We see you Sales Engineers, creating custom demos, supporting sales teams, and managing requests from various departments. We know it’s a tough job and your heavy workload can lead to demo bottlenecks, slowing down the sales process. A lot of that came out in our Presales Demo and Workflow Trends report earlier this year where we saw a lot of opportunities for streamlining presales workflows.
Streamlining presales processes through smart, thoughtful use of technology can help teams avoid demo bottlenecks while keeping quality high. The key is finding the right balance between speed and personalization.
Key Results When You Scale Presales Demos
Using interactive demo platforms brings real benefits to your team, company, and presales process. Here are the main outcomes you can expect:
- Less Time Spent on Prep Work: Cut demo preparation time by hours. This gives you more time for important strategic work.
- Better Pilot Success Rates: Interactive demos engage prospects better than boring slide presentations. This leads to more successful pilots.
- Happier Sales Engineers: Remove pressure from your SE team. Streamlining presales processes helps prevent burnout and keeps morale high.
- Better Team Work: Create stronger partnerships between SEs and sales reps. Everyone feels more confident contributing to the process.
- Clear Brand Messages: Keep your messaging consistent across all demos. Every presentation shows your product in the best light.
Finding the Right Balance Between Speed and Personal Touch
At Walnut, we wholeheartedly believe the secret to streamlining presales is balancing speed with personalization. Sales engineers need to work fast while still making each prospect feel that their pain is heard, understood, and acknowledged. Interactive demo tools help achieve this balance by allowing quick changes without losing quality.
Use Variables for Speed and Personalization
For example, Walnut helps you create super personalized demos without a lot of extra work by using “variables.” Think of it like this: instead of making a brand new demo for every single person, you create one main template.
Then, Walnut can automatically pull in details like a prospect’s name, company, or even their logo directly from your CRM, email list, or lead forms. This means you can quickly swap out these little bits of information on the fly, making each demo feel custom-made for the viewer, even if you’re embedding it on a website or sending it out in a marketing email. It’s all about making your prospects feel seen and understood, without all the tedious manual customization.
Keeping the Message Consistent with Templates
Beyond just using variables, Walnut also supports your presales process by letting you create and reuse demo templates. Imagine you’ve built an amazing demo that perfectly highlights a specific feature or workflow. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you can save that as a template.
This means your sales engineers can quickly grab a pre-built foundation, saving tons of prep time. You can even mix and match screens from different templates to create a truly unique demo without reinventing the wheel.
Plus, Walnut allows you to easily collaborate on these templates with your team, ensuring everyone is on the same page and delivering consistent, high-quality messages that truly resonate with prospects. It’s all about working smarter, not harder, to keep your demos looking polished and professional every time.
When sales engineers adopt strategic thinking about balancing speed and personalization, they preserve energy while delivering powerful presentations. With the right tools and methods, SEs can handle their demanding role with confidence and efficiency.
Give Sales Teams Self-Service Options
Sales Engineers are often swamped with demo requests, but Walnut helps them empower sales teams to handle many of these requests themselves. For example, SEs can create a library of reusable demo templates, covering common use cases or product features.
This means sales reps can quickly grab a pre-built demo and personalize it on the fly using “variables” for things like a prospect’s name or company logo, without needing the SE to build a new demo from scratch every time. This frees up SEs to focus on more complex, strategic deals and helps sales teams keep momentum in their sales cycles.
Plus, Walnut allows for easy collaboration on these templates, ensuring consistent messaging across all demos, which also helps sales reps feel more confident. It’s all about giving sales the tools to showcase the product effectively and efficiently, making everyone’s job a bit easier and more productive.
This approach not only saves time but also increases efficiency in presales work. Sales engineers can focus on strategic activities rather than getting stuck doing the same tasks over and over. By adding self-service options to their workflow, sales teams can scale their presales efforts without burning out their SEs.
Using Automation to Help Sales Engineers
Between creating personalized demos, supporting sales teams, and handling unexpected requests, many SEs end up feeling burnt out. Automation helps solve this problem.
One of the coolest ways Walnut helps streamline presales processes and makes life easier for both Sales Engineers and sales reps is by letting them create super personalized demos directly from Salesforce. Think about it: you’re already spending a ton of time in Salesforce, managing accounts, and prepping for calls. Instead of jumping to another tool or asking an SE to build a demo from scratch, you can literally be looking at a prospect’s account in Salesforce, click a button, and boom – Walnut pulls in all the relevant details.
This means you can instantly generate a demo that’s already populated with the prospect’s name, company, industry, or even specific data points from their Salesforce record. It’s like having a magic wand that transforms a generic demo into one that feels tailor-made, all without leaving your main workspace.
For SEs, this is a huge time-saver because they can set up these integrated templates once, and then sales reps can confidently create personalized demos on the fly, keeping the sales process moving and prospects feeling truly understood. No more copy-pasting or manual data entry – just seamless, personalized demos, right when you need them.
Streamlining presales through automated tools benefits the entire organization, not just individual SEs. Companies can deliver a more consistent and effective sales process across all teams. This improves customer satisfaction and ensures that time and resources are used wisely.
Moving Forward with Streamlined Presales Process
Investing in technology that supports growth and enhances productivity is essential for maintaining quality in presales while keeping efficiency front and center. Sales engineers who focus on streamlining your presales process can navigate challenges with ease and continue delivering excellent results without sacrificing their well-being.
The path forward involves choosing the right interactive demo tools, setting clear processes, and empowering teams with self-service options. When companies avoid demo bottlenecks through strategic planning and smart technology, they create better outcomes for sales engineers, sales teams, and customers alike.
Ready to streamline presales and transform your demo process? Discover how Walnut can help you save time, empower your sales team, and close more deals.
Get started with Walnut today and experience the difference.
