How Enterprise SaaS Companies use Interactive Demos on their Website
Are SaaS companies keeping up with modern buyer best practices?
To find out, we partnered with Chili Piper to write our second B2B Buyer Best Practices Report.
In it, we took a deep dive into how the top 100 SaaS companies approached:
- Calendar scheduling
- Public pricing
- Interactive demos
For our dataset, we leveraged Peer Signal and defined “enterprise” as any company with over 1,000 employees. Here’s a breakdown of company size featured in the report:
Within SaaS, we found that the most common sub-industries using interactive demos were:
- Cybersecurity
- Customer Engagement
- Cloud Software
- Work Management / HR
- Fintech
And a third of the websites had an interactive demo, a 2x increase from last year.
In this article, we’ll explain exactly how these enterprise SaaS companies implement interactive demos on their website.
Top Ways to Deploy Interactive Demos on Enterprise SaaS Websites
Below, we share four distinct patterns we saw among top SaaS companies and share examples to show how these strategies work in action.
Interactive Demo Placement
When you think of places to put an interactive demo on a website, the homepage likely comes to mind. And many SaaS companies include an interactive demo on their main page.
But the most popular place to deploy interactive demos is on product pages. 41% of top SaaS companies add an interactive demo to a specific product page, while 31% add one to the navbar or home page.
A fairly significant percentage — 28% — put their demos somewhere else entirely: a dedicated demo center.
Demo centers contain multiple demos, allowing prospects and customers to filter for the specific use cases or features they’re most keen on seeing in action.
Example Enterprise SaaS Website Interactive Demos
Example: F5
Category: Demo Center
F5 Distributed Cloud Services enables users to manage, secure, and deploy applications across multiple cloud environments.
Because the product has so many features, the marketing team created a demo center to help potential customers better understand what F5 can do and the value it could bring to their organization.
On the demo page, users can easily find the content they’re looking for — whether it pertains to the F5 web app, API protection, multi-cloud networking, or app performance.
Clicking on a particular use case takes them to a product-specific landing page that gives a brief description of what they’re about to see in the interactive demo.
From there, they can use the checklist to navigate to the parts of the demo that pique their interest most.
Example: Dropbox
Category: Overview
Dropbox, a popular cloud storage vendor, hosts its interactive demo on the resource pages of its website.
Going this route encourages prospects to explore all the features Dropbox has to offer — whenever it's convenient for them.
Upon clicking “Take a Tour,” visitors jump down the page to an interactive demo.
After providing basic contact information, users are guided through five simple steps that highlight the main benefits of the product.
Then, users get to pick and choose what they learn about next from a more comprehensive checklist.
Putting an interactive tour (containing multiple use cases) front and center gets users the information they need to make a decision about Dropbox faster.
Example: RingCentral
Category: Demo Center
RingCentral, a leading AI-powered communications solution, built a demo center to centralize its interactive demos and give users a choice as to the type of demo they want to see.
Before entering the demo center, users are asked to provide more information about their company and their role — information RingCentral reps can use to nurture leads later on.
Once visitors fill out the form, they can toggle the business communications tag to see a whole list of interactive demos, ranging from SMS to video calls to RingCentral integrations.
Upon clicking on a tour, visitors will go through a series of a few steps, showing them a high-level overview of each feature.
Storing all these demos in an accessible place keeps prospects engaged and gets them excited about incorporating RingCentral into their workflow.
Enterprises are Making Demos More Public on Their Websites
While product-specific pages are still the leading spot for interactive demos, today’s top SaaS companies are starting to make their interactive demos more public.
In the last year, the percentage of interactive demos on product-specific pages dropped dramatically — from 82% to 41%.
At the same time, there was an increase in interactive demos placed on overview pages and an uptick in demo centers.
These results indicate that marketing teams tend to try an interactive demo on a product page. Once they see success there, they create one all-encompassing demo that incorporates multiple product lines or create multiple demos highlighting specific features.
Our anecdotal customer feedback reflects that same trend.
Davide Bessi at Qonto points out, “We started with a high-level demo of the whole product, without a very detailed explanation of all the features. We put it on the website and we saw it worked.
From there, we decided to see how could scale it up and create a demo hub for it. We could then create more detailed demos that were shorter but more dense in the kind of information we give.”
Taking this incremental approach also increases comfort with interactive demos as a complement to book a demo forms — not a competitor.
Hilary Smith at JungleScout explains, “One of my fears was, are interactive demos going to cannibalize the demo traffic that we're already getting of people like coming in and filling in the forms?
But it actually resulted in higher quality across the board. People who were maybe lower intent got a feel for the complexity of the product. So it resulted in higher quality and didn't cannibalize our demo form.”
She continues to use interactive demos on the enterprise side, offering them as an alternative for those not quite ready to book a traditional demo but still wanting to get a feel for the product and see whether it fits their use case.
Demo Deployment Method
There are two main ways to add an interactive demo to your website:
- Embed them on a page
- Link out to them via a call-to-action button
Similar to last year, the majority of interactive demos, 83%, were linked out via CTA rather than embedded directly on a landing page.
This year’s embed versus CTA breakdown is similar to our analysis earlier this year. In our State of the Interactive Product Demo ‘24, 87% of demos were full-screen embeds linking from a CTA button.
If you’re considering doing the same, try riffing off of the most common language for interactive demo CTAs:
- “View Demo”
- “Take a Tour”
- “Start Demo”
Ungated vs. Gated Demos
We did notice a slight increase in gating compared to last year, but a majority of companies in our dataset ungated their demo.
Last year, 82% of interactive demos were featured on product pages. Because product page demos tend to be shorter and high-level, they’re less likely to be gated.
Navattic customer Remote is a good example of how bite-sized, product-specific interactive demos tend to be ungated.
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Rodney Rasmussen, notes, “Our primary use for interactive demos is on our website, particularly on different product pages. This allows us to showcase product details, appearances, usability, and highlight features and benefits at a high level, which is so nice.”
If visitors are interested in a deeper dive, the Remote team invites them to book a full demo and then collects their information.
Example: Remote
Remote’s website has separate landing pages for each element of its platform (Contractor Management, Remote Talent, HR Management, etc.).
On each of these landing pages, they invite users to either book a call or take a tour, guiding them through the ins and outs of that part of the product.
For example, on the Global Payroll page, an interactive demo gives visitors an in-depth view of exactly how they can run multi-country payroll, detailing how to handle reimbursements, incentives, and bonuses — in addition to country-specific taxes.
At the end of the demo, users are prompted to book a demo with the Remote sales team.
Bonus: How Enterprise Customers Use Interactive Demos for Sales + Product
We only looked at the website for this report. But we’ve also talked with a few enterprise customers about how they use interactive demos beyond the website and in their sales cycle.
Wayne Dakin, Solutions Architect at Dropbox, says that his team incorporates Navattic interactive demos in various ways throughout the sales motion — from engaging with potential customers to aiding in the onboarding process.
“We use interactive demo content across the organization from the sales-led process to onboarding. Recognizing that everyone learns differently, we leverage Navattic to create targeted demos.”
He continues, “Instead of lengthy videos, we can focus on specific functions or processes, allowing users to explore in a more digestible, chunked manner.”
On the product side of things, interactive demos are useful training and feature announcement tools.
Srijit Ghosh at Qonto embeds Navattic demos in monthly and quarterly newsletters, covering complex features they want to highlight.
“The goal is to walk the user through the feature and its main use cases, showing what it helps them accomplish and demonstrating how easy it is to use,” he says.
“It's very effective. Seeing it in action can be more impactful than reading through a block of text and trying to understand how it translates in the app.”
For more information on how top SaaS companies leverage interactive demos, check out our full B2B Buyer Best Practices Report.
And if you’re looking for ways to weave interactive demos into your go-to-market motion, we’ve got plenty of resources, like: