The faster you can showcase the best parts of your product, the quicker you can set your company apart.

Here’s the problem: scheduling instant live demos or building demo videos takes time, money, and resources most GTM teams don’t have.

That’s why demo automation tools are becoming increasingly appealing.

If you can spin up a demo based on a previously created product video, landing page URL, or a natural language prompt, you scale your outreach and conversion much, much faster.

In this guide, we’ll explain more about what demo automation is, the efficiency it’s bringing to SE teams at top B2B SaaS companies, and how reps, SEs, and other sales team members can incorporate demo automation into their day-to-day.

Demo automation is a type of sales demo software that lets you capture your product once and turn it into:

• An interactive product demo so prospects can explore key features before or after a live sales call.
• A sandbox demo environment so SEs and reps can show your product on a live sales call without worrying about bugs, lag, or deviating too far from their sales script.

How Does Demo Automation Differ From Videos?

Videos are one way to show your product, but they’re not very dynamic, prospects aren’t able to actually get their hands dirty and see how your product works.

Most buyers know you’re only showing the best parts of your product in the video, which makes them skeptical before they even talk to your sales team.

Plus, videos expensive to make and expensive to update.

Demo automation is a quick, easy way to let your prospects explore your product without logging in – while still giving you full control over customization.

Most demo automation tools have AI assistants (Navattic, for example, has Copilot) that work behind the scenes as you build your demo, paying attention to the screens you capture, then writing demo copy, anchoring tooltips, and crafting a demo story for you.

Once your draft demo is built, you can use a natural language prompt or other AI features to make updates like:

• Magic Editor, which lets you edit and personalize specific elements, like text, charts, or tables.
• AI Up-to-Date, which uses AI Detection to find and mass replace old dates hiding in your Captures.

The whole process of developing demos is markedly faster than creating videos, and it gives your prospects a better sense of what your product is and how it works.

Demo automation tools fall into several distinct categories. Knowing what they are will help you find the solution that works best for you, your team, and your use cases.

Below, we review each one in detail. But if you’re short on time, this table serves as a TL;DR:

Traditional Sandboxes

Best for: Sales engineering, complex feature testing

Traditional sandboxes are live demo environments that AEs or SEs use to show a product in a real instance.

Live sandbox environments are a good fit if you:

• Want to give prospects a real POC with real data.
• Need a highly flexible, technical environment for prospect evaluation.
• Have a team with the engineering resources (and the time) to spin up and maintain multiple sandbox environments (you might have some with and without certain features, for example).

Best for: Companies that have very complex, technical, lengthy sales cycles where a CTO might demand to see and use a real instance of your product.

Sandbox Demos

Sandbox demos are simulated environments designed for live sales calls.

When sellers or SEs show a sandbox demo on a call, it seems like they are going through the product organically – but really, they’re moving through a curated environment.

This gives them:

• Full control over the story they’re trying to sell.
• A way to avoid bugs.
• The ability to present when there’s a deployment or other maintenance happening in their test instance.

Best for: Sales reps and presales teams who want to give a high-level overview of their product earlier in the sales cycle.

Interactive Demos

Interactive demos are a type of no-code sales demo software that gives prospects and customers a hands-on experience without ever having to log into your product.

Instead, they can click through a self-guided tour to get a sense of what your product can do and whether it will serve their use case.

Interactive demos are great for top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel content, like:

• Blogs
• Sales leave behinds
• Ads
• G2, TrustRadius, or SourceForge profiles

It’s so useful for product education that 18% of the top 5,000 B2B SaaS websites include an interactive demo CTA.

Check out our list of Top Use Cases for Interactive Demos for more inspiration.

Best for: Marketing teams, especially those working a PLG motion.

Demo Automation Tools

Demo automation tools help you build new interactive demos or sandbox demos fast.

Software like Launchpad lets SEs and product folks store multiple “approved” sandbox and interactive demos that sales teams can personalize with variables and intro videos for a live call or an email follow-up.

All they have to do is:

1. Open the extension.
2. Choose which demo(s) they want to share.

The system will automatically pull in the corresponding individual name, company name, role, and other prospect details.

On the backend, GTM teams can monitor:

• Who, on the internal team, is sending demos (via the Rep Activity dashboard)
• Who, on the buyer’s team, is opening those demos and how they’re engaging with them (via the Demo Activity Dashboard and Navattic Analytics)
• Which companies are converting after going through demos (via the CRM integration)

Best for: Cross-functional teams that want to scale their demo programs.

For a lot of SEs, every day feels like Groundhog Day.

Yes, there are some differences and nuances here and there. But for the most part, SEs are doing the same prep every single day:

Logging into the environment → seeding it with realistic data → double-checking integrations → rehearsing the flow

Do this 12 times a week, and SEs burn half their schedule before a single prospect sees value.

Here’s how sales engineering teams at fast-growing companies are increasingly using demo automation to reduce tedious work, expedite the sales cycle, and spend more time with prospects.

They Send Demos Ahead of Calls

Most discovery calls sound the same. SEs or sellers ask what the prospect cares about, and the prospect gives vague answers.

Haloo eliminated this awkward back-and-forth by creating a “monster demo,” which consists of multiple flows – one for each feature.

On the backend, Haloo’s reps monitor what the prospect is interested in so they can bring it up live.

“We distribute it to prospects before they meet with sales,” Emily Casaccio, Haloo’s Commercial Director, explains.

“In the sales call itself, we can say, ‘I see that you spent a lot of time looking at comprehensive search. I would love to talk to you about that.’”

They Remind Prospects to Go Through the Demo

Prospects aren’t spending their days thinking about your product or how they can prepare for a discovery call.

They’ve got so much else on their plate.

A gentle reminder to review your interactive demo before the call, or to share the demo link with their colleagues, is a welcome nudge and can help them feel a bit more assured going into a sales call.

Plus, it can help you tailor your call and identify who else on the buying team you need to research and cater to. Emily at Haloo shares:

“Navattic has increased our deal probability by empowering the prospects to learn about our products before they get to that sales call, and then weeding out the ones that weren’t our true ICP after the call.

Overall, demos decreased the length of the sales cycle because we can see, based on engagement with the post-call demo, which clients and prospects are actually interested and engaged.”

They Use AI for More Than Demo Creation

Mark Rida, Director of Solutions Engineering at Saviynt, recommends using AI for tasks beyond demo building.

Some examples include role-play, call transcript analysis – even integration development.

“A lot of my guys will lean on it for quickly building out an integration.

We have our own Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q internally that we've trained on everything from our documentation, our product schema, all of the pieces, our API layer.”

They Make Demos Self-Serve

One of the biggest SE bottlenecks is fielding basic AE requests.

Mark suggests thinking about how you can build collateral that sales can feel confident finding and reusing without you.

“The goal should be self-service or at least making sales self-sufficient. I don’t need my SEs spending time building out a deck because an AE doesn’t know how to use PowerPoint.”

Thankfully, demo automation tools make storing and sharing demos a breeze.

Mathieu Govoni, an AE at Productboard, points out, “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.”

Instead of bugging SEs to find the correct interactive demo to send, AEs can browse pre-call demos and drop them straight into prospect emails or LinkedIn DMs using a tool like Navattic’s Launchpad Chrome Extension.

SEs and reps aren’t the only ones who benefit from a tool like Launchpad.

At Dropbox, Navattic started as a solutions consulting tool but soon became a favorite across multiple teams.

“Different teams kept seeing our demos and asking, ‘Where are these coming from? Can we get involved?’

Now our demos are shared by sales, used by marketing at events, and even featured on review sites like G2 and TrustRadius. It's become a company-wide asset rather than just an SC resource.”

Want more tips? Here’s how other SEs are using Navattic to cut demo prep time, boost deal velocity, and increase win rates.

Demo automation tools are designed to make building demos easy. That being said, there are a few things you can do to scale your demos faster:

1. Create Templates

Chances are, most prospects care about the same 2-3 specific features or use cases.

Building “standard” demos for each of those and storing them in a demo library (like Launchpad):

• Makes it easy for GTM team members to know which one to send to which person (or highlight for a particular audience in marketing content).
• Makes it easy to customize. All a seller has to do is make a few tweaks and send it to a prospect.
• Makes your messaging more consistent. If everyone is working from the same few templates, you know every prospect is hearing, seeing, and reading the same things about your company.

2. Come Up With a Maintenance Strategy

In a fast-changing startup, demos can go stale quickly.

We recommend coordinating your demo updates with your product’s release cycle. That way, you’re showing off your most up-to-date features, UI, and UX.

To know at a glance which demos need to be updated and which don’t, we recommend implementing version naming, like “v3.0” or “Q4 Refresh.”

Remember to also archive old flows so no one uses the outdated ones.

Learn more about how to keep demos consistent and up to date.

3. Figure Out How You’ll Measure ROI

Before you go all-in on demo automation, take a minute to jot down:

• How long it takes team members to create sandboxes, interactive demos, and sandbox demos.
• Your engagement and conversion rates for each.
• Current pipeline impact
• Current sales cycle speed

Consider these numbers your benchmark.

A month or so into your demo automation journey, check back on these metrics to see just how much time and energy you’ve saved your team.

Showing these metrics to leadership can secure buy-in for that demo automation tool budget line item next quarter – or even an upgraded plan or seats.

Related: Check out our tips for measuring SE impact.

Curious how much time you can save with demo automation?

Book a customized demo of Launchpad today.