Natalie Marcotullio: Using Interactive Product Demos As Your PLG Motion #194

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about using interactive product demos as your PLG motion. Today we have our guest Natalie Marcotullio joining us. Natalie is the Head of Growth and Operations at Navatic, a A company that empowers prospects to get hands-on with the product early on through no-code interactive demos, and they help SaaS companies give their prospects a better buying experience. Natalie's background is in SEO and digital marketing for B2B sales and marketing for SaaS. Now she focuses full on full funnel marketing, GTM strategy, and improving the digital buyer experience. So welcome, Natalie. Glad to have you on the show today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

So let's get into the basics here before we get into some of the complicated stuff you're doing with the PLG Motion. But for listeners who maybe have never heard about it, what, what exactly is an interactive product demo? Actually, it's probably the first time I've heard about it as well.

I think you did an awesome job describing it in the intro, but basically what we say is it's just a try before you buy experience for SaaS. So letting prospects get a feeling of getting hands-on with your product directly from the website or a link. And before they even log into, let's say, a free trial or talk to a salesperson, it's basically a little tease to give them. It's like, okay, this is what my product does. Here are some core features of it.

So are they getting just like a sneak peek or what's the— why is this important? So if I'm coming in, whether I'm an SMB or an enterprise, more likely I can either go down the route of booking a demo, you walk me through it and I show it, or maybe I sign up and use a free trial and play around with it myself. What is this interactive demo?

I think it's important for 2 main reasons and sort of what we've all been, I feel like, hearing and seeing. A lot of it is PLG. Now we'll get into that more later, but the rise of PLG and just buyers wanting to get hands-on with product earlier in the buying cycle. I think that comes to buyers aren't always fully ready to jump into a free trial, which, you know, takes time to set up. They have to usually import data, do integrations, or on the flip side, they might not be ready to see a demo or take 30 minutes out of their day to hop on a call. But they want to get a better idea of what your product does. For the longest time, marketing has been so focused on value-forward messaging. And don't get me wrong, we should not just feature dump, but I've seen 10 websites that promise to 5x your pipeline. And at some point, I need to understand how you actually do that. So I think that's why buyers are sort of demanding a little bit more of this product content, or product-led content we call it, and that in the form of an interactive product demo. So if they go to their website, They have an understanding of what you do. They don't have to do any work or set anything up. And then if they like it, they'll be ready to jump into that free trial or talk to sales.

And generally, this product demo the same for every user, or is it different depending on, say, I'm in this industry and maybe I can set it up differently for different industries?

We actually just launched a partnership with Mutiny, and they do like A/B testing. You could do different types of landing pages depending on the industry. So our platform itself, you can create as many demos as you want for as many different industries. But what's been really cool to see is we have some customers who are using us plus Mutiny. You could also do this like Google Optimize, for example, and we'll serve different demos depending, like you said, on industry. Or one really cool use case is integrations is huge. So if we have a customer that has, let's say, a HubSpot integration, a Salesforce integration, they can change the landing page depending on if they know that customer looking at it has that software.

Makes sense. So they come in, they use the interactive demo, maybe they're playing around with it and they follow the sequence of what you set up. What's, what's kind of the goal from there? Then from there, are you generally pushing them to, okay, now start your trial or log in and create your account, or do you want to go into a full demo at that point?

Really depends on the company. We actually have about a 50/50 split of customers that are full sales-led or product-led, but we always recommend, like, make these demos super short, about 5 to 12 steps, then throw in a CTA that says either keep going or, you know, Take a demo, try it free. And then from there, you could also give them options. We have a little checklist feature. So you could say, if you keep going, okay, now you decide what part of the platform you want to keep exploring.

And are you finding that— where are people kind of plugging this into their funnel? Is this now, okay, you know, start free trial, create free account, or are they replacing it completely and saying all their CTAs are now saying, you know, start with interactive demos, your entry point, and then moving down the funnel?

We have seen both, but I'd say the majority of our customers have, still have a free trial or a secondary CTA. Usually this isn't their main CTA. Again, this is more to give a little bit about that sneak peek, and then we'll push them to the free trial or talk to sales. We have seen some customers who will entirely replace their free trial motion. I think that, for example, if you have a really like complex product that requires a lot of setup, that requires, again, as I mentioned, like integrations or inputting data, And you want customers to see value right off the bat and not have to do any work. That's why they might create instead like a really long demo showing multiple features instead of the free trial, which kind of puts more onus on the user.

And do you find like— so I know we're kind of going off topic here, but I'm just trying to understand from a marketer's perspective, if I create this and maybe I have all these free users who came into my account at some point and they're maybe inactive and you're trying to reengage them, rather than saying, hey, let's been a while, let's get back and use your account, or let's get a demo. This kind of a middle step of like trying to reengage them. You think that works as well?

We've seen customers actually do that. Exactly. So we've seen customers first put this on their website and 2 to 3x their engagement rates just from customers, for users using this interactive demo first. Because if you think about it, if I'm a free trialer, if I get to see what it's supposed to be like to use the product, I'm probably going to be much more successful than just being dumped into an empty sandbox. We've also seen in onboarding flows, customers will link out to these interactive demos or in nurturing campaigns. If they've seen a user, as you mentioned, hasn't been active, hasn't been engaging, say, here, try this interactive demo instead.

Yeah, that makes sense. Versus like, all right, log back into your account and try to figure this out and try to get time to value, which might take— it's a lot of effort and energy.

Yeah, it makes sense.

So what's the power behind the no-code? What are you guys using here that's no-code? the interactive side if I want to build this out as a SaaS company?

I think the biggest power is if you're a SaaS company looking to go PLG or wanting to make steps in that direction, the no-code means that you can get started with this in 2 weeks. We've had customers go from purchasing to having it live on their website in a week. So unlike, you know, committing to PLG is a really big entire go-to-market strategy shift versus this being no-code, the marketing team can buy it, own it entirely, build out a demo and have it live. I know I used to be at a PLG company, and one thing that was really, really frustrating was our free trial was our number one form of lead gen, and I had no control over the form, over the experience. Obviously, I'd work with product and they were great, but in their defense, their focus wasn't the free trial. Their focus was the actual product.

Right.

So, it was always really frustrating to be like, I think if we just change the form, I'd get an increase in conversions, but I can't because it's a month-long sprint cycle. That's kind of the power, is the marketer now gets to own it.

Makes sense. And if, who's like an ideal, you know, SaaS company or persona that you guys like to work with and you see that's working best with? So obviously PLG, but—

I think companies generally that embrace PLG, we generally say more mid-market companies that have been a little more established just because at that point they know they have a great product, a great UI, they understand what those product aha moments are that they want to push customers towards. And we do find this is almost a better tool for qualification. So if you have so many people coming to you and you want to weed out some of those lower ACV or those free trial pokers who just want to see, that's when it's a best fit. So companies like Mixpanel, Ramp that are very PLG forward, then have a lot of people coming and expressing interest. This is sort of the way to let some of those early higher up, maybe less qualified users, leads get kind of a sneak peek and understand it.

Makes sense. Let's talk a little about the stats and metrics. I'm curious to see when you guys, people are using this, you obviously have a lot of customers using it. What are you seeing in terms of conversion rates when people have, you know, before using this and then after they plugged in and started using interactive product demos? Like, you know, share some, share some numbers if you can.

We've seen from a few different customers about a 30% increase in conversion rates on their website. And all of our customers use it differently. So it's hard to say definitively, you know, if you put it here, you'll get these results. But generally, if they add them in, we've had customers, you know, just add them on one website, add them to the product tour pages, all that. We've had a few examples around that range. We also see the tour themselves. So once you go into the actual product demo and eventually, like I said, add in those CTAs, we see around an 8 to 12% conversion rate on average, which when I think about like my ads or my ebooks in the past that had like a 1 to 2% conversion rate, definitely shows that people are excited to get something that is a little more tangible and hands-on with the product.

Actually, maybe we can talk about that a little more. So if I'm running ads, like, would you drive them to this demo? So rather than saying get the free account, you drive them to this interactive Are you creating a separate landing page and, or like the product page and then driving them there, get them to use it? And is that what you're saying or how would you do that?

We've had customers who will create ads and then have a landing page with an interactive demo. And then again, maybe the CTA of the interactive demo itself is then to do a free trial or talk to sales. We've also seen people use it in like sitelink extensions. So there are a few different ways you could deploy it, or just if your ad leads to your website and you have an interactive demo or like a new CTA rather than users being used to to try a free explore product, product tour just stands out a little bit more.

So I'm trying to think if I want to test out this tool and see the value of it, same thing where it's like getting the time to value back into your time to value for your customers. But all right, so I plug this in. Where should I plug it in? On my homepage? I've got free account and then I plug it right beside, maybe I'll run it for a few months and then start measuring my conversions and run some ads to it. Or what would you say?

The main way we see customers using it is just on the homepage. Either they link it out in a CTA. So maybe right next to the free trial CTA, they have an explore product or product tour CTA, or they might just embed it entirely ungated on the product, on either product page or the homepage itself. We've seen both be pretty successful. It's really just, I think that depends on your website layout and your design. And if you're someone who says, like you were saying, oh, I want to test this first, I want to see the improvement. One thing we've had customers do is A/B test this against an existing product video. I think a lot of SaaS companies have product videos currently on their website. We generally haven't seen great engagement rates around those product videos. So again, using a tool like Optimize, Mutiny, you can just directly A/B test and say, how's this video doing, this interactive demo? And so far what we've heard is like 2x in conversions when using that interactive demo versus the video.

Really? So even the— so I know some people have those like 1-minute explainer videos and then you also have maybe like a 10 or 20-minute Demo video. So would you replace both of those or, or more of the demo video?

I'd say probably more the product-focused video, but you could try experimenting with both. Generally, we've seen them head-to-head against product video. And what's nice is exactly what you said. A product video can be 10, 30 minutes, and generally prospects are busy and don't want to watch a 10 to 30 minute long video versus demos. We really recommend keep them short and engaging and someone can click through them in a minute or 2.

Yeah, I always thought that. I'm like, who actually watches this 30-minute product video? I definitely don't. I'd rather just call somebody and you explain it to me. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Anything else you want to share around this? I mean, if people are looking to get started and maybe test it out, anything they have to consider when trying this new way of engaging customers?

I think the biggest thing is because the marketing team owns it, you want to make sure that you're trying something that is easy to use, is fast to get up. I think the benefit of these is the fact that, again, it's not engineering team pulling teeth, having to use code. That's why we do push no-code and try to make our platform as simple as possible so teams can get these up quickly. If you want to try it out, we also have a— we do like free demo builds. We have a demo building team, so you could go to our website and request that you could see what a demo would look like of your software.

What do salespeople say about this? I mean, if you're pulling away from all their demos and like all of a sudden, yes, we're getting all these, you know, These interactive demos, but now my demos have dropped in half. What are they saying about that?

What's so funny is usually we sell to marketing teams and then we've heard this time and time again where the sales team will discover these and actually get really excited about them. One, we've heard that these prospects are some of the highest quality prospects that the sales team gets. So yes, they're scared maybe to not— to show a little more of the product, but once they talk to these prospects and like, oh my gosh, I didn't have to do that high-level overview. They understood what we did. They were excited because I gave them a little bit. Then they're on board and they also love using it throughout the sales cycle. So rather than, again, post-demo, when someone asks, hey, can you send me over a video of this specific feature or send me over the recording of this demo, which we all know no one's going to watch, like instead, here is a quick 1-minute guided tour of the exact feature that you wanted to cover that you can also easily share with your decision maker, with your boss, all that.

Yeah, that actually makes sense. I mean, if I'm doing a demo and you've already seen most of the products and then by the time it gets to you, like you just feel a lot easier in the conversation, right? You don't have to explain those things again.

Yeah. Exactly. And like I said too, our goal also isn't to replace the sales demo. We always say the reason I've emphasized like 10 times, keep it short, is because it really should just be something to get the prospect excited. We find that 50-step demos generally aren't the most successful because people, again, we have short attention spans now. So the prospect won't— will still need a demo to fully understand the product and then dive into their specific use case. They just don't need the high-level overview anymore.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I'm excited. I mean, that's something we'd like to do with our portfolio companies is conversion rate optimization. Any company who requires, like, one of the first easy wins we do with the website, you know, we use like VWO, that's a tool we love. But, you know, I'd love to test this out. I mean, maybe one of our companies, see how it works. I mean, we're always about finding ways to improve conversions with just adding one button. If all it takes is adding one button and we're getting conversions, that's the best thing. Those are the best experiments, right?

Exactly. Yeah, I think being able to quickly test something, that's why the no-code aspect, anything that's no-code gets me so excited because I know as a marketer, there's so many things, and a growth marketer, so many things I want to do but not always able to. So like you said, just changing a button, you're like, yeah, that's awesome, I can do that.

Exactly. Cool. This has been good, Natalie. You ready to shift gears to the second part of the interview, the personal, more rapid-fire questions?

Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right. All right, Natalie, number 1, what's one activity you enjoy doing outside of work that gets you into flow state?

We were talking a little bit about this before the call, how I live in New York and how sometimes New York can be a little hectic. But honestly, one of my favorite things to do is just walk and run around New York and explore. So generally, I feel like I have my best, even my best marketing thoughts and ideas when I do just give myself that time to go for a walk and step away. So it's always a good reminder. I know it's I know it's best, but sometimes I think as marketers we have so much to do, we forget that empty space is usually when we come up with those best ideas.

Where's your walk? Central Park or Times Square? Where do you get more of the energy inspiration?

Oh, definitely not Times Square. No, no, no. I live right near the West Side, so I love the West Side Highway. Any New York girl probably has seen me running on it at some point.

Nice. I agree. I'm with that. I don't know who can get inspiration from Times Square, but who knows? Yeah. Natalie, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known if you can go back and would tell your 20-year-old self?

I think what I was talking about before, of like giving yourself space to think. I think in life and in marketing, just that it's okay to say no. And I know this is a super common piece of marketing advice, but almost every marketer I talk to is just so overwhelmed because they have to run ads, SEO, brand, create a community, try TikTok, all these things. And one thing I've really tried to practice is the art of saying no respectfully and giving a reason why. So rather than just saying yes to everything, if I don't agree to something, saying, you know, here are my priorities list. It doesn't necessarily fall on that. I'm happy to experiment with it at this date. Or, you know, why do you think that'd be a good channel? Let's talk about this because I'm actually trying to achieve that goal with this channel. And maybe this might be a better channel. So really like the masterful art and in life too of Saying no and prioritizing.

Yeah, I think Tim Ferriss, I don't know if you follow him, but he has a podcast where he explains he has like a pretty good script on how to set up those emails or response. I thought that was cool.

Yeah, I think I've seen that before.

Yeah, I think you've seen it. Yeah. Natalie, what are some of the biggest challenges you guys are currently facing in order to continue to grow Navitic? Meaning, you know, what's keeping you up at night these days? Keeping you up at night these days as a marketer?

I think anyone in a new SaaS market can identify with this, but it seems like competition is just crazy for so many new industries. It's easier than ever to start a company.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes it feels like, we always joke, a new competitor pops up like every day. So I think for us, just really thinking about how we can artfully and respectfully differentiate. I think that's a really hard job as a marketer. You know, the environment is always changing. So how can we make sure that we know, really know our niche and where we thrive, and then making sure we're also very clear where we don't thrive.

Yeah, that's fair. Who or what are some of the best 3 resources that you can share with the audience, whether they're books, people you follow, mentors who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

So if you're in growth, one person who I highly, highly recommend following and reading his content is Andrew Kaplan. I've been working with him for a little while now, and I feel like I learned just So many great tips about growth activation rates, what it means to be a growth professional. And all this stuff is super digestible, very enjoyable. And he is very honest and organic of, this might work, this is what I tried, I don't know. I think too many of these people out there try to just definitively say, this is what works and this is what doesn't. And I always appreciate someone saying, here's my opinion, take it or leave it.

Okay, let's go ahead and hear from Al. Is this deliveringvalue.co? Is that him?

Yeah.

Yeah, cool. Any others you recommend?

That one I'm going to cheat because that's a person and a resource. But the last thing I always recommend, this is less about marketing, but just anyone looking to get into tech for the first time and specifically a female in tech. I love the book Uncanny Valley. It's very funny. It's about a New Yorker who gets into tech, so it's also super relatable. But I think sometimes just having those moments of like, is this normal? Is this not normal? I will say the industry has gotten so much better since she wrote that book. But it was just a very entertaining read that also let me think about the industry as a whole. Like it was, it didn't feel like it was educational. But I look back and realize like, there were a lot of good life lessons I learned from it. So a little different. As far as marketing content, I think there's amazing, you know, a lot of amazing like LinkedIn people out there. I personally am not always as much of a fan of some of the books or all that because I feel like they can be very definitive rather than kind of understanding that every use case, every industry, every platform is a little different.

That's true. So Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, is that right? I actually haven't read it. Yeah, good recommendation.

It's also just very funny. It does not feel like you're reading something educational.

Okay, good to know. What does success mean to you today, Natalie? Whether it's personally, business, financial, life, there's no right answer.

I think for business, one big thing, the reason I joined Novatic, as I mentioned, I was, I don't know if I mentioned, I was a customer of Novatic before. I was also a huge buyer of B2B software.

Okay.

And I just thought the whole thing was really annoying. Like, you have to evaluate 10 different vendors, you wouldn't get to see the product until months in. So honestly, one thing that just gets me so excited and motivates me with Novatic is the fact that we can change that, that we can change the buying experience. to make it enjoyable, and we can spend more time working on work or outside of work rather than sitting on discovery calls. So that's sort of what keeps me going as far as business. I think personally, I just really like the challenge of startups, trying something new, learning something new. I think I'll always work in startups just because I always say, I really love being involved in every part. I love working cross-departmentally. I love new challenges and constantly have to figure things out. That kind of just keeps me going day to day.

I wonder what the trend is with the buying experience. So it's cool you can do a SaaS, you know, kind of on your screen. But imagine things with, you know, physical objects of like getting it without having to buy it and then, or even, you know, going to the store and trying it. I imagine maybe like VR would help with that, right? You put on a thing and you can try out something before you buy it.

I don't know. I wonder. Yeah, that was pretty cool. We often do compare it to the B2C experience where imagine if you wanted to You know, go buy a new pair of shoes and you weren't able— it took you a month to do so. So I think the B2C experience has it pretty well and free trials and all that stuff. But not shockingly, B2B just has to catch up.

B2B.

Yeah.

Even for services, can you try it out? I don't— yeah, it's kind of tough, but maybe something you'll solve later on. I feel like you can understand it. Cool. Natalie, where can founders listening in, marketers get in touch with you, learn more about you? and your company, what's the best place?

Not shockingly, LinkedIn for me. You know, if you want to, I generally post around PLG topics about interactive demos, some data that we're finding. So if any of that's interesting, feel free to follow or reach out, and I'm happy to chat about these things. Recommend if you want to learn more about Novatic, go to our company page, just novatic.com. We, it's very meta, but we actually have an interactive demo of our interactive demo platform embedded on the website to give you a little overview of what we do.

Cool, cool. Awesome. We'll add the website, novatic.com, and your LinkedIn profile to say hi to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was great chatting with you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Cheers. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, Get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and see you on the next one.