When you're learning how to drive a car, you don't sit in the passenger seat while the instructor shows you how cool and wonderful driving a car is. You drive the car and the instructor provides guidance as you learn.
Yet 99% of B2B sales demo have instructors who don't let us drive. They drive for us. They share their screen. They click the buttons. They jump from page to page. Next thing we know it's 30 minutes later and we leave our Zoom window without ever learning how to use the damn thing. And it's not even a 4,000 pound hunk of steel speeding at 55 mph!
The traditional B2B sales demo process is broken. We have learned, while refining our process over the past three years at Clay, that there is a better way to teach someone about your product.
We think of this as The Reverse Demo, which was critical in the early days of us building a self-serve product.
How B2B sales demos usually work
When we first launched Clay on Product Hunt in Feb 2022 we had hundreds of people interested. We did what all the other big software startups were doing—run a standard B2B demo. We looked at the waitlist, found people in our ICP and gave them a 30-minute presentation like a college professor teaching a Zoom class. Show off the product, hope they like it and set them loose.
The problem was that no one retained. We can't be sure why exactly. But most likely because no one was actually learning during the demo. Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience theory suggests that people retain significantly more information when they learn by doing rather than by listening.
We quickly realized there were a number of problems with the traditional B2B SaaS demo. Here's how they typically go:
- Someone who’s never used the product gets on a demo
- They watch someone who's great at the product use it for 30 minutes
- They think it’s impressive, but when they try to use it themselves, they get stuck
- As a result, they churn after they can't figure it out
This is especially true for a product that has flexible use cases. Where it's not a prescriptive tool and instead relies on the creativity of the end user, like ours did (and still does).
Similar to the Cone of Experience theory, I personally learn by doing, so I thought this may be similar for others. And this is what sparked the beginning of the Reverse Demo.
How the reverse demo works
Our Reverse Demo flow began by emailing someone before the meeting, asking them to come with a problem they wanted to solve. Typically these were data enrichment problems, which was our product niche in early 2022. Here were a few practical examples.
- A software company with an ICP of local businesses (ex salons in Phoenix, AZ) wanted to build lists for targeted outreach. They sent me their ICP in advance and we built a workflow live. By the end of the reverse demo, they had a list of all email addresses for local salons in Phoenix, along with personalized copy for outreach.
- A list of portfolio companies in private equity had similar target audiences, which all leveraged a similar Google Maps playbook. They'd start with Google Maps as a source in Clay and use Yelp to figure out when the business was opened by using "first review" as a proxy. The logic being more recent businesses would be open to buying technology when we found company owner and email.
- There were of course more simple flows, too. Such as helping a content newsletter business enrich company information such as headcount, location and revenue. Or helping a fintech business identify which companies were using specific payment processors. Or when a company had a certain number of open sales roles in EMEA.
The use cases were endless. But the critical nature was asking people to come prepared with a problem to solve in advance of the meeting. Of course, not everyone came prepared. But for those who did, the conversation was far more productive.
Once they were in the meeting, I’d ask them to share their screen. I’d give them a link to sign up for Clay live. I'd then use Zoom annotations feature showing them exactly where to click on the screen.
My goal on every reverse demo was simple: solve their stated problem within the 30 minutes (and try to blow their minds in the process).
Initially, it took multiple calls before they reached the "aha moment" where people realized how valuable Clay would be for them. As I got more practice, and ran into consistent stumbling blocks, it became possible within a single 30-minute call. Then within 20 minutes. Then when it took only 6 minutes into a Zoom call to get a reaction of "HOLY *&#@ THIS IS CRAZY!!" that's when we knew we were onto something.
Another objective was to build a product habit. As we solved their problem within 30 minutes, the next time they'd run into a similar problem in the future, our objective is they'd open Clay to solve it. Yes, our goal was to blow their minds and solve a problem, but more importantly it was to build the foundation of a new product habit.
We then built a little machine with our new Reverse Demo process. We’d get people on the waitlist, identify those who fit our ideal customer profile, and do a reverse demo to get them hooked. Rinse and repeat.
That said, even if people "got it" on the Reverse Demo and used the product themselves, they would inevitably still have questions. Which is why we funneled everyone into our shared Slack community at the end of every Reverse Demo call. Where I would have them continue to share their screen, open their account in Slack, and ask them to send me a message directly before they stopped their screen.
This was all to build the habit of, "so when you have a question after this call ends you can ask here and someone on our team will help you." Additionally, when we were asked a use case question in Slack, we would create a content video about it. This saved us time by sending people a video instead of re-answering the question again live in the future.
So can you accomplish all of this with a traditional B2B software sales demo? Maybe. Watching a race car driver drift around a corner is interesting. Doing it yourself is exhilarating.
Why the Reverse Demo was so valuable for us
The obvious benefit of the Reverse Demo was better customer conversion and retention. After 100+ Reverse Demos I was getting people to “a-ha” moments within just a few minutes and most would convert after that call alone.
But more valuable than short-term customers was how quickly the reverse demo helped us improve Clay as a product. There’s no tighter feedback loop than getting your ideal customers on the phone and watching them use the product for the first time. I can remember dozens of moments that, on a reverse demo, I noticed something—a bad piece of UX, bad copy, a bug—and then went to Eric Engoron on our software team and got a change shipped within the day.
This tight feedback loop between GTM and engineering was critical. I was getting a UX masterclass during the Reverse Demo as I saw the users try to make their way through the UI. I could treat it as a UX interview while doubling as sales call! When they couldn't find something on their own, I'd message Eric about it. When they clicked the wrong button, I'd ping Eric. Or when they got stuck halfway through the process trying to enrich someone's email, I'd tell Eric.
This feedback loop was foundational for our growth as we navigated product/market fit and evolved our GTM motion. We cover this product feedback loop in detail in this webinar with Reforge if you'd like to check that out.
Finally, this concept of a reverse demo has now carried over to our GTM engineering team which is led by Everett Berry. Where our team jumps on calls with GTM leads at Anthropic, OpenAI, Intercom and hundreds of other companies to build workflows together live on calls. We’re constantly refining this process to more effectively communicate Clay’s value to users.
Compared to the way software companies traditionally run demos, the benefits are obvious:
Deciding whether this would work for your startup
A common reaction to have after reading this essay might be, “We should go try this at our company!”
A simple heuristic for determining whether this is a good idea for your startup would be to ask if you can answer Yes to the following questions:
- Does our product have a genuine learning curve?
- Is it likely that at least some users are churning because of that learning curve?
- Is it reasonable to think we can show real value in less than 30 minutes?
- Is it reasonable to think we could guide someone to that value instead of doing it for them?
- Do we have a waitlist and/or are we able to be selective about who we run these demos for?
- Are there people on our team with the capacity and skillset to run these calls?
My disclaimer is that I think this worked well for Clay under a specific set of circumstances. We had a somewhat complex self-serve product, we had a bunch of demand and could afford to set a waitlist. This allowed us to be selective about who we did reverse demos with so we kept our feedback relatively constrained to those in our ICP.
We never planned to do a Reverse Demo. It was our failed attempts trying a traditional sales demo that forced us to try something new. It was simply the stepping stone we needed to move to the next hurdle as a company. The Reverse Demo was also quite helpful as we navigated product/market fit at Clay.
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