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Welcome to our 8th edition of Show, Don't Tell. A newsletter to help you build REMARKABLE interactive demos...3 tips at a time.

This week we is three ways to make the demo about the buyer instead of the product:

1. a product page that writes the buyer into the scene
2. tours of somebody else's website, sorted by industry
3. two words on a button doing the work of a whole sentence

Let's get after it...

Tip #1: Let Them Play as Themselves

We've been beating the storytelling drum for nearly 90 editions. Give the buyer a character and a reason to care.

Zoom's Team Chat page has a great example of this.

It opens where you'd expect. “Every role has work that slows you down,” so build an AI agent for it. Then, instead of a feature list, two words…

Followed by “You're a marketing manager.”.

It walks you from campaign kickoff to the agent sitting in your team channel like somebody who works there. But they’ve wrapped the entire story around that one role to help their buyers say “I’m one of those too.”

If we’re being honest, it reads like a demo we'd build. We'd like to think somebody saw one of ours and took notes. No idea if that's true, but either way… we’re glad to see more of these out in the wild

→ Read Zoom's scenario and notice who the main character is​

Tip #2: Let Their Page Be Your Demo

Imagine you’re a Shopify store owner for a second. You’re shopping for a loyalty program. The product tour shows them the dashboard. The question in their head is “what's this going to look like on a store like mine?”

LoyaltyLion answers both on one page. A “3-minute tour” link in the nav lands you on a demo page with two tours up top: a customer-facing loyalty tour and a dashboard tour. Then underneath, “See real loyalty pages by industry,” and six tiles.

Each “Explore pages” link opens a tour of real stores in that industry, so you end up scrolling loyalty pages that live shops actually built with the product.

Jason and I like it because:

• When your product's output lives on somebody else's website, their page IS the demo
• Sorting by industry means the pet store owner goes straight to the pet stores

BONUS POINTS: it does a case study's job without anybody having to read a case study.

→ Explore LoyaltyLion's real loyalty pages by industry​

Tip #3 - Say "Try" More Often

How many buttons on your site have the word demo in them? Count them, then ask what any of them promise.

Book a demo promises a meeting, right? See a demo that promises a video somebody else made.

Checkbox's homepage button says Try Checkbox. It drops you on a page with the demo embedded.

Try is a promise about what YOU get to do. Book and See are promises about what gets done to you. The only thing that changed was the verb.

This tip might feel small, but you’ll be surprised what it does to your engagement and conversions.

→ Press Try Checkbox and see where it drops you​

So that’s it. Our 89th edition of Show, Don’t Tell.

3 useful tips to help you build remarkable interactive demos.

Tune in next Tuesday for more advice from DemoDash.

P.S.

If you know anyone else who would love these tips, please consider sending them this edition so they can subscribe 🙏
​

​Jason and Eric​
​Say hi on LinkedIn!