The SaaS market has taken the world by storm in the past few years, and it isn’t showing signs of slowing down any time soon. According to Statista, the SaaS market is anticipated to reach a global valuation of $208 billion in 2023, which is pretty staggering considering its $31.4 billion valuation in 2015. For the most part, this exponential growth is due to the immense value that SaaS firms bring to their customers through offering access to simplified, affordable, and highly effective software solutions. (Solutions that would otherwise necessitate expensive infrastructure upgrades or complex on-site hardware installations.) However, as demand for SaaS companies rises, so too does the competition for consumer dollars. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important for SaaS firms to find ways to effectively showcase their products by demonstrating their value and use cases to prospects. Typically, this is done through product demonstrations, which effectively function as a “try before you buy” marketing method. In light of this, the sales demo has become one of the most pivotal aspects of the entire customer journey, as it gives companies a small window of opportunity to dazzle potential clients and convert them into paying customers. In this article, we will compare and contrast three companies that are looking to serve this market by offering product demo experience platforms that are perfectly tailored to these scenarios. Let’s get into it.
Reprise, Walnut and Demostack
Founded in 2020, Reprise is a SaaS demo platform for sales and marketing teams seeking to present their products through story-based demo experiences. Reprise does not require any prior coding expertise, which means that back-end teams are not required to be engaged in the workflow. This not only frees up their time, but also lets those responsible for delivering the presentation set it up completely on their terms.
Reprise, Walnut and DemostackMarket perception, and our thoughts
To make this possible, the Reprise platform allows revenue teams to capture and edit animations within their software’s front-end. From there, they can showcase features and create sequenced self-guided tours, along with multi-team, role-specific access controls aimed at preventing unauthorized access and edits. The Reprise software also comes with built-in performance and analytics metrics that deliver customer-facing teams important insights that can help steer them towards a conversion. According to some customer feedback from around the web, Reprise is charging its customers per demo views, which could be a bit discouraging. Founded in 2020, Walnut is a Sales Experience Platform designed to help revenue teams get the very best out of each demo. The platform’s overarching goal is to create the most customer-centric experience possible through empowering sales personnel with all the tools and features they need to directly appeal to each prospect’s unique wants, needs, and pain points. Walnut achieves this with its easy-to-use, intuitive no-code software, which removes the necessity for back-end teams, such as graphic design and R&D departments, to get involved with the demo creation. This hand’s full control over to the people who will be delivering the demos, the sales teams. As a result, sales personnel can tailor each demo for the prospect they are facing, while collecting key information along the way (click monitoring) that can be analyzed and used to better inform strategy in subsequent demos. Finally, Walnut’s Sales Experience Platform is entirely hosted on the cloud. This means no more downtime or embarrassing glitches during the demo. By removing this variable, sales employees can focus on the task at hand and concentrate on delivering the best experience possible, increasing conversions, and driving more revenue through the company. Walnut offers advanced insights and integrations, to close the loop between sales leaders within the organization, learn from the demos and improve conversion rates. Founded in late 2020, Demostack is another solution that tackles the same problem. The platform is no-code and offers an easy-to-use drag and drop editor that allows teams to create interactive demos. Demostack demonstrations are constructed using a single source of truth, allowing all creations to be updated and edited with each new product release. This also means that demos can be edited and optimized when new information emerges during prospect conversations, allowing salespeople to tailor their strategy to specific buyer use cases. Demostack also has applications across a wide number of SaaS business operations (aside from sales), such as creating guided marketing demos where prospects can educate themselves about products. Employees can also access important learning and development tools in a demo sandbox that enables them to effectively prepare for future client engagements.
Market perception, and our thoughts
It’s great to see a whole new landscape evolving right before our eyes. It reminds many sales veterans of how competitive landscapes such as Gong/Chorus and HubSpot/Marketo have emerged. Reprise, Demostack and Walnut are all catering to an exponentially increasing demand as the SaaS industry continues to grow. There will undoubtedly be enough room for each of these companies to flourish if they continue on their current trajectory. They have all raised significant funds, and are in the range of 100 employees. But, value and product-wise, there are some differences to be aware of. Walnut and Reprise both stand out in efficiency, however, in our opinion, the Reprise platform is less simple to use out of all three. Reprise does boast a wide set of features, but Walnut does as well, and is overall simpler to use.
Reprise fits mostly enterprise companies, but also does require some hand holding and a white-glove service, while Walnut is not only a “demo editor” but a wider platform that helps teams scale and sell better – whether SMB or enterprise. Demostack seems to be working quite a bit on their unique value proposition, but as TechCrunch wrote in a recent funding announcement of theirs, don’t bring anything new to the table. They don’t have quite as many reviews and testimonials when compared to Reprise and Walnut. If choosing a more well-known and highly trusted company is at the top of your list, Demostack fall short. Our bottom line: All three are worth a try, though any brief research you’ll likely perform will lead you to trusting Walnut better than Reprise and Demostack.
