Riverbed Technology’s sales engineering team eliminated unreliable live demo environments. It scaled their capacity to support enterprise deals through interactive demos—achieving consistent messaging across a five-city global roadshow that directly generated new business.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is a leading provider of AI-powered IT operations and application performance optimization solutions. With headquarters in San Francisco and over 1,500 employees globally, Riverbed serves enterprise customers by delivering comprehensive visibility, intelligence, and control across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The company’s solutions span network performance monitoring, application acceleration, and digital experience optimization, helping organizations ensure optimal performance for critical business applications. Riverbed operates in the IT & AI ops industry, competing to serve large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees who demand reliable, high-performance connectivity across distributed workforces and cloud-first strategies.
Scenario
Riverbed Technology faced a critical challenge: selling to large enterprises required compelling, realistic demos that showcased their solutions’ impact on complex, enterprise-scale environments. However, their live demo environments contained inconsistent or unreliable data that was often irrelevant to prospect audiences. The teams struggled with data exposure and inaccuracies, spending more time maintaining demos than actually selling.
Limited sales engineering bandwidth meant the team couldn’t support every demo need at scale, while inconsistent storytelling led to mixed messaging across the sales organization. Engineers couldn’t confidently showcase product capabilities due to unreliable demo environments, and prospects were forced to imagine how the product would work rather than experiencing its value firsthand.
We sell to large enterprises, which means our demos need to be compelling, realistic, and believable. Before Walnut, we spent more time maintaining demos than actually selling.“
– Mark Robinson, Senior Director, Marketing Solutions Enablement, Riverbed
The situation reached a critical point when Riverbed needed to deliver consistent demonstrations across an international roadshow spanning five cities: London, New York, Paris, Sydney, and Texas. This high-stakes initiative required unified demo flow and messaging across all locations, consistent storytelling for diverse enterprise audiences, and reliable, repeatable experiences that could be delivered by different presenters without extensive local technical setup.
Riverbed required a consistent and repeatable demo experience for an upcoming international roadshow spanning five cities: London, New York, Paris, Sydney, and Austin, Texas. Ensuring a unified demo flow, message, and story across all locations was a top priority. This initiative required reliable, repeatable experiences that could be delivered by different team members without extensive local technical setup.
Sales engineers also faced credibility challenges when demo data didn’t align with the story they were trying to tell. This disconnect made it harder to establish trust and demonstrate deep understanding of enterprise challenges—a critical requirement when selling solutions that address mission-critical business functions where network performance or application availability issues directly impact revenue and employee productivity.
Solution
After evaluating multiple demo automation solutions, Riverbed chose Walnut for its comprehensive capabilities that exceeded their requirements. The platform offered data capture and editing capabilities that allowed for enterprise-scale scenarios, cross-screen personalization that could be tailored to enterprise buyers, an intuitive user experience with minimal learning curve, and reliable, realistic demo environments with enterprise-grade performance.
It was only Walnut, that really met all of our requirements and exceeded all of our requirements… And in all cases, Walnut did everything that we wanted and it did it in a way that was easy to consume and pick up and do just intuitively. So, it was a no brainer for us. Now, ultimately, Walnut wasn’t the
– Mark Robinson, Senior Director, Marketing Solutions Enablement, Riverbed
cheapest but it was head and shoulders the best.”
The implementation was seamless. Creating a demo in Walnut took minutes, not days, and the process was painless compared to maintaining live systems. Riverbed established a comprehensive library of enterprise scenarios covering their most common and high-impact use cases, with the sales manager taking responsibility for creating and maintaining these demos to ensure consistent quality and messaging.
Getting internal buy-in was easier than expected. Walnut empowered Riverbed’s sales engineers to deliver demos that still relied on their storytelling expertise but were far more compelling and repeatable. As one team member explained: ““It’s still the sales engineers’ skill that brings the demo to life, but now they have a powerful tool to ensure consistency and impact.”.
Sales engineers now deliver consistent, compelling demonstrations that showcase relevant capabilities without technical uncertainty. The reliability factor allows them to focus on prospect engagement and value communication rather than troubleshooting. The international roadshow leveraged Walnut’s consistency features to deliver unified messaging and demo experiences across five cities, ensuring professional presentation quality regardless of location or presenter.
Beyond customer-facing applications, internal teams began using Walnut demos to gather early feedback on products still in development, creating faster iteration cycles and more market-ready launches. Training programs incorporated Walnut demos to prepare teams for new product launches, ensuring consistent knowledge transfer and reducing time-to-productivity.
Results
Walnut transformed Riverbed’s enterprise buying experience with immediate, measurable impact. The roadshow demos led directly to new business, with higher prospect engagement and conversion rates. One customer saw a demo of a new product, and it resonated so well with their needs that after just a few questions, they placed an order.
The transformation extended beyond individual deals to operational efficiency and strategic capability:
- Minutes, not days to create enterprise-ready demos
- 5 cities
- with unified messaging across global roadshow
- 100%, consistency in product storytelling
Enterprise-tailored demo data with realistic scenarios now resonates with prospects in Riverbed’s ideal customer profile. Sales engineers provide accurate, compelling demos with fewer resources, increasing their capacity to support more prospects and opportunities. The team achieved faster product feedback loops, with internal teams providing input before product launch to accelerate development cycles.
Walnut lets us focus on demonstrating business value rather than just showcasing product features.”
– Mark Robinson, Senior Director, Marketing Solutions Enablement, Riverbed
This shift from feature-focused to value-focused demonstrations aligned with enterprise buying behaviors and decision-making processes, enabling more meaningful prospect conversations. Pre-launch internal enablement became more effective, with teams adequately trained on new products ahead of release using consistent demo experiences.
The sales team particularly values Walnut’s flexibility. As one team member noted: “My favorite part? The flexibility to change absolutely anything.” This adaptability allows Riverbed to quickly respond to changing market conditions, new product capabilities, and evolving customer needs without extensive technical overhead.
Today, Riverbed uses Walnut across multiple touchpoints: sales engineer calls for delivering reliable, compelling demos; roadshows for ensuring global demo consistency; product feedback loops for gathering early insights from internal teams; and internal enablement for training teams before products go live.
Most importantly, the platform enabled Riverbed to shift conversations from “here’s what our product does” to “here’s the business value you’ll realize”—a crucial distinction in enterprise sales environments where buyers need to justify significant technology investments to diverse stakeholder groups. The result is a more efficient sales process, stronger customer relationships, and a competitive advantage in a crowded market.
“Creating a demo in Walnut took minutes, not days. The process was painless, and the results were far more compelling than live systems.”
– Mark Robinson, Senior Director, Marketing Solutions Enablement, Riverbed
