they are working with our marketing persona, for example, they can grab that demo and send it to them.

The product tour has been incredibly successful from day one. It took off like wildfire:

• Over 280 unique demo visitors in the last 30 days
• Dramatic reduction in repetitive, generic live demos, freeing up time for the SE team to focus on complex enterprise deals
• Faster sales cycles as prospects get hands-on with Dash earlier and better understand its value
• Broader demo distribution across field marketing and events through mobile-optimized experiences

1. Start with the self-guided path. Choose-your-own-adventure demos help prospects navigate complex tools at their own pace and surface the features they care about most.
2. Don’t wait for events to engage. QR codes and mobile-friendly flows extend the life of in-person touchpoints and give every event visitor a clear next step.
3. Use personas to personalize. Tailoring demos by use case or role increases relevance and improves demo-to-deal conversion.
4. Build once, update often. Because the Dash demo is based on screenshots, it’s quick to update as the product evolves - no full rebuild required.

For those curious about Dash itself, it's a central dashboard. If you have anything in Dropbox, OneDrive, or any other storage platform, Dash will take all those items and documents and put them into what we call Stacks, which are essentially collections. These Stacks can then be shared internally as well.

This content was adapted from a presentation by Jonathan Paredes, Solutions Consultant at Dropbox.