10 Ways to Boost Your Sales Efficiency With Walnut

Drip drip drip — this is your current flow of SaaS sales.

Sploooooooooosh — this is your potential one.

You probably don’t need us to tell you that splooshes are way better than drips. And not just because it’s way more fun to type.

But how can you turn your SaaS sales drips into splooshes of sales? Well, that can happen if you improve your sales efficiency.

What is sales efficiency?

For the sake of our overlords Google and our friendly-but-assertive SEO advisor, here’s a quick definition of the term “sales efficiency.” 

Sales efficiency is the act of closing as many deals as possible with the resources that are available to you. Which means that the more sales you make with less resources, the more efficient you are.

Here’s the sales efficiency formula: 

You can calculate your sales efficiency by taking your sales revenue and dividing it by the cost of making those sales.  

(sales revenue) / (cost of your sales)

What’s the difference between sales efficiency and sales effectiveness?

Ok, this section is not just to appease the Google algo or our SEO guy. This is a real question that we’ve been asked in the past and feel is useful to include.

Sales efficiency and sales effectiveness are often used interchangeably, but usually they refer to different things. Whereas sales efficiency measures the team’s overall sales output, sales effectiveness focuses on the sales team’s ability to handle their daily tasks effectively.

So, great sales efficiency means that your team can drive a lot of revenue with little resources, while great sales effectiveness means that your team is being productive, accomplishing their individual goals, and completing their necessary tasks. 

Therefore, if you have great sales effectiveness, you’ll eventually start seeing great sales efficiency as well. But if your sales effectiveness is lousy, your sales efficiency will suffer.

How to improve your team’s sales efficiency

Let’s get back to our dripping water analogy because it was fun writing the word “sploooosh”. Oh yeah, AND it’s also a useful metaphor.

Like we said, to turn your drip into a sploosh, you’ll need to boost your sales efficiency. And in order to do that, you’ll need to increase your sales revenue and decrease the cost of your sales. 

And in order to do THAT, you’ll have to read this list of ways to improve the way you sell.

1. Reduce friction with buyers

Not sure if you got the memo, but SaaS sales is a pain in the **** for buyers. (What? We said neck!)

So we want to help you make it better for your prospects by letting them actually try the product themselves before they buy. (Revolutionary stuff here.) Happier prospects means faster sales processes, which means less time and resources per sale. And this will improve your sales efficiency.

Think about your prospects and what they want from you. If they visit your website and are interested in what you offer, wouldn’t they want to understand how it works and see what it looks like? Especially if they click the CTA “See a Demo”. 

Showing your product right away makes it much easier for them to determine whether your product is the right solution for them at all. All you need to do is send prospects an interactive demo and let them play around with your product as if it’s the real thing.

Because who wants to sit through countless discovery calls before getting a chance to even see the product? Not you, not us, and definitely not your prospects. Cuz after all, #WeAreProspects too.

2. Focus on better leads

Not all leads are created equal. (We think this may be a direct quote from the U.S. Constitution.)

There are the leads who have no idea what you do but they happened to download your eBook, attend your webinar, or sign up for your blog newsletter. And then there are the ones who heard about your product from someone who is already loving it, did their research, and want to see a demo. 

If you embed an interactive product tour directly on your website, you can use it to drive leads (by making it gated), improve the quality of your leads, increase conversions, and speed up your sales process. Through your embedded Walnut demo, you can track how your site visitors engage with your product tour to gauge how interested they are in your product and what specific features interest them most.

You can then use this information to qualify leads, prioritize the more engaged ones, and personalize your communication with them to focus on their actual interests. 

Here’s what Contractbook’s Head of Global Revenue Operations had to say about their embedded Walnut:

“Our highest converting marketing leads come from interacting with our Walnut demo walkthrough on the site.”

Contractbook’s Head of Global Revenue Operations

Powerful stuff.

3. Simplify your demo creation and presentations 

“Ain’t nobody got time for that” is not just an internet meme. It’s also the slogan of most sales enablement teams out there.

That’s because many organizations spend loads of time and resources building sales demo environments, only for them to need constant updates and fixes from developers. Then, sales engineers are needed to run each live demo.

And honestly, it’s insanely costly and downright exhausting.

With Walnut, creating interactive demos is super easy. So easy that Walnut users save an average of one day per week on demo building. 

PLUS, because they’re so easy to run, sales reps can send them to prospects or present them live without needing an SE on every call. This frees up precious time for some of the most precious resources on your team.

Think of all the things they can do with that time!

4. Focus your demos on what matters 

Attention spans are shrinking. We know this because most of you haven’t even read this whole blog till here. At best you skimmed. Be honest.

Anyways, you need to take this into account when you build your demos and make sure you get straight to the point. 

Walnut lets you tell your product story in exactly the way you want to by skipping through the boring bits. Instead of creating an entire product replica, build a product demo that jumps over any clicks that aren’t absolutely crucial to showcasing your value.

The result will be shorter, more engaging demos that pack a much stronger punch.

5. Personalize demos in seconds  

Stop using generic names and company logos on your demos. 

Using a personalized demo shows your prospects that you prepared this demo just for them. It helps build trust that you did your research, understand them, and aren’t just giving the same generic demo you give everyone. And, if that wasn’t enough, it’s also way cooler.

By using an interactive demo platform like Walnut, sales reps can personalize their demos themselves in seconds. All they need to do is update the Demo Customization Wizard with all the prospect’s details and *poof* — the demo is personalized. Magic. This means faster time-to-value and quicker sales processes.

Improving time-to-value is something that Cato Networks’ VP of Marketing really appreciates about Walnut:

“Setting up a demo literally takes minutes and the time to value is just amazing. Our entire sales organization is over three hundred and fifty people, so we all benefit directly or indirectly from Walnut.”

Cato Networks’ VP of Marketing

6. Use AI to write scripts, emails, and more 

This wouldn’t be a blog written in 2023 if we didn’t mention ChatGPT at least once. 

So often you know what you want to say, you just don’t know the best way to write it. This is true when it comes to writing your demo scripts, guides, and even your emails.

So why not get a little help?

That’s why Walnut integrated with OpenAI to give your team the help they need with writing, editing, or simplifying their content throughout their sales process. The result is a cute little squirrel named Nutty who lives in your Walnut editor and loves to help.

7. Show how your product integrates with their other stack

If you really want splooshes of sales, you gotta be able to sell the experience when you demo.

That means that not only do you need to show your prospects the value your product can bring them, but you also want to show them how it can be incorporated into the stack they are already using.

This way, when you show them your interactive product demo, they’ll experience it exactly as they would when it’s part of their stack.

To do this with a demo platform like Walnut, simply capture the necessary screens they use in other products and add them to your product story. This’ll let you create a cross-platform product demo that more closely resembles the actual product experience.

8. Collect key insights on your demos  

The party isn’t over once the demo is done.

In fact, much of the party still hasn’t even begun. (Please excuse the accidental rhyme there.)

After you’ve shared your demo with your prospect (which can be either before or after the live demo itself), you need to evaluate how your prospect utilized the demo to gain key insights about this prospect in particular and your entire sales process in general.

You can do this by tracking which features are most interesting to your buyer and then focus the rest of your sales process on what actually matters to them. This alleviates the need to ask them a million discovery questions or bore them by talking about features they have no interest in.

Plus, you can also gauge the success of your sales process in general by continuously optimizing your demos based on these insights. 

9. Reach out to prospects when you’re top of mind 

Wouldn’t you love to know whenever your prospect is thinking about you and your solution? Wouldn’t you love to close more deals even faster? Wouldn’t you love a long all-expenses-paid vacation to the Virgin Islands?

Ok, well, we can only help you with the first two.

With a solution like Walnut, you can be notified via email or Slack when your prospect views or engages with your demo. This means you know exactly when your prospect is thinking about you.

And what better time to give your prospect a call and answer any concerns or handle objections than when they’re already checking out your product?

This’ll allow you to move the deal forward faster and move on to your next prospect.

10. Get scores on your demos automatically

How are you doing? No, how are you REALLY doing? 

Oh, we don’t mean emotionally. You’re in sales in 2023 so we’re pretty sure we know how you’re doing emotionally. We meant with regards to your sales process.

This is obviously a crucial thing to keep track of if you want splooshes of sales. Because by keeping track of your performance you can make sure to continuously optimize your work by eliminating or improving activities that aren’t beneficial and double down on those that are.

With an interactive demo platform like Walnut, you can avoid using low-converting demos and make each pitch a winner. How? Not by doing any extensive research, thankfully. Instead, you’ll get a simple score on each demo that tells you how it’s performing. 

A not-so-subtle push in the right direction

If you haven’t gotten the point yet, we really think that using an interactive demo platform like Walnut is the answer to your sales efficiency woes.

And even if you don’t have woes, Walnut can help you  improve what’s already working.

Showcasing your product in an engaging and interactive way is a powerful tool to significantly improve the quality of your entire go-to-market strategy—from marketing through sales and even into customer success.

Because even if the really impressive list we just mentioned hasn’t moved you, you have to admit that the word “splooooosh” is truly irresistible.

So what are you waiting for? Click that big “Get Started” button to (you guessed it) get started with Walnut.