Demos for CS: A playbook | Demos for onboarding & activation

Interactive demos help CS teams in getting customers to value faster. Demos offer guided, clickable product experiences that customers can go through at their own pace, revisit when they need to, and share with their team.

This playbook covers which demos to build first, how to structure them for activation, where to deploy them, and how to measure whether they're working.

What’s in the playbook:

Best places to put demos in onboarding and activation
Tips for building demos
A guide to metrics

This is a practical framework for building interactive demos for CS.

Where to use demos in onboarding and activation

Interactive demos can support CS teams at multiple points in the customer journey.

You can share individual demos that walk customers through a specific flow, or build a demo collection for more breadth. That lets you mix product explainer videos, recorded webinars, and other product explainer assets alongside interactive demos—in a single hub that customers can explore at their own pace to learn the product.

Then, you can share the demos at high-impact moments, like early onboarding or in-app at points of friction to help activation.

Tip: You can share individual demos that walk customers through a specific flow, or build a demo collection for more breadth. That lets you mix product explainer videos, recorded webinars, and other product explainer assets alongside interactive demos—in a single hub that customers can explore at their own pace to learn the product.

1. Pre and early onboarding

The goal here is to give customers a product orientation before or immediately after their first onboarding call. This means that the call and CS team can focus on explaining how things work and personalising the experience for what that specific customer needs, rather than going over basic functionality to go live.

Interactive demos and demo collections can also be shared as a single link, without needing to provision accounts.

An example:

Business Warrior is a lending software that builds a self-serve training hub for each new customer they onboard. The training hub covers workflows that customers need to complete to go live. Their north star is getting customers actively lending, which means that the demos are intentionally designed to get customers to that state.

Each new customer works through the hub at their own pace before training calls begin with the CS team, which protects CS time.

"The account management team can now focus on getting the customer live, rather than spending all their time getting ready for a training."
Jonathan Brooks, Business Warrior

They onboard 25 new stores a month, and the shift to demos has saved 15–20 hours a week across the team, and cut time spent per customer onboarded by 50%.

2. In-app at moments of friction

Short demos embedded in-app can show customers exactly what to do and sticky points in the customer journey. This often works much more smoothly than telling customers through written walkthroughs.

An example:

Sked Social uses short in-app demos for their approvals feature, which manages content sign-off between agencies and their clients. It's a feature that's genuinely difficult to convey in a sentence.

"Part of the value of the approvals feature is in the simplicity of the experience, and describing it doesn't do it justice. When you actually do it and click around in a demo, it connects the dots to, 'oh, well, that was easy.' Because if you tell people something is easy, they don't believe you until they do it."
Rich Henson, Sked Social

Sked's CS team replaced Appcues with interactive demos, which was costing $4,000/year and producing tours that "no one used." They now have over 150 demos that are connecting the dots for customers.

"It synthesizes the sweet spot of getting the product understood in the medium that meets the customer where they're at. I used to think I needed quick reference guides, one-pagers, support docs. What we actually need is the interactive demo, because it solves all of those problems in one."
Rich Henson, Sked Social

Which onboarding demo to build first

Start with one demo that addresses the most pressing problem. The best-performing demo gives the viewer what they need in the shortest, clearest way.

It’s easy to get hung up on huge projects, placement ideas, and so on. But strip it all back and start with four questions:

What business problem is prompting you to create this demo?
What does the customer need to understand before they can take the next step?
What is the smallest part of the product we can show to close that gap?
Where would the demo be most useful (in terms of placement)?

Start simple, and testing and perfection can follow. CS teams will usually start by focusing on things like the step where customers stall after kickoff calls, the feature that customers consistently underuse, or the part of the product that causes questions your CS team answers on repeat.

"Be really clear on the business problem you're trying to solve."
Jonathan Brooks, Business Warrior

Sked Social started with their approvals feature because it’s the hardest to explain in words, but people get it when they walk through a demo.

How to structure an onboarding demo that activates customers

The best onboarding demo gives the customer what they need to take their next step, and nothing more. A few things to keep in mind that make the difference in moving someone forward:

Start at the moment of value, not at login
Skip the navigation, setup screens, and account configuration. Get the customer as close as possible to the outcome they're working toward before you explain anything.
Show one outcome per demo
One workflow, one result. If you need to cover more, build separate demos and group them in a Collection. Trying to show everything in one demo is the most common reason completion drops.
Keep it short and cut hard
Aim for 9–12 steps. Completion falls from 62.8% at 6–8 steps to 31.8% for demos of 21 or more. If a step doesn't move the customer closer to activation, remove it.
Write for action, not explanation
Annotations should tell the customer what to do and what they'll see next, not describe a feature. Plain, concise language ("click here to set up your first report") led to 9.4% higher engagement in our benchmark data.
Match the CTA to where the customer is
An onboarding demo should end with a clear next step, whether that's completing a task in the product, reaching out to their CS rep, or moving to the next demo in the sequence. The CTA should match the commitment they're ready to make.

A couple of resources to get you started:

For a full walkthrough of building and editing your first demo, see Umberto's guide to creating high-performing interactive demos.

For data on what other teams are doing and what works with demos, see the interactive demo benchmark report.

Where to put demos to get them in front of customers in the right moments

Here are the three main placements for CS teams:

1. Help documentation
Short 3–4 step demos embedded alongside traditional written guides. For example, Sked's CS team builds one demo per help article.

2. Onboarding training hubs
A demo collection or asset hub that covers the workflows a new customer needs to complete to go live. This can be a blend of interactive demos, webinars, and videos that work together and gets sent to customers in a single link. For example, Business Warrior builds collections (that consist of one demo per workflow) that the CS team share with every new customer at onboarding.

3. Certification
For more complex products, interactive demos can become part of a full certification program. Walkthroughs go well with content and quizzes, and completion tracking gives CS visibility into where each customer is in their journey.

If you build your program out as a collection or virtual training lab, you can also track completion of guided demos or use a sandbox to track users’ comprehension. Below is an example of a training lab for making a payment.

4. A few other places interactive demos can help CS flows:

In-app popups: Short in-app modals triggered at moments of friction (Sked uses demos here for features that don't describe well in words). Demos can turn into a popup embed that work well here.
Post-kickoff demos: Demo links sent post-kickoff so customers can walk through the product at their own pace.
Upsell and expansion: In-app demos on paywalled features show customers what they're missing before a CS or sales call. Komo embedded demos on their paywall pages and saw a 30x increase in upsell requests in two months.

Measuring impact and iterating

It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds trying to measure everything. To avoid that, start by mapping your demo metrics to the north star metric your CS team is measuring. Then track 3-5 metrics that connect to that north star.

E.g. For Business Warrior, their north star is the number of customers that are actively lending within 3 days of going live. That’s the key metric that they track, and they keep demo metrics as a leading indicator. Demos are a leading indicator of that metric, not the metric itself.

Core metric examples

of customers activated

feature adoption rate

of CS hours saved

Demo engagement metrics

completion rate for demos

of drop-offs by step

CTA click-through rate

What to look for in the data

Signal	What it shows
Overall demo engagement	Whether the demo story is compelling enough and clear enough to get people clicking through
Drop-off steps	Whether the annotations are clear or convoluted, and whether there’s a point of friction or confusion
CTA metrics	Whether the CTA matches where the customer is in their journey
High engagement, low adoption	Whether the demo shows a feature but doesn’t connect to the customer's outcome

For a full framework on connecting demo data to your CRM and reporting to stakeholders, see the measuring interactive demo impact playbook.

Other resources to explore

Interactive demo benchmark report. For data on what works (and what doesn’t) in interactive demos, from our data on 300,000+ demo sessions.
How to create a high-performing interactive demo. For Umberto's hands-on guide to building and editing your first demo.
Measuring interactive demo impact. For frameworks for connecting demo data to business outcomes and reporting to stakeholders
Business case playbook and interactive generator. For a personalized builder to hand to stakeholders.

How to use interactive demos for customer onboarding and activation

This guide will give you tangible ways that interactive demos can help you meet CS targets:

Table of contents

Chat with this article