Salesforce Product Demonstration System in Practice: The Rise of Dedicated Demo Teams

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A new executive role is about to emerge in your company: the Demo Engineering Leader.

Over the next three years, you'll see this job title explode across job boards. You'll continue to see millions in venture capital poured into the presales tech stack. You'll witness the rise of demo bootcamps and best practices. And you'll see the creation of an entirely new role: the Demo Engineer.

The demo engineering team is responsible for providing marketing, sales, and customer success teams with the product information they need:

- In near real-time

- Across all products and SKUs

- For every vertical and market segment

- Across all roles, use cases, and integration points

Sales leaders have long struggled with demos and product experiences for their prospects and customers—we've been stuck on the demo! Here are several ways the current system fails us all:

- Your demo environment crashes, and now your sales team is showing "bugs" and "glitches" instead of value.

- New features are released, but your demo environment is empty for months or quarters because your company hasn't deployed them yet.

- If you're lucky, you have a sandbox with anonymous data, and your sales reps are improvising on the spot, trying to make up a story. "Yours will look different than this. Your data will be different. You can imagine... right?"

- Sales reps interfere with each other in the same demo environment. If I update a field, it's "wrong" for the next rep's demo, unless I change it back.

- Prospects get distracted while clicking around and ask questions like, "What does that button do?" Your sales rep goes off track and fails to demonstrate your full value.

The typical solution is to hire more presales engineers. "They're like account managers with technical chops." Hand it to the sales engineer, and they'll figure it out. But what really happens when you add more SE resources?

As your product complexity increases, so does the presales-to-sales ratio. We're not building a scalable demo solution; we're doing one-off demos in a real production environment, just as we always have. The only difference now is that every prospect has two paid employees with them instead of one. You can't scale headcount like this. There has to be a better way.