Once upon a time, B2B buying was simple.
Okay, maybe not simple, but definitely slower. Fast forward to today, and everything is moving at breakneck speed—leaving revenue leaders scrambling to keep up.
Your product should no longer be just one piece of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy—it needs to be the centerpiece.
Why? Because according to VML, 90% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C experience on your website—seamless, intuitive, and product-first. And as SaaS models become dominant, the user plays an increasingly important role. They want to organically explore the product, keeping marketing in the funnel for longer (Liz Urheim, former CMO, IBM for McKinsey).
Whether you’re running a product-led or sales-led motion, the product is the most powerful tool you have. And the only way to succeed in today’s market is to unlock its full potential.
That’s why we put this ultimate guide to product-led everything together. This isn’t just another framework—it’s a mindset shift.
We’ll show you how to weave your product into every aspect of your GTM motion, driving better alignment, smoother experiences, and faster growth.
Because in today’s B2B sales world, the product isn’t just part of the journey—it is the journey.
Background: Why B2B sales sucks
B2B sales feels like an uphill battle.
Sales teams are being asked to hit higher quotas than ever before, but many are falling short. In fact, according to ebsta and Pavilion, 69% of reps have missed quota in 2024.
Meanwhile, buyers are overwhelmed by a flood of marketing messages, making it nearly impossible to cut through the noise. With reduced workforces due to economic downturns and rising software prices straining tight budgets, companies face increased pressure to reduce or consolidate their tech stacks. With so much friction on both sides, it’s no surprise that buyers and sellers alike are frustrated.
Many buyers now prefer to avoid sales reps altogether. In fact, Gartner reported that 43% of B2B buyers opt for a rep-free experience—though many regret that decision later. When they skip engaging with sales teams, they often miss the chance to get clarity on whether a solution really fits their needs.
Our latest survey at Walnut reflects this shift. Nearly half of SaaS buyers (45%) told us that their last purchasing experience was more complicated than expected. They want answers early on—details about how the product works, whether it fits their needs, and how easy it is to use. But too often, they struggle to get that information upfront.
What’s the missing link? Sellers told us that better product assets—like interactive demos—would help them communicate value more effectively. Buyers aren’t avoiding sales teams because they don’t want help; they’re avoiding them because they’re overwhelmed and don’t see the value in engaging. When product insights are missing early on, the entire process drags out, leaving both buyers and sellers frustrated.
However, when given the opportunity to explore the product directly at every stage of the buying process, buyers gain clarity faster—leading to quicker conversations, reduced friction, and more closed deals.
The takeaway? Anchoring your GTM strategy around the product isn’t just a tactic—it’s a game changer that can allow you to break the vicious cycle that is B2B buying.
By delivering meaningful product interactions from the get-go, sellers can build trust, shorten cycles, and meet their goals, while buyers get exactly what they need to make informed decisions. Everybody wins.
How to leverage your product at each stage of the buying journey
In today’s cutthroat business environment, companies are constantly seeking innovative ways to gain a competitive advantage and improve GTM efficiency.
One strategy that’s gaining significant traction is the use of interactive demos.
According to research by Gartner, organizations implementing interactive demos have achieved remarkable results: a 10-fold increase in conversions from demo to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), a 450% surge in free trial sign-ups, a 28% reduction in customer acquisition costs, a 36% uptick in leads becoming qualified opportunities, double the close rates, and a 32% acceleration in deal velocity.
These figures aren’t just impressive—they highlight how transformative interactive demos can be for enhancing your sales funnel and propelling growth. They demonstrate the amplified reach and effectiveness that technology can bring to customer engagement strategies.
But here’s the crucial point to consider: While interactive demos are undeniably a powerful tool for driving product-led sales, technology itself is just that—a tool. A truly effective product-led go-to-market (GTM) approach isn’t defined by the technologies you employ. It’s about placing your product at the heart of everything you do, creating authentic value, and ensuring every interaction showcases the unique solutions and benefits your product offers.
With this in mind, we’ll break down how to incorporate your product into each and every stage of the sales funnel.
Awareness
Website product tour
By embedding product tours on your website or in your marketing materials, you help visitors explore key features and quickly warm up to your product.
Interactive product tours give prospects an early look at what your product can do, speeding up the sales process and increasing conversions. This early engagement means buyers are more eager when they meet your sales team.
Plus, using demo platforms (cough, cough, like Walnut) lets you track how prospects interact with your tours, improving lead qualification and guiding your sales talks.
Adding interactive tours to your site via a Playlist or demo center also keeps visitors around longer, grabbing their attention and giving your SEO a boost. More time spent on your site tells Google you’re an authority, which can help bump up your search rankings.
Looking for a little inspiration? Here are just a few Walnut customers that are leveraging us to build product tours.
Conferences and events
Successfully showing your product at marketing events and trade shows can be a challenge. TY spotty conference WiFi.
Not to mention, presenting the product live can lead to demo fails, unwanted data breaches, and more.
That’s where using interactive demos, and specifically ones that can be accessed offline can come in handy.
With offline demos, you can impress your buyers and quickly direct them to the “aha!” moment for your product.
This way, your GTM team can demo with confidence that no bugs will interrupt and that no personal data will accidentally be shared.
Email marketing campaigns
With an interactive demo platform, you can include product demos directly in your email marketing campaigns, letting your prospects dive into your product with just a click.
This means they don’t have to wait for a demo call to see what you offer—they can get hands-on right from their inbox. It’s a great way to keep the sales process smooth and nurture leads effectively throughout their journey.
Review site product tours
Pop an interactive demo right onto your G2 or TrustRadius review page to showcase your product and snag leads instantly.
Standing out on review sites isn’t easy these days, but by adding a product tour, you can rise above the competition and capture those leads when they’re most interested.
Education
RFP response
Imagine this: you’re a SaaS vendor, and a prospect sends you an RFP/RFI—a big questionnaire to see if you can meet their needs.
Instead of just filling it out with a wall of text, why not show them the value directly with interactive demos?
By letting buyers experience your product firsthand, you quickly find out what features they actually care about, which speeds up your response and makes it way more relevant.
The outcome? You improve the quality of your RFP response and stand out from the competition.
Pre-call warm up demos
One of the simplest yet most commonly overlooked opportunities to better leverage your product is right before the initial sales call.
We refer to this as a “pre-call warm-up.”
Think about the automated or AE-driven email sent to someone who has a call scheduled with an SDR or an AE. So, ask yourself, how can we showcase our product during this stage of the buying process?
This is where implementing interactive demos can give you an edge. By addressing specific pain points and showcasing how your product can provide value before the call, SDRs can expedite the decision-making process and drive conversions.
Take our own inbound motion for instance.
In this pre-meeting phase, we created an optional form and demo playlist that prospects could engage with. In the first 30 days after implementing these two process changes in our inbound flow, we saw 66% of inbound leads completed the optional form. In addition, we noticed an 8% increase in our MQL to SQL conversion rate and an 11% boost in our conversion rate from SQL to closed/won.
These two changes were relatively minor, but improvements like these can add up significantly—simply by finding a couple of straightforward ways to put your buyers in the driver’s seat and give them access to more of the right information earlier in the buying process.
Check out the pre-call playlist we used.
Live demo
Imagine the traditional demo—now automated, easily personalized, and scalable across your entire team.
A great live demo doesn’t just impress your prospects. It also allows you to present your business case and link your discovery insights to practical solutions your product offers for their challenges.
Share real-world examples of how your product addresses customer issues and delivers meaningful business outcomes. Demonstrate your product in action and educate your buyers. This helps them visualize exactly what they’ll experience with the actual product once they decide to make a purchase.
Selection
Post-call leave behind
Using interactive demos in post-call emails can really boost the sales team’s communication game, shorten the time it takes to move prospects to the next step, and improve results throughout the sales cycle.
Interactive demos let you share the most relevant details with prospects in a hands-on way.
By highlighting how your product tackles the specific challenges mentioned during the call, sales reps can speed up decision-making and drive more conversions.
Better multi-threading for complex GTM teams
Depending on the level of complexity of your GTM motion, you most likely have various personas and stakeholders involved in most of your deals. Some of those stakeholders may be directly engaged with your GTM team, but many of them may not be.
Interactive demos and product-focused playlists are a powerful way to be able to share custom content with relevant stakeholders, whether they are talking to your seller or not. As you progress through the sales cycle, imagine being able to showcase exactly what parts of your product are most relevant to each individual buyer.
Then imagine not only being able to tailor those demos and product tours to each individual buyer, but also having insights regarding which demos were reviewed, engaged with, or even shared.
Onboarding and adoption
New client onboarding
You might be closing tons of deals, but if your customer onboarding falls flat, it doesn’t really add up to much.
Great onboarding should offer your customers a friendly and realistic way to explore your product. That’s where interactive product tutorials can be a game-changer.
By showcasing your product, you can step up your onboarding by creating engaging walkthroughs and tutorials for your clients.
This makes it super easy for users to navigate your platform, which can boost product adoption. Plus, if you use interactive tutorials, you can gather valuable insights on how customers interact with your onboarding materials to keep improving the process moving forward. By analyzing these interactions, you can also gain a better understanding of user workflows within your product, helping you to tailor future updates to fit their needs seamlessly.
Feature releases
Boost feature exposure and awareness, user engagement, and retention by showing exactly what the feature does, how it works, and the value they can get from it.
Don’t just tell users how your new feature works—show them! There’s no better way to learn than seeing exactly how it works and how it helps them.
Partner with your product team to make creating a Walnut demo a core part of your commercialization and release process for new features, ensuring a seamless launch and maximizing user adoption. You can also distribute these demos using a Playlist.
Knowledge base
Think of your knowledge base as the go-to spot for helping your customers get to know your product, understand how it works, and stay in the loop on new features. Many businesses lean on their knowledge base to help users onboard and learn on their own.
But instead of static screenshots or videos, interactive demos take it up a notch by letting users learn by actually doing. This hands-on approach helps customers explore products and features directly, making the learning curve way smoother.
These demos in your help center can be anything from how-to guides and training sessions to best practices or specific use cases. Plus, they’re great for showcasing the value of other products, packages, or services to current customers — maybe even encouraging an upgrade!
Another huge benefit? They can highlight new features to drive adoption, while also cutting down on the need for support teams to handle individual questions and tickets.
Advocacy and growth
Expansion sales
Being product-led can be a powerful tool for driving expansion sales, particularly for multi-product, multi-SKU companies that sell add-ons, such as ZoomInfo, Gong, Zendesk, or marketing automation tools.
In these environments, clients often start with a single product on a basic plan, leaving a substantial opportunity for upselling. Account managers, customer success managers, and AEs can use Walnut’s interactive demos to create personalized, impactful email campaigns that show existing clients how additional paid add-ons can drive more value.
This approach not only educates clients on the benefits of a broader product suite, but also opens up meaningful expansion sales conversations, making it easier for sales teams to highlight the tangible benefits of scaling their investment with add-on products.
Internal GTM enablement
Give your team the practical know-how they need by using a demo to show off all the ins and outs of your product and its features.
Don’t just tell your team how your product works—show them! There’s no better way to learn than seeing exactly how it operates.
Use a demo to give your team hands-on experience, showing them the best ways to use the product and how it helps different businesses. Train them on multiple use cases, personas, segments, and solutions. This will allow you and your team to guide conversations around specific narratives for each audience.
Channel enablement
Working with resellers has its ups and downs—you get more people selling your product, but less control over the sales process.
To get the best out of your channel sales partners, you need to support them so they can sell your solution effectively. An interactive demo can help big time.
Five ways to use interactive demos with your channel partners:
- Train them easily: It’s hard enough to train your own sellers, let alone training partners. Make your product the easiest to sell by giving reps interactive demos and walkthroughs. They’ll learn the ins and outs without getting overloaded.
- Keep them in the loop: Use demos to update them on new features and changes, so they’re always up-to-date.
- Support them anytime: Provide resources they can access whenever they need, so they don’t have to wait for answers.
- Get valuable insights: Use analytics from demos to see how partners are performing and how customers are engaging.
- Speed up the buying process: Equip partners with demos that customers can access instantly, making the buying experience smoother without endless meetings.
- Stand out from the crowd: Partners have a lot of options. So, give them the easy sale by equipping them with interactive demos that showcase exactly how your product stands out, making it clear why it’s the best choice over competitors they may also represent.
By using interactive demos, you can strengthen your partnership with resellers and get better results all around.
The future of B2B sales is product-led
Going product-led isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have.
Interactive demos, product tours, and hands-on experiences give buyers the transparency they need and equip sellers with the tools to drive engagement, build trust, and close deals faster.
By making your product the star, you’re doing more than meeting modern buyer expectations—you’re exceeding them.
When your product takes center stage in your GTM strategy, every interaction turns into an opportunity to connect, educate, and convert. Sales cycles get shorter, conversations flow easier, and your team hits their goals without the usual grind. In the end, a product-led mindset brings real wins for both sides.
By letting your product lead the way, you’ll be able to turn the buyer journey into a smooth, impactful experience that creates wins for you and real value for your customers.
