How Planisware Uses Interactive Demos with a Global GTM Team

Planisware is an enterprise project portfolio management software used by huge teams around the world. It's a powerful, sophisticated tool. This means that it can do a ton, but it can also be a puzzle to communicate value with prospects who are looking around and wanting to understand what it does before speaking to sales. 

Ethan Collins is in the product marketing team at Planisware in the US. He moved to HowdyGo from screenshots, which were starting to feel limited for their tool. He’s built a library of interactive demos that the marketing team can use:

1. On the website
2. As a tool to equip sales reps
3. As a way to help customers get deeper into the product  

We talked to Ethan about the way their GTM team uses interactive demos, and the ways it ties to their global PMM team modernising and building a new narrative. 

Shifting away from screenshots 

Planisware moved to interactive demos because they wanted to move to self-service options for prospects and leads. This gave leads a different way into their funnel, and meant the GTM team had another tool in their belt besides videos and sales-led conversations. Their tool has a ton of depth and configurability, and screenshots were limiting the ways they could show people what it can do and really tell the story they wanted to tell.

"Our tool is very sophisticated. And with sophistication comes an overload of information about what the tool can do for you. Our goal was to create predefined demo flows that show the best and brightest of our tool without overcomplicating everything."

Ethan chose to use HowdyGo, and started with GIFs. Interactive demos were always on the roadmap but he needed internal buy-in first, and GIFs were an easy stepping stone.

"I was a huge advocate for HowdyGo from the beginning because I believed in the tool. I liked the fact that it was a small team, and Tom and Umberto were super friendly and really easy to talk to. I've had so many times where I've had issues and hopped on a call with Umberto and he helped me within an hour of reaching out."

When he got internal buy-in, adding interactive demos was really straightforward because he was already onboarded and solid with how HowdyGo works.

How a global GTM team uses interactive demos

Planisware uses HowdyGo in three main ways:

• A public demo library on their website where prospects can explore the product before booking a sales demo
• Sales enablement, with a repository of demos that reps can pull from to share individual demo links with prospects when they’re in active conversations
• Customer success: working with CSMs to show existing customers features and areas of the product that they aren't using yet

Gating or ungating demos on the website

Their main use case is interactive demos on the website. The goal is to use demos as a top of funnel tool to help prospects convert to sales calls. 

Planisware has opted to semi-gate interactive demos. This means that visitors can click through the first 6-8 steps of a demo before being asked to fill in their information to continue. The idea is that they show prospects enough of the product to create genuine interest before asking to fill in a form.

"We're confident that our tool is very powerful and high-value. If we can just show it to people in an attractive way, they will want to contact us to learn more."

How PMMs equip the sales team with interactive demos

Interactive demos are a sales enablement tool for Planisware. The marketing team builds a repository of demos, and the sales team can pull from them when they’re in active conversation with a prospect.

The sales team often comes to the marketing team and asks for demos that they think would be nice to have. And the good news is that the marketing team usually has that demo already built and can just share it with them. It’s seamless and makes it really easy for the marketing team to equip sales with what they need.

"I know they're using it because I see the amount of external shares out to people. When they're in contact with whoever they're talking to, if the prospect mentions they want to see some features, the sales rep can just go look at what we have and share it with them individually."

How they'll measure success

Planisware is still in the process of building out its demo library, and meaningful measurement is just starting to become possible now that the demos are properly surfaced in the site navigation and campaigns are driving traffic to them.

The primary metrics Ethan is focused on are conversions and demo requests, specifically how many visitors are engaging enough with the product to ask to speak to someone.

"It's about hoping that when they get halfway through the demo, they're intrigued enough by the product to want to put their information in."

The semi-gate is a key part of this flow, because visitors can start interacting with the demos and then click on the CTA (or not). No matter what the prospect does from there, Planisware has a meaningful intent signal from the people who do convert. They know that prospects who fill in the CTA form from the gate have seen enough of the product to want to speak to sales.

Demo engagement data then gives leading indicators that the team can track from the HowdyGo dashboard. This shows where people are dropping off, which demos are working well, and how people are moving through to the CTA stage.

"There's always a way to perfect a demo, whether by reducing steps, simplifying things, and so on. I'm confident that for what we're trying to sell, it's the right presentation."

How the numbers look so far

Rolling out interactive demos with global teams

The US team started using interactive demos, and global marketing teams are now taking those demos and adapting them to their needs. Teams in France and Germany are translating and tailoring demos for their regions, and teams in Eastern Asia are keen to do the same.

As Ethan built out the demo library and started sharing them internally, other regional marketing teams started reaching out and wanting demos for their audiences, too.

"Since having created more and more [demos] and sharing them with the rest of the organisation, a lot of the other regions' marketing teams have been pretty excited about what it could do. They've been creating localised versions in their own languages for their own individual pages."

The regional teams mostly work from existing demos, and tailor them by translating them or tweaking the steps with region-specific content.

Changing the narrative and modernizing product marketing

Interactive demos have helped Planisware to shift the narrative around their product and modernize their product marketing.

"We had a challenge of having a sophisticated tool that was sometimes deemed to be too hard to learn and to use. The challenge was, how can we change that narrative and modernize our product marketing approach? The tool and the output of creating demos has heavily contributed to being able to change that."

What's next for Planisware: sandboxes and attribution

The team are now looking at sandboxes as an option for trade shows and hosted events. The idea is that booth visitors can explore the product freely in a controlled environment, and can get a genuine feel for the tool without any risk of breaking things or exposing real/sensitive data.

Measurement and attribution are also growing as a priority.

The demo library on their site is now linked from a findable page in the main navigation, and campaigns are actively sending traffic to it. The goal is for demos to have a positive impact on engagement and conversions,  and Ethan is confident that more demos, more awareness, and more pushing will make that happen.