How Figure uses HowdyGo to demo their platform (without showing real financial data)

Figure is a fintech company that recently hit $1 billion in monthly volume. They went public in November and are growing fast. They have a strong internal sales team running daily sales calls, plus a large partner network of loan officers who interact with Figure's platform daily.

Alex Nichols is a trainer on Figure's sales success team. He’s also the company's "HowdyGo Guru."

We talked to Alex about how he and the sales team (and external partners) use interactive product demos and how they look at impact.

Showing prospects and customers Figure without showing real financial data

At Figure, the Engineering team works in (and manages) their test environment. They own it, and showing prospects the test environment in sales calls wasn’t feasible. Working with screenshots, PowerPoints, or videos was also not sustainable for the sales team. 

"I would do training or sales sessions and we wouldn't have an environment to show anything. So then I would go to PowerPoints with screenshots. It just was not effective."

Alex pitched interactive demo software to the leadership team, got sign-off, and chose HowdyGo. Now he, the sales team, and outside partners can use demos to show prospects and customers Figure’s platform. 

How a financial platform uses interactive demos

The Figure sales team largely owns and runs the demos (and shares them with outside partners). What makes their story particularly interesting is the breadth of how HowdyGo gets used. 

Demos for sales calls was expected. Demos led by external partners was a surprise

Figure’s sales team and CS teams use interactive demos a lot, but what was surprising to Alex (and us!) is that external partners request demos weekly. 

"Our partners want to be able to play around with our websites, but they can't put in dummy financial information. So they like to have HowdyGo there for different use cases depending on the partner."

One of Figure's partners started using HowdyGo in their call center so that agents could walk borrowers through the application process live on calls, using a branded demo instead of the real environment and real financial data.

"That really surprised me and my senior director. Partners are using HowdyGo not just to go through the demo, but in their call centre. Their loan officers can see what our environment's like as they're on calls with people."

Interactive demos are becoming more widely adopted for top-of-funnel marketing, sales enablement, and CS, but it’s interesting to see them being used as a live operational tool embedded into partner workflows.

Interactive demos and sandboxes can be a great way for sales teams to demo a product without worrying about breaking live environments or leaning on engineers

How Figure thinks about interactive demo impact

Direct revenue impact isn’t the main yardstick when Alex thinks about whether interactive demos are working for him and his team. Instead, they focus on signals around enablement for their sales team and partners. 

• Can the sales and training teams show exactly what they need, to whoever they need, without an engineer-managed demo environment failing them?
• Can they easily set up demos and personalize them for partners as they need them (weekly)? 
• Are people requesting demos and using them in their workflows?

They have sales calls every single day. They have training calls every single day across various teams and departments. They have partners running demos.

Everyone that runs one of those calls needs to be able to show the product and be able to demo effectively while meeting security requirements.

That's what HowdyGo allows them to do.

For Figure, interactive demos have fundamentally changed the way they're able to show their product.

What do the numbers look like?

Figure doesn't track demo impact in numbers, but there are some numbers that show how interactive demos are fitting into the workflows for the Figure sales teams and external partners.

For example:

Alex's advice to anyone starting with product demos

We asked Alex what he would tell anyone that was just getting started with product demos and wanted to get the most out of them. His response:

Get creative with it. That was my biggest learning when I initially started. I would record through our website as I would normally use it and I didn't touch too many of the tools. It took me a while to realize that I could strip the experience down and really create the focused demo that I wanted. Edit the text, remove things, and make it what it needed to be.

He also suggested thinking outside the box. Interactive demos are great for sales calls, but there's a ton more you can do with them beyond the traditional demo brief. They use HowdyGo for everything from onboarding flows to edited screenshots for resource materials (replacing what he previously needed Photoshop for).

What's next for Figure

Now that the internal team and partners are all on board, they're getting faster and faster with spinning up demos and personalizing them for different prospects and use cases. They're looking at Howdy AI to speed up the personalization process and let them take existing demos and adapt them for new (and existing) partners faster.