In our Customer Show + Tell series, we highlight how Navattic customers solve real business challenges through interactive demos.

At a recent user event, Billy McDiarmid, VP of Customer Engineering at Red Sift, shared how his team narrows every demo down to a single high-impact use case, chosen from real customer discovery, cutting through hundreds of product use cases to keep prospects focused and demos closing deals.

• Built a qualified sales pipeline through targeted, customer-specific demos.
• Won deals with major clients and secured partner agreements.
• Cut proof-of-concept setup time by building each demo around one high-impact use case instead of the full product.

Red Sift, a London-based cybersecurity company, sells four products covering hundreds of use cases. One product alone has 437.

"Sometimes I feel like our team and our customers just get completely lost in the number of use cases we actually have. One of our products has got 437 use cases inside of it. But the problem we solve is often very, very simple."

Billy McDiarmid, VP of Customer Engineering at Red Sift, sums up the paradox at the center of Red Sift's demos: the products are complicated, but the value they deliver, keeping a customer's web and email assets safe, is simple to explain. Showing that value got complicated fast. Screenshots and Zoom calls couldn't capture the detail prospects needed, and customers lost interest before reps got there. "Screenshots just lack color," Billy says. "They don't give the detail that's required."

The fix wasn't a better slide deck. It was showing less, on purpose.

Red Sift's process starts before the demo ever gets built.

Find the killer use case. During discovery, reps fill out a "situation slide" documenting the customer's specific need and the value they're expecting. Billy describes it as a document that "in one page really nails down what the customer wants to see at the next stage of the process."

That slide becomes the brief for the demo. "I really do try and stick to one single impact point," Billy says, "and keep it under 10 steps," built to hold attention instead of covering everything the product can do.

Fix weak discovery on the call. When discovery falls short before a demo, reps don't wing it.

"What I tend to do is reserve about 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of the second call just to do some further discovery," Billy explains. "I'll show another demo, one use case from another customer, just to get them thinking about that quantification."

Build the demo to match. After discovery, Red Sift sketches the workflow that resonated most, then builds it in Navattic around that exact use case, with the customer's own data where possible. A recent demo for a large US financial services organization focused on one problem: preventing domain takeover of web assets, a specific risk for financial services companies.

"It's a use case that stops their website domain names and subdomains being taken over by bad actors," Billy says. "Being financial services, it's a really important use case, and it really resonated on the first demo call."

This discipline matters most to the value Red Sift promises customers, especially under pressure from within the company to inflate it. Billy puts it:

"I don't like to put numbers and facts into my customer's mouth. I want to take the information that they give me and use that to come up with a value."

That value comes straight from discovery and is validated before it ever reaches a demo. Billy sends the completed situation slide to the customer ahead of time: "I'll start the demo with this. If there's anything that's incorrect, can you tell me before the demo?" That step keeps customer expectations aligned with what the product will actually deliver, so there's no gap to close later in the proof-of-concept or implementation phase.

A pipeline built on relevance, not reach. This use-case-first approach has helped grow a qualified pipeline.

Deals that actually close. "It's landing quite well," Billy says. "It won us a couple of large enterprise deals and a partner agreement.”

Less time lost to setup. A basic proof of concept used to take Billy roughly four hours to set up, before accounting for check-ins and resourcing. Scoping each demo to one use case instead of the full product cuts that time down.

Sharper outside of sales, too. Red Sift uses the same focused approach in analyst presentations. "Focusing on one use case means we're not getting into the weeds," Billy says. "We're just cutting out the noise."

Billy sees room to bring AI agents into the process next. "My hope would be that we'll be able to get the agents to handle a lot of the complexity that comes from the volume of use cases we actually have," he says, "and probably get us a better quality of discovery that my team can then actually deal with."

He's also considering agents for post-sale work, such as automated quarterly business reviews and self-serve knowledge bases for implementation.

• A complex product doesn't need a complex demo. It needs one use case, chosen on purpose.
• Weak discovery doesn't have to sink a deal. Example demos from similar customers can surface a prospect's priorities live, on the call.
• Real numbers, validated before the demo, protect trust later in the deal.
• The same focus that wins deals works in analyst briefings and any setting where attention is scarce.

Red Sift didn't simplify its product. It simplified what it shows. By choosing one high-impact use case per customer and grounding every demo in real discovery, they turned a 437-use-case portfolio into a pipeline built on relevance, not reach.

Start with your customer's single biggest pain point, and build your next demo around that alone.