S2E74 - What's wrong with demos today with Jonathan Friedman

Hey everybody, it's Richard Harris and Scott Leese with another episode of the Surf and Sales podcast brought to you by the Salesforce for sales group outreach. Reggie, AI and Vidyard, these are the tools we like. We promote them because they are very kind to us and we know that they help everybody drive their revenue through the end of 2021 into 2022 and from further into the future. With that being all said and take gone through, let's go ahead and introduce our guest who is the CEO and co founder of Demo Stack, Jonathan Friedman. Jonathan, nice to meet you. And do you go by John or Jonathan? What do you, what do you.

Jonathan, usually people shortcut it all the time, so whatever works for you. But Jonathan, usually, yeah.

And what, what is your middle name in case we need to. In case you trouble on the podcast? Right.

I can give it. But then you can hack into my bank account and stuff.

Right?

Well, you got. You and you and Scott know each other. So Scott, you know, tell me how Jonathan got here because I, you know, Jonathan, I just met.

Well, the. How we got here is I've been messaging Jonathan back and forth for over a year probably.

And then he would message me and back and forth and whatnot. So it's been a long time coming. So I'm excited to, excited to have Jonathan here. So why don't you tell everybody first of all what Demo Stack is and what it's all about for anybody who doesn't know.

Sure. So DemoStack is a demo experience platform and that means that we help companies create demos that help them win deals. Usually the demo environment is kind of the weird thing they keep in the closet, but they use it for demoing. It's usually something someone built a while ago, that's Acme or the Pied Piper kind of thing. It's always rickety working kind of. But actually most people see it and Demo Stack just provides essentially the perfect demo environment. It takes away all the, all the technical constraints there are unless you present your product in a clear system manner. Works all the time. Share it, get analytics and share the beauty of your product, help you connect the beauty of your product and essentially win deals with a great demo environment. That's really in a nutshell, of course, we can double click into anything here.

What are some of the things that kind of universally sellers are doing wrong in their demos?

So right now I think the state of demoing, it's.

You know, so a demo. I always say that demoing is an intimate moment because, you know, there's A lot of song and dance in the outside outskirts of it, right? You can go to see my website, maybe you see a deck, all that stuff, that's all nice. But when I come and we're on a meeting together and it's live and I'm kind of sharing my screen, I'm showing you the demo. The demo is a very interesting moment because I'm showing you what the product is about and trying to walk you in an experience of what it would mean to use it. Now, everyone that ever built any product knows it's really, really hard. You need a lot of talented people working a lot of time together. And still some products are not good, right? So, honey, you know, it's very hard to fake. It's a very distinct and real signal. And you can discount my deck and you can discount my song and dance and, you know, telling you how much customers love, love us, etc. But when I show you a demo and you can imagine yourself using it and it talks about your use case, your problems, your everything, it's magic. It's magic. And that's when deals are won.

That's the part I love, is that you have to talk about their use case, right? Every sales conversation is about their use case, right? Even when you get past the use cases, they said yes, guess what? You still have to go through the use case of the process on both sides. I'm going through that with a big company right now. It's a major pain.

What are the mistakes people are making though? Like if you sat back and you watched the sales rep make a demo, right? Even with, you know, without demo stack, what are you seeing them do wrong the most these days, right?

So there's a lot about Harbor Harbor Tours. And I look at my product, there's this, there's that, you know, and you're on a tour looking to the right, looking to the left and kind of seeing a lot of interesting things. But to me, a demo is a product story that's the middle of it. And if people usually don't hit the product story, the product narrative, or even you can even flip it aside and say that the problem narrative, right? So a customer comes usually with a pain, else they're not usually not even motivated enough to go and see a demo of yours. It requires a cognitive load to see a product, digest it and learn it. So usually you come with a pain and therefore there's a narrative. And humans, they're powered by narrative, they're powered by stories, and if you just go technical on them, show them a bunch of things and you don't close in and hone in the narrative. So I would say that's probably the most major mistake. And a lot of times it's not because AES or reps or whoever is demoing is not good. It's sometimes it's constrained. There are technical constraints like I'd love to show you, but I can't. It's amazing here, but, you know, so there's a lot of technical constraints because how demo environments are structured. And.

It'S also a bit of education on what it means to tell a product narrative, a product story and how to communicate that well.

And I think that can be improved because if you sit in the demo and you're not, you can't regurgitate the story. Everyone can't really tell, okay, what did we see? In a minute? Then you're doing something wrong and people will forget the features. They'll remember a narrative.

It's interesting. I've been telling people this for a long time and I learned it from a rep is that a demo is not product training. So often I've seen demos and it's like they're trying to show you 60,000 clicks, you know, and it's a massive. Like you need to see the customer glaze over, you know.

One thing I'm curious to you to your thoughts on this too because I get this all the time. People come in expecting the demo, so the reps feel rushed to do the demo. However, I'm a big proponent of. Hey, before we do the demo, can we just take 10 minutes so I understand what to show you. Like you got to do a little bit of qualifying before the demo. So is that what you see better reps doing? Do you think that qualifying of the demo or pre discussion of the demo should be a separate conversation? The same conversation. How do you keep. Because you're trying to paint that picture right? Like what do you see are best practices?

There's.

So there's a lot of thought on this subject and you know, you can open a PLG door and there's a lot out there that's like the buzzword of this I think era you went to Saster this year was all about PLG and what it means, but I think that the right thing here. So there's a lot of data on the mismatch. When a prospect comes on a call, the first thing they want to get to is a demo. When you get. When the first thing a rep wants to get to is the discovery qualification.

So It's a kind of game where the interests are mismatched, but it doesn't have to be. I think more and more, as kind of things progress.

New generations have less of an attention span. Things are more condensed. Try watching a 1980 movie this year versus a TikTok thing. Amount of information per second you get.

It'S not even. It's not on the same planet. And so people will want to see demos earlier. And I think you can work with that. So you can work and show product and kind of have a narrative where you show vignettes across.

Across the conversation. So it doesn't have to be, okay, demo now or interest first. You know, it can be like, here's a vignette, here's how it would look in your site. What if you could actually show a demo even before the conversation and kind of give a glance of what their product would look like? Their story problem will look like in your product. How. What if you could compress that and kind of push the product visuals earlier? So I'm a true believer that you should, because things are changing. People are less and less want to go get on the phone, hear a big pitch. They want to discover they're used to digital tools. They value good tools because they, you know, they grew up on Facebook and TikTok and then, you know, the best tools out there that are UI machines. So they want to try it and they feel that they can. So I think you need to compress the demo up. You can't have it like five meetings and then I'll show you. But you can't also rush things and not explain it. But you just have to find where your prospect sits and find the right amount of demo content to show in each and every stage.

I think that's super good advice. And one of the things that I have seen over the years is people have no plan other than the first demo. So they don't know what a second demo looks like other than to redo the first one, let alone a third, fourth or a fifth. And it was really interesting what you said there about how that you pick different bits for each kind of step of it and break it up and push some of them forward.

Do you find that.

Do you find that the organizations who are running the best demos have this structured like, okay, on our very first demo, this is what we're going to cover on the second demo when we redo it for other people in the org, we go this route. Do you think about it like that? Have you seen that succeeding?

Yeah, so really I think that the best orgs, they have kind of, we call it like almost a demo metrics.

In this matrix.

They have, you know, you can have the buyer. So right. So different buyers. So, right, you show, I don't know, you sell it to finance. Right. So maybe you have the user, the accountant. Right. So that's a demo and then their boss, the VP is a demo and then the CFO needs to sign on that and that might be different demos with different vantage points.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's a vertical and then of course industry. Right. Maybe you sell to enterprise mid market SMB and that's different because they're all focused on different things and you have different data in there.

So we've left, we've left the world behind then where there's one demo for everyone, one demo fits all. We've become much more specific in how we're showing the product. Like you said, the CFO gets this kind of demo, the VP of sales gets this kind of demo. Right. So what is the ideal demo length then? How much information should we be trying to, you know, slam down, down people's throats? Are we looking at 30 minutes, 60 minutes? I don't know about you, Richard, but I have been on demo phone calls before that have gone on for two hours.

I think. I mean, I think some of that has to do with the technological aspect of what you're doing.

Right. Like I can, the engagement of the prospect and so forth. But I want to know what Jonathan thinks about what's the ideal length? Especially if you're kind of designating different types of demos in this multiple stage thing. How long do you think these things should be? What's everybody's attention span?

I don't think two hours is product training. I think it might be if someone is deep, deep, deep, deep trial and they go in and you need to help them get there. So obviously that's too long and obviously I would say five minute demo doesn't show anything in depth. I think five minute demo could be good for like here's what we're doing and super brief, like tell us about your problem. You know, that's, that's good to start a conversation. We've seen, you know, ideal demos, depends on length, products, there's a bunch of things but you know, it depends, it depends really where you are in the chain. I see how a 5 minute demo can be. Well, I think a deep demo, deep dive, that again doesn't go too deep as you know, 20 to 25 minutes is usually Ideal to show most products. But I've seen definitely demos go beyond it. Not a lot being two hours, though. I haven't seen two hours. That's not defined as training.

Also, demos, you know, we're only, obviously we're here thinking about the sales aspect of it, but there are different demos. You can do a demo for a webinar. You can do a demo when you talk to Gartner and you want to get into, you know, be ranked somewhere. You can do a demo for prospects. Like we love doing demo for our prospects for candidates, you know, that we want to have join because we think that you should see the wait.

So in the, in the recruiting process, you're sometimes doing demos of the product.

I would say 99%. I don't think I tried to say.

I would venture to say 99% of companies don't do that, Richard.

Right.

I would agree. It's funny because I was going to take it to the other, to the, to that exact area, which is how often have you had a interview process set up and you haven't laid out what each person is going to do? Right. Scott, you're the Croatian, Jonathan's the founder, I'm the sales manager. Are we really going to all ask, so why do you want to be here? What do you like about our company?

Right. Like, you know, so it's the same philosophy, right? Like, is that. And you even have to sort of think from an HR perspective, you are demoing to your prospect, to your candidate, right? Because they got to choose from three other competitors for you. So I completely, completely agree.

What.

When. What do you do in a demo when, you know, Scott's eyes start to glaze over? You're five minutes into the demo, Scott's.

Eyes, and every answer is, huh?

Yeah.

How do you. Because I think this is a problem. Like, I think we all are taught to do this. We're taught to tell the story. We're taught to tell this narrative. We're so busy trying to hit everything in the demo that maybe we aren't paying enough attention to our audience. Right. So I'm trying to give people just like, you know, some, some tactics of like, oh, yeah, I should try to do that. Like, what do you do?

Well, first, demo anxiety is a real thing again, because showing product is an intimate moment.

It's really, you're opening a door, you're showcasing a part of the heart again, because it's such a pure signal. Products are super hard. It's impossible to fake. Right. So people want to get there so it is a magic moment. And then some people. But some people, you know, get like, you know, someone grabs them by the air, say, hey, this vendor wants to show a demo come in here. So obviously.

They might come and they're like they're on Facebook or they're on. Worst case scenario, maybe they're on Slack. But even you know, that's Scott.

Scott's on Facebook all the fucking time. I can never get him up. I'm looking at it right now.

It's not working today. So I'm sure we have attention today for sure.

I mean it depends on the rep, right? Some rep. Are people really good on people management and they, you know, you can scream Bitcoin in the middle and be like, oh, I just want to make sure everyone has attention. May crack it or it's cracking out a different joke in there and just do that. On the, on the demo level, you know, you might ask the person most glazing over, like, what are your thoughts? Is this what you expected?

Is this. Does this answer? But again, if you. The more prep you do in the beginning, meaning here's the three questions I want you to come out with, right? So if you do that with a prospect and you know, like here are the three issues that we identified that you want to solve for this tool. So did we get there? So let's. We went to over issue number one, is this good? Did it solve what you thought it would solve for you? And then ask a question like that, which is not a yes, no question. So the if when people get asked a question, they are forced into the here and now.

So that's a trick to kind of get them in. If they're not friendly, not engaged, it might be that there's no, you know, they might be completely out of it. And you know, sometimes I don't think you can solve all of it with these kind of tips and tricks, but I think asking, asking a question that kind of engages them back is your best bet.

Yeah, no, I agree with you and it sort of leads. I'm going to set you up for this one. See if you know this one. Because it's one thing I've been teaching for a long time is do you know the single worst question to ask your customer or prospect in a demo? What do you think it is?

Don't know.

I'm not trying to trip you up. It's just something I talk about. So it's not.

I don't know either. For what it's worth, Jonathan, I'm waiting to See what he says, it's quite.

Simply, it's this terrible question of does that make sense? Because it's the worst question. You get no real answer. And you just get, as Scott said, huh? Yeah. And it's like to your point, it goes back to what you were saying is how does this compare to what you're currently doing? Right. What are we missing so far? What do you want to see? Like to your point of how do I get them to re engage? You get them by asking that open ended question. When you ask that question, that's closed ended, you're actually pushing them away. When you say does that make sense? That's not drawing them into this intimate conversation, which I really like. What you said earlier, a demo is an intimate conversation between two people to solve the pain. So I really like that.

What do you think? Do you think.

To your point, you said, hey, we need to compress the time we're doing in these demos. How do you see the value of the explainer video demo and an actual demo? Do you have both? Like you said, there's different kinds of demos. Do you like having both of those things? How do you see that?

So think about, for most products.

There is a wall of indifference, right? The main thing you have to overcome is indifference.

You, Scott, me, we have a wall of indifference protecting us because there's so much data in the world. If we wouldn't have that huge filter that filters 99.9999% of everything, our head would explode, right? You walk on the street, just a billboard, your head will explode instantly. So you have to filter out everything. So the first thing, if you're trying to get a prospect for us is the stages, the clear stages. Awareness, consideration, trial and buying, etc. So for each of these stages, the awareness and the amount of time people want to invest in you.

Grows, right? But getting into awareness is the hardest because you have to go through this massive filter that everyone puts in place, and rightly so, including myself. And so there are things there that are very superficial and just like getting your attention. So you have explainer videos and you can have product tours on the website or a link you get from an SDR or stuff like that that works really well. It's colorful, it's quick. I click next, next, next, or I just watch a video and I'm, I'm kind of in your, I understand your world. And if that's, if that, if that, that passes my filter, that main nasty filter I have that filters everything now, I can consider it and say like, okay, do I even care? And if I care, then of course I want more time, but then I want more. So demo progresses. The fidelity it needs to support each stage grows. You can't do a demo where I show your product tour that's on the website. It's too flat. I can't show you a video. I don't think you've ever sat in a demo, came to see a demo and a vendor would show a video. I've seen it actually once. It was terrible.

It's not the way to do it. So there's different awareness and different consideration stages. And you need to progress the fidelity to your demo until they buy. And then you have maximum fidelity demo, which is your product, so that product communication.

Increases in fidelity until you actually get to the finish line, which is handing them your product, which is what you sell.

What I find fascinating is there's so much talk and chatter and product focus on filling the funnel and prospecting and all the early steps in the sales process, and so much less conversation about demos now and closing the deal. And yet you founded a company about the back end of the sales process in the middle of all this noise about the front end. Why? I want to know where and why the passion for demo stack and just solving this problem in general came from. Did you experience this as a seller? So maybe go into your history a little bit about how you. How you arrived here and what it was like to, in my opinion, at least found a company focused on the opposite of what so much, so much other chatter is focused on.

Oh, I would say, first of all, we look at demos from the most holistic perspective, where it's really, you can use a demo on the entire aspect of a fund like sdr, can send you an outbound email and that has a link to a demo. And ideally it's a demo of your product. Your details in my product, where you're already like, oh my God, like, you know me. And I mean, it's just as if I already started using your product. All my details are there, so you can look at it in everywhere. In the funnel, there's top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. And essentially, if I would need to summarize, demo stack, we're in the business of product communication. We're telling a product story, we're helping you tell the product story. And that can be all over from marketing, sales, csm, even executives, et cetera. But my story actually coming into this is, I think the first time I saw what a good demo actually Means and that goes back to my history. I've been entrepreneur most of my career, either a regular entrepreneur or one time I was an entrepreneur inside a big company. Not even big $5 billion company, I guess that's fairly big.

First time was with my previous company called Reactful. We were in the conversion optimization space and I would come with a demo that I didn't realize back then, but it was mind blowing. We would come and show you your website and we show you how we would change it in the fly we know without you telling us anything. Or I would show your website, I would fold it in 3D and show you something behind it and add stuff to your form and a lot of people will be like, whoa, how did you do this? And would still remember my demo years after. And actually at that time I was against us investing in a demo environment. My co founder back then, who is again my co founder here at Demo Stack, he said, no, we should invest in it. He didn't ask me, he built it. And he was absolutely right. I was absolutely wrong. I came into the demo issue again at Trip Actions. So I was hired in Trip Actions to build Trip Actions Liquid, which is the expense management, essentially part of or no expense, actually part payment, travel payment, part of Trip Actions. And there I was building this beautiful product from the ground up.

At some point I wanted to start demoing it. And when I was demoing it alone, it was all okay, but quickly it became impossible. Do I give every rep access to the admin panel? It's a fintech product. So do you give them all the admin access so they can move millions? But if not, I can't demo the admin panel, which is what we're selling to finance teams. How do we do that? Do we show Trip Actions own use of this? We can't, right? Because it has real data in there. So what do we do? And so my instinct and what I told the team, I thought, okay, I'm brilliant, I have an easy solution. Let's do Pied Piper. They become a customer and we show that. I think I had it. I was like, go home. That's. I paid the big bucks for it. But actually that didn't solve anything because this Pied Piper thing is empty. And no prospect was like, oh, Pied Piper, that's me. You know, nobody, nobody felt that it actually talked to them. We had a few users, but it was all empty. It was so much less nice than showing the real thing with real data, which you can't, of course, because GDPR ccpa, all that.

So we suddenly had this demo environment that will suck. And my aha moment was my realization that we're building two products, we're building a regular product, and we're built up liquid, in my case, which I love, and then nourished and all that. And this kind of side project that was for showcasing that. We tried to invest as little as possible, but actually more people saw it. More people see your demo environment than ever see your product, which is huge. And then if you invest a little bit in that and try to do the minimum amount of work because you want your engineering to build features, you're stuck in a conundrum. And it's always this gap between product and sales. Sales want to tell a product story. Product is building products for customers. And that gap. When I realized that, that was my aha moment. And I woke up to the idea that every SaaS company is probably in this conundrum. And of course, research kind of showcased that as well.

Amazing. Richard, I've never thought. I've never had this thought that Jonathan just said. I've never had this thought that more people see your demo than actually use your product.

That is interesting. Yeah, that's good.

You think about all the people you're showing the product to who don't buy, don't become customers, right?

Yep, yep.

And maybe four to one, five to one. You know, it can easily be, you know, plus candidates, plus.

Yeah, right. And I'm just thinking about my. My pipeline. Jonathan's like, yeah, investor pipeline, recruiting pipeline, all this other stuff. It's very true. I've never thought about that before. I'm having an aha moment.

I totally agree. Because I'm sitting here going, oh, I should do some. Build a training program around that.

Right?

Because it's. I mean, to Jonathan's point is that it's all about the conversion, Right. If I can increase my conversion from my demos, what does that do to my revenue? Right. Like, it's critical and yet I don't see anybody giving demo training. I don't really see it out there. So it's pretty interesting. Jonathan, I got a couple of questions. One.

I assume you grew up in the Netherlands before coming to the States.

I'm from Israel originally, but I have a long history at Holland. I lived there as a child, came back to Israel after army service. I went there again to do college.

So overall, I live almost a third of my.

And the reason I'm asking and I'm fascinated by it is what do you think is the difference between some of these places in the business environment. Right. Selling into America versus selling into Europe, selling into Israel, or vice versa. If you're over there and you're trying to sell here, what are a couple of things. People, maybe they know it, but they just never sort of brought it to the forefront of their mind. What do you see as different?

Well, Europe or is the Netherlands. Right. I can talk of all Europe, although, you know, you can kind of combine a little bit of Europe. But Europe and the US are very different places and Israel is again, a third different place. I'm super happy. I have all the experience of living on all these wonderful places because I learned a lot and opened my mind to how, you know, how you can perceive the world and what you're into it and what you're doing. It really, really helps broaden your horizons. You know, it's sometimes Europeans, when they see US sellers approach them, they feel they're very aggressive and they're very.

Animated and very talk a lot, but not show substance. So they can discount that a lot. And it's not because the seller is not good. It's just a cultural perception thing. It can be very different. I think on the flip side, US people can feel like Europeans are very cold. You know, 5 or 5pm Everything, they drop everything and go home, which is true. The work life balance, there is a whole different game. They value it a lot. And there's just different perceptions, right? Like in Europe, for example, when in the travel industry, where I was, you know, and before, like, they really care about, you know, trains, for example. In the US nobody cared about trains. So you wouldn't know that not trying to be in Europe or they, you know, carbon offset is huge. There's something like that the US thinks about as well. But in Europe, it's like ingrained. Like if I, if I buy a flight, I want to, I want to do something about it because I realize I'm taking it all. So there's different, huge different perceptions in how the world works. I would say Israel, somewhere in the middle, probably more skews towards the US Israelis in general, they have an issue.

Because they feel like they know US culture because they watch Friends and they watch, you know, all these shows, they're 100% sure they know US culture. And they come in and they're like, you know, Israel is very buddy buddy because it's so close and small. It's like the size of New Jersey, right? So, you know, everyone, I'm two steps away from anyone in Israel, most likely. And they are there for me from the Prime Minister to the last, you know, person somewhere. And they come and they're buddy, but they don't understand. You know, when somebody in the US tells them, oh, it's interesting, they don't understand. It's a no, they really think it's interesting. Or, you know, they come and you know their friend works at. Or not even a friend, some Israeli guy works as a VP in some company and they call them like, hey, I can solve all your problems, let me in and I'll. And then, you know, they start up with three people, right? And they're like, they're going to tell them how to run their business. So very, very confident. Which comes across one way in Israel, may come across very differently in the US and actually because it's because they know the language and because they watch all the shows, they actually know US culture. And I can tell you they 100% don't. It's very different.

I can attest to this because I have a couple of friends who are Israeli and there's definitely a sense and look, we know not everybody is this way. Like we get it. Like we're not going to overgeneralize, but for a moment we will. There's definitely the sense of they know how to tell you what to do better than you know what to do and what you should do is.

And that was very much like what we do for a living, Richard, as consultants a little bit.

But the interesting thing that at least I've experienced is that is that I also think that.

They'Re saying it from the heart because they care. Like they're passionate about it. It's the delivery. Maybe they don't necessarily understand, which could be said the same for us as we go to Europe. It's we care, but our delivery needs to adjust, you know, so. So it's not a slight to any of those. To our friends from Israel.

This has been great. Jonathan, we're going to ask you our final question is what do you want to ask us? But I want to give a quick shout out to Salesforce for Sales, Vidyard, Reggie, AI and Outreach. Please check out our sponsors and their tools and services because they will help you achieve what you're trying to do. And by all means, certainly get in touch with Jonathan over at Demo Stack. This episode has been massively enlightening, at least for me, and I've always known to do better, but I've probably taken it for granted and never researched it enough on how to do better. So hoping it drives some people that way. So Jonathan, what. What can we answer for you?

Well, I'd love your guys take on the, you know, PLG movement and all that. Obviously it's making, making a lot of waves faster. You can walk a meter without hearing PLG and some shape or form. I wonder how does that impact you, your thinking, your work and. Yeah, just your take on it.

Scott, you want me to go first? Do you want to go first?

Go ahead, go ahead.

So I was never aware of this.

Word or verb or whatever you want to call it till a few, I guess maybe a month or two ago when we interviewed, was it breezy?

I think, right, Correlated?

Yeah. He was talking all about product LED growth and I'm like, what's that term? I have no idea. So my problem though is that I agree with it. However, I have a massive disdain for buzzwords. So as soon as I hear PLG or product LED growth, it's just the next iteration of somebody's algorithm or our version of AI is better than everybody else's version of AI. But I'm biased, biased that way, right, Because I hear these kinds of phrases all the time. What is encouraging though is that people are looking at it as something that they should get better at. And so for me that's actually good and it's nice because a piece of that product LED growth does come down to the individual delivery. So there's a difference between PLG of driving an inbound lead and a self serve revenue model, which is obviously very important.

Versus, you know, something where it's, it's more of a platform that you've got to sell and you got to go sell in a multi threaded environment of, you know, six or eight different people and all that kind of stuff. So it's understanding the nuance behind it, but it is the new buzzword and it is the new, you know, algorithm. I can't even remember what the other, the other one, you know, the other buzzwords we hear all the time. So Scott, you're grinning, you've got that devilish grin that I know and recognize.

I feel like, and this is potentially and probably not accurate at all, but let me tell you how I feel. I feel like the phrase PLG came from product folks, complete and utter disdain for salespeople.

And the absolute heavy lift and cost in order to build a successful sales organization. So I feel like that's where it came from. And so as a sales leader, I obviously don't love hearing that. And so my skin bristles as soon as I Hear it. I think to myself, well, PLG is great until all of a sudden you need a fucking salesperson to actually convert off of these free trials. Or as Richard said, this more complicated kind of sales process. So there's a lot of people who do PLG till they get to a million or two in ARR. And all of a sudden they're like, well, fuck, now we need salespeople. And so I guess we're SLG now and we have to start over. So that's one other thing. And the last point that I'll make is.

I just don't like free trials. It's really that simple. I don't like giving away things for free. I understand that there are plenty of examples and plenty of companies who have done it really, really well for a really long time. HubSpot, for example, as one of them. I just don't like it.

I always think to myself, richard, let's say I'm going to go buy a house, right? And I'm going to tell the realtor, you know what? I really like this house. I'd like to try it out for a month and move all my shit in and live there for a month. And if we like it, we'll buy it. And if not, you know, no harm, no foul.

So I'm going to push.

Look at me like I was insane. So that's how I feel when people ask me, can I get a free trial of demo stack? Can I get a free trial of qualia? No, I don't want to give you a free trial. I want to talk through things. I'll let you behind the wheel. You can drive the screen, the demo environment right here. So I, I have a adverse reaction, obviously, to PLG type things.

Jonathan, Jonathan, what do we got wrong about it? Because we don't, you know, we're also not the people who should be defining plg. Like, let's be honest, like that's part of our. We can, we can associate with it.

But no, we're, we just have a show. So we're allowed to have uneducated opinions, right?

No, you know, I think, I think I always, I'm always also cautious about buzzwords. You know, we happen to have caught one and timing and that's useful for us. And we talk about it because that's like how people think about stuff. Stuff. But, but you're right, like AI was five years ago. That was machine learning AI. And you had to say that and your investor pitch and all that, even if you barely knew what you're talking about. I think PLG is being defined and right now it's a lot of stuff. I think it can easily cannibalize sales if you don't think about it correctly. I think discounting what salespeople do is very dangerous path. You can combine PLG to say also sales, but again then it's a conversation. What, what is it? You know, we've seen a lot of things that have just gone into a buzzword that were. Things that existed before just weren't kind of defined that way.

I got a question for you, Jonathan. So if you're, if you're a product person and you want to start promoting product led growth, does that mean you're willing to accept a revenue number?

Of course not, of course.

Because until then, keep your mouth shut about salespeople.

I think if you discount like even the big companies that you think like, oh, they just sell themselves, the big API companies and all that, you'd be surprised how many salespeople they have. If you actually go to LinkedIn and look at, they have like armies of AES and those are the companies that you'd be like, yeah, they're selling themselves. I gave you a few examples here. I don't want to call anyone out. And it's fine because you get to a point where salespeople do their job. Salespeople are important and they build a connection and you need them. So PLG will never replace it. And let's see what PLG ends up being exactly. But obviously interesting. But I think the court is out, at least on my end on what it means and how.

So let me, I'm going to flip it to you, one more question. How is PLG helping you guys give, you know, because Scott and I just bashed on it for a little bit so, you know, talk about the things you've learned from doing PLG the right way.

So I think what we learn and where it helps us and what it gets prospects to think about is like, how can I show my product earlier rather than a product. The definition of product is it's walled, right? It's walled up. If it wasn't walled, it was a website. That's the difference between a product, a web product and.

A website, right? The fact that it has walls. But if you have walls that you need to, because you need to protect the product, people need to log in and all that good stuff, communication becomes hard because that communication is also walled up. So PLG helps people think on how they need to unlock that, how they can show people Information how they can give the product experience earlier. And to my, you know, I'm betting essentially with demo stack that the way to do it is create that replica of your product that feel, looks and feels exactly like the real deal, that then you can communicate because it doesn't have all the heaviness of a product and all the protections and all the stuff you need. So, for example, if someone, you show a demo and someone asks you, hey, can I, can I get a link to play around with it? You as a rep might be thinking that, oh my God, I need to provision okta, I need to set things up. Needs to connect to Salesforce, five different things. And you know, even plg, even if you're not doing the whole PLG and you don't bite into the whole thing, you're still thinking, how do I empower this? And for example, demo, you just send a link out and be like, yeah, here, show your boss good. And you actually get analytics about that. So you know if they're getting in and actually playing with it. So you can, you can go. So that kind of stuff of like, how do I communicate the product? How do I do it earlier? How do I think about communicating my product in different stages? Top of funnel, bottom, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. I think I really bless the PLG for that because the product, putting the product first in the end, even if it's a cover for sales, I think it's. That's a very positive thing and something I truly believe in. So that, that piece I completely buy when.

When he talks about it like that, Richard, it's. It softens my stance because it's not, it's not how I have heard the phrase PLG spelled out. I'm thinking of like the extreme version. And Jonathan is saying, well, here's his imagining of it and that makes a lot more sense to me.

Yep. So does that make sense, Scott?

Yes, it makes total sense.

Awesome. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us, man. It's been a real pleasure getting to know you and your insights on demo has just been phenomenal. Like, you've opened up my eyes and my mind to it quite a bit. So thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for joining us, Jonathan.

Thank you. This was tons of fun. Thank you for having me.