Five Ways Interactive Demos Increase Demo Requests
Head of Growth & Product Marketing
The last thing buyers want to do is invest their time in a live demo for a product they ultimately realize won’t fit their use case.
The copy, images, and social proof on your website can help paint the picture of how your product works and who has benefited from using it. But the best vote of confidence you can give them is access to your product.
Interactive demos show prospects exactly how your product works, looks, and feels — without requiring them to talk to sales or sign up for a free trial. Often, that hands-on teaser is the nudge they need to request a live demo.
But there’s an art and science to making your demo convincing. Below, we break down how top SaaS teams drive demo requests, backed by data from Navattic.
Read on to learn more about why boosting demo requests matters, or use these links to jump straight to specific tactics:
- Design your demo to pre-qualify buyers
- Embed demos on high-intent pages
- Ditch the gate — at least at the start
- Use demo analytics to prioritize outreach
- Make demo content persona-specific
Why a Better Buyer Experience Matters for Demo Requests
Today’s buyers expect to see your product before they ever sign up for a live demo. And when they do sign up for a live demo, they expect to hear from your team right away.
Yet, in our 2025 Buyer First Best Practices Report, we found that many B2B companies donn’t cater to those buyers. Here’s what we heard from top marketing voices
Isaac Ware, AI Demand & ABM at UserGems, notes, “Calendars are huge for me. I have never fully understood why people don’t always just send a calendar link immediately. As soon as somebody is like, ‘Well, send me what times you’re available,’ I’m like, I really don’t want to do that. Take a look at my calendar. I don’t want to have to deal with emails in between me requesting the demo and actually being on the demo.”
Jenny Narod, Director at Samsara shares, “I dread so many demo calls because I know I’m going to be hammered with questions. Reps are just getting value out of me — I won’t get what I want until we schedule a follow-up. But I wish I could get that second call material on the first call, so I can explore the product myself. So I would put interactive demos first.”
Unfortunately, these companies are missing out on opportunities to convert more leads faster.
Calendar schedulers would avoid endless back-and-forth. Interactive demos would let users see their products right away, piquing prospects’ interest while giving sales teams some buffer time to get in touch.
Coupa is an excellent example of a company using interactive demos to accelerate the enterprise sales process. Before Navattic, prospective customers had to wait 2-3 weeks to get a demo and even longer to get a test drive.
“Interactive demos have proven to be a much more efficient way to communicate the key features and benefits of Coupa,” the team notes.
Case in point: “Our Navattic interactive demos helped influence over $10M of ARR.”
Five Ways to Increase Demo Requests
1. Use Interactive Demos to Pre-Qualify Buyers
When a prospect takes the time to go through your interactive demo, there’s a high chance they’re interested in your product — and therefore worth your sales team’s time.
According to our 2025 State of the Interactive Product Demo Report, the top 1% of demos have:
- An 84.4% engagement rate. For every 10 users exposed to the demo, 8 of them are invested enough to progress past step 1.
A 54.0% click-through rate. That means over half of prospects click on a CTA to an external link, such as a book a demo form or another interactive demo.
Prioritizing these high-intent demo visitors can make your sales process much more efficient, focusing your sales team on the users who truly matter. Take SwipedOn, for example.
Although the team still uses videos and stylized elements for product marketing, they are finding that interactive demos are ‘much better for qualifying leads at the top of the funnel.’
“By providing an in-depth demo that covers three different product areas, we’re able to educate prospects and help filter out poor-fit use cases. Prospects who book a sales demo after the product tour are often higher-intent and speed through the sales process.”
Insider, a cross-channel experience platform, has seen similar results from showcasing product value earlier in the buying journey.
“Rather than working through the setup and enablement process with a trial or sandbox, prospects can immediately jump into a product tour to start experiencing product value. This opens a bridge to build interest and excitement, but also qualifies and filters leads for our sales team to better lead conversations down the funnel.”
2. Place Demos Where Interest Is Highest
Your demo can be an excellent way to showcase your product, but your ideal customer may never see it if it’s buried on your website or in a company newsletter.
The most discoverable places to put your interactive demos are your:
- Homepage. This is the most popular spot to place interactive demos because it’s hard for prospects to miss. A digital marketing manager at Caddi shares: “The product tour is a key CTA on our homepage and has accounted for 17% of our website conversions so far this quarter.”
- Product page(s). If a visitor is on this page, they’re likely comparing your product to another vendor. An interactive demo can help tip the scale in your favor. 18.5% of the top 1% of demos place their interactive demos on product pages.
- Ad landing pages. Try retargeting website visits with an offer to try a product tour. Stan Rymkiewicz, Head of Growth at Default reports that “Pages with product tours convert about 25-35% higher on this flow, meaning I get cheaper CAC and more excited customers.”
- Pricing page. If someone is on your pricing page, they’re even further down the buyer funnel. Highlighting your product’s best features can emphasize the value prospects would gain from purchasing your software and encourage them to see it in action.
Navattic customer Klue takes a different approach — bundling all their interactive demos into a multi-use case “Demo Arena.”
On the demo center page, buyers can choose to go through a more high-level interactive demo of Klue or dive into an interactive demo tailored to their role.
Just 60 days post-launch, the Demo Arena drove over $550,000 in new pipeline.
Eric Holland at Klue explains: “Before, we didn’t really know who was engaging with our product. Now we know that 510 companies engaged with one of the tours in the Demo Arena in the first 60 days and that we could attribute over half a million dollars to it.”
Klue isn’t the only company to lean into demo centers. Our research shows 46.6% of the top 1% of demos appear on a demo center page.
Other tips
Ideally, your interactive demo should be above the fold to capture a prospect’s attention immediately. Our internal data shows that 73% of the top-performing demo CTAs were visible from either above the fold or the navbar — and the demos placed above the fold saw 3.5x more engagement.
You might also place it right next to a demo request CTA — that way, a potential customer doesn’t feel like they have to book time with sales to see something. They can explore your product independently before registering for a live demo.
Or you could use your interactive demo as a CTA in and of itself. 44.7% of the most popular interactive demos are embedded or used as CTAs on landing pages.
3. Remove Your Form Gate (or Delay It)
Though you want to gather as much data about potential customers as you can, form gates tend to disrupt the demo experience.
For that reason, most high-performing demos don’t require users to fill out a form — at least up front.
Our research shows that the majority of forms are placed in the middle of a demo, and these forms have a 9.7% higher engagement rate than forms placed at the beginning.
Let your product speak for itself, and then layer in CTA moments after users have had a chance to engage.
For more, read Should You Gate or Ungate Your Interactive Demo?
4. Route High-Intent Demo Viewers Automatically
Demo data can not only qualify leads, it can also help quantify their interest.
Demo click-through rates, completion rates — and especially the time users spend on each step — can tell you a lot about what prospects are looking for and how to frame your product in the best light possible.
Ramp, for example, ties demo engagement directly to pipeline impact. “Since launching Navattic, it’s been responsible for 15% of the leads on our website.”
We recommend using engagement data to route high-intent leads to sales faster through automation or predefined SDR workflows.
Sample plays to run based on demo data
- Route CTA button clicks to sales. Update a dedicated Slack channel when prospects click a “Book a Demo” CTA inside of your interactive demo so sales team members can follow up right away.
- Look for multiple visitors from the same account. Send alerts to Sales or CS when multiple people from the same company engage. This could signal some internal discussion or buying group activity.
- Send partial viewers marketing nurture campaigns. Not every demo visitor is ready to talk to sales — they may just be in the early stages of the buying cycle. Send lower-intent folks (people who viewed less than 50% of your demo) to targeted nurture tracks instead.
Want more inspiration? Check out Navattic’s Demo Data Playbooks.
5. Personalize Your Demo by Persona or Use Case
Different prospects get excited about different features. To cater to each buyer, we suggest creating variant demos for each use case or ideal customer profile (ICP).
This not only ensures prospects understand how your product works, but the value it presents to their unique workflows.
A good way to ensure those variant demos are seen by the right people is to create a demo center with filters to help users easily find the demos that cater to their role or use case.
The team at Athennian, for instance, built a gated demo center featuring demos tailored to specific use cases, personas, and customers across various industries.
“This allows visitors to browse our various options to choose the content that is most relevant for them,” their team notes.
That optionality has had a dramatic impact on their pipeline. “Our interactive, product-led initiatives now contribute to over 25% of our annual leads.”
Insider has seen the benefits of a demo center, too.
According to the team, its Navattic ‘Demo Hub’ has generated “1000s of high-intent leads” that enter the Insider sales cycle already familiar with the product and key use cases.
Buyers want to see your product first. Give them hands-on access — and pre-qualify them at scale — with Navattic.
Build your first demo for free.