How Komo achieved a 30x increase in upsell requests

TLDR;

What Komo implemented with HowdyGo:

• Home page product demos for inbound prospects visiting their website .
• Email campaigns with interactive product demos.
• In-app product tours.

What Komo achieved with HowdyGo:

What does product marketing at Komo look like?

We sat down with Callum Whitley, Komo’s Product Marketing Manager to chat about how he uses HowdyGo’s interactive product demos to help prospects understand Komo.

“Komo is an engagement OS - so what that means is we actually allow our customers to very quickly create interactive experiences whether that be games, competitions, trivia, polls. Whatever it is they can do that very quickly and they ship that to the world and as a result they’re able to engage customers, very easily and non-intrusively capture their zero and first party data and off the back of that engagement, build long term loyalty.”

“As product marketing manager at Komo I’m leading the product marketing efforts there. So I’m very focused on actually bringing products to market, enabling our teams to understand them and sell them, as well as educating the market on what it is we do and the value that we offer.”

The challenge and the opportunity

Callum and the team at Komo have always viewed their product as a powerful component in their go-to-market strategy. 

But delivering one-to-one product demos at scale presents a number of challenges.

Availability

The sales team only has limited time and availability. So finding a way to self-educate prospects on the product was important to creating a scalable go-to-market function at Komo.

“You've only got a certain number of sales people and hours in the day. So you can only talk to this number of people or prospects in a given time.”

Self-serve automated sales demos using interactive demos was the perfect solution.

"When the sales team saw what was possible, they got really excited."

Consistency

When you're delivering demos directly through calls, it's difficult to get consistency with the right message and positioning.

“Something that will resonate with other product marketers - making sure that you've got consistency across what is being shown and said, because as we know, that's not always the case.

Sometimes you've got people or teams saying one thing and another team saying the other, or showing something completely different.”

(Though he was quick to point out that this wasn't something he's experienced at Komo specifically. 😊)

Being able to bake the positioning and message into HowdyGo demos using annotations turned into a great opportunity to achieve a higher level of consistency.

Free trials

Free trials are a helpful part of the sales process for Komo.

Unfortunately, they often give people an incomplete experience, why?

Because it takes time to create a marketing activation, put it out into the wild, gather data and see the benefit.

This is a common challenge SaaS companies face - how do you show off the value proposition of a product when the core value proposition is delayed or hidden?

“It’s not just clicking a button and you’ve got instant access…Realistically putting Komo out there and getting customers to use it, and capturing data in a live scenario - It’s unlikely they would do that during a free trial.”

So to solve this problem, Callum started looking for a solution - and found it in HowdyGo.

Why HowdyGo interactive product demos?

Callum started looking for an interactive demo tool and considered some alternatives to HowdyGo. But he was frustrated with the limitations of alternative tools like Storylane, Supademo and Navattic which all had seat limits. He selected HowdyGo for its unlimited users and demos, HTML recording, ease of use and excellent support.

“I did explore other interactive demo platforms, but with HowdyGo there are not as many limitations in what you can do within your plan. I found with a lot of the other offerings you could only create 3 - 5 demos, you could only have a certain amount of seats and things like that.”

"We wanted to double down on demos, I didn't want us to be limited by seats."

The ability to record HTML

Callum was impressed with HowdyGo's ability to capture Komo in full HTML, giving him the ability to tweak things in their UI after capturing their demos.

“The ability to record the HTML - It sounds like a no-brainer to me but a lot of other offerings don’t necessarily do that. Some of the other interactive demo solutions are just screenshots or video recordings.”

He was also really impressed with the feeling of an HTML interactive demo.

"It literally felt like I was inside the platform. I remember thinking 'This is insane. I've never seen this before.'"

"I don't think I realised the full potential of that until I started playing with the HowdyGo editor a bit more, but it was definitely a key selling point."

HowdyGo was really easy to use

When selecting an interactive product demo tool, Callum really wanted to find a tool that was exceptionally easy to use - and HowdyGo ticked the box.

“I got access and then built a full end-to-end demo of our platform within a few hours. It was really easy to get my head around and just start playing with it”

The customer service was too good to pass up 

We can’t downplay the importance of support when you’re implementing interactive product demos - even if “the platform is very clean and very easy to use”. The most challenging part of your product demo strategy is knowing what to demo, so support was something Callum specifically highlighted when working with the HowdyGo team.

“I found support from the team at HowdyGo made it all super easy. You guys are responsive, helpful, and you were there to answer any questions.”

“But for the most part, I didn’t even feel like I needed your support - because the platform is very clean and very easy to use. All I had to do was click record, do my thing in Komo as I already know how to do it and it just captured it all.”

Three use-cases with one tool

Callum shared his initial perspective on G2 reviews - “We're replacing numerous other platforms with this single tool.” he confirmed with us that they have used HowdyGo as an alternative to UserFlow and reduced overall spend on subscriptions while gaining the ability to:

1. Show paywalled/feature locked parts of the Komo product (which was not previously achievable with UserFlow).
2. Demonstrate their product on their website.
3. Send directly accessible interactive demos to prospects via email campaigns.
4. Reduce the ongoing maintenance challenge of keeping UserFlow functioning in-app as their product changed.

Let’s take a look at the three use-cases they implemented, including embedded interactive product demos, in-app product tours and feature paywalls, and automated sales demos shared via email.

In-app product tours drove upsells

Komo has incorporated personalized interactive product demos directly into their app. This has unlocked the ability to show off locked features in their best light, increasing ACV and conversions.

In the first week, they received over 15 requests for sales/customer success follow up. This has become a core growth path for them.

To make this an effective flow for them, they used HowdyGo's HubSpot Integration and personalization functionality to create an automated lead pipeline.

Where Komo is taking in-app product demos next

The current implementation has 3 interactive product demos across the application. With plans to introduce another 5 demos for other features that are currently behind paywalls.

Home page demos increased page-time

Komo’s first demo was an embedded platform demo on their home page, where they showed the entire end-to-end experience creating an F1 themed marketing activation. From the initial creation process, to the fan experience, and back to Komo to see the engagement data collected from the fans.

Where Komo is taking embedded product demos next

Callum has big plans for interactive product demos on their website. Following a redesign of their website, they are planning to introduce demos across industry pages, solution pages and incorporating demos into their case studies to show prospects what's possible with Komo.

Email campaigns achieved peak CTR

Soon after the release of their home page demo, Komo used an interactive demo as the primary hook in an automated email campaign that was sent to prospects. It achieved the highest CTR (>6.5%) across all their outbound email sequences at the time.

Where Komo is taking emailed demos next

Komo is now looking to incorporate interactive product demos into their leave-behind emails after sales calls. They are also considering follow up emails that incorporate interactive demos to nurture prospects who have gone cold.

Callum's advice for other PMMs

Who would you recommend HowdyGo to?

Any marketer who wants to be able to clearly and easily showcase their products without having to really change any of their existing ways of working.

Creating your first interactive demo

The first demo I did, I was very cautious and thoughtful about every single click and step I took. More recently, I've just started using Komo like I normally would and cut out and deleting steps in HowdyGo.

Starting out with interactive product demos

If I had any advice for somebody thinking about demos. Make sure you're thinking through what it is you want to show and communicate.

The actual capturing part is the easy part. It's thinking through the strategy around it and what you're going to show and how you're going to do it that is the time consuming part and the difficult part.