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Show, Don't Tell

🤫 Show, Don't Tell #71 - There's a poem hiding in a cybersecurity demo


Read Time: 3.3 minutes

Welcome to our 71st edition of Show, Don't Tell. A newsletter to help you build REMARKABLE interactive demos...3 tips at a time.

This week, we:

  1. Find personality inside a cybersecurity product (yes, really)
  2. Hand buyers an escape hatch right at the signup gate
  3. Stack the conversion paths instead of choosing one

Let's get after it...

Supported By:

  • Navattic is our favorite interactive demo platform ❤️
  • It's easy to build demos of your product, that feel like the real thing
  • With HTML screen captures, easy editing, lots of sharing options, and powerful analytics
  • Try building your first demo for free!

Tip #1: Personality Is In Our Nature

Think about any 'cyber cloud' demo on the face of the planet. You'd be lying if you said it should sound like anything OTHER than a compliance manual.

But suddenly… there's a tooltip that says:

Oh dear, an alert! 🫢
But that's why we're here, so no one gets hurt! 🦺

That's Acronis. A cybersecurity company who’s wrote a poem inside their interactive demo.

And I'm not even sure the product is vastly different. It just feels that way because somebody decided buyers were allowed to enjoy themselves.

Jason and I love this because:

  • It makes an alert feel less scary, which is the entire job of a security demo
  • Only a team that trusts their product can afford to be playful inside it
  • Weird enough to remember, weird enough to share

Remember Ep. 36 when Quick wrote demo copy like a character was inside it? Acronis just pulled it into a category that most wouldn't dare.

See the demo that's not afraid to rhyme

Tip #2: Off-Ramp at the Gate

Pretend that you're a buyer. You're scrolling for a few moments, then hit the demo signup gate. Are you ready to book a demo yet? (I know I'm not).

But then there’s a CTA you weren't expecting to see:

Not ready for a demo? Take a tour instead.

That's Birdie.

The "take a tour" button drops you into their demo center instead of a demo form. The first time I saw this, I exhaled a little. I mean, that's the goal… right?

Jason and I like this one in particular because:

  • The "not ready" buyer used to bounce. Now they stay, just on a different track.
  • It tells the reader you respect that they might not be ready
  • Whoever does fill out the form DEFINITELY wants sales

We've talked about off-ramps a lot lately. Birdie moves the off-ramp upstream, to the gate itself. Which is something we haven’t seen before.

See the gate that knows when to step aside

Tip #3: Always Give Them a Next Step

Dremio's demo for their Agentic Lakehouse doesn't make the buyer pick where to convert. It just lets them convert wherever.

They’ve got three moves stacked on top of each other:

  1. A sticky "Start for Free" bar that follows you across every step of the tour.
  2. A left-nav checkbox that lets you swap to a different demo mid-flight without losing your place.
  3. At the end, three CTAs: Back, Start for Free, or Next Demo.

Jason and I give this an A+ because the buyer's intent will shift mid-tour. It always does.

A sticky bar, a checklist, and the end CTAs aren't redundant. They catch buyers at different points of readiness, and they kill the dead-end moment lots of demos finish on.

In Ep. 37, GovDash let buyers pick their path before they started. Dremio extends that mid-flight: the buyer can change their mind without leaving.

See how every screen is a conversion path

Build and manage demos directly from your LLM

Navattic just released a major update to their MCP server.

Not only can you get performance metrics or reminders to refresh your demos, you can actually build and edit demos directly from AI agents like Claude 🤯

And now, Navattic has released a library of 16 ready-to-use skills, making it even easier to build on-brand demos, report on analytics, use demos as sales follow up, and more.

For example, let's say you want to update your demos to include messaging around a new feature. Instead of doing it manually, try combining these two skills 👇

Feature launch demo updater: Maps a shipped or changed feature to the exact demo steps that reference the outdated version, then drafts the fix.

Staleness triage: Ranks demos for refresh priority using traffic and staleness.

The Navattic MCP will then:

  • Look through demos by traffic and last updated date
  • Suggested Captures and text edits to those flows
  • Apply those edits directly into Navattic (after your approval)

All it takes is simple natural language prompts, and you can let AI build and improve your demos for you.

I created a short video testing one of the MCP skills, so you can see exactly what they're capable of 👇

→ See the "Demo QA Checklist" skill in action

Ask the Dash Bros 🎙️

A live, FREE coaching session to help you build better interactive demos (and make them your top marketing asset.)

In these 45-minute coaching sessions, Eric and Jason answer your questions about demo strategy, distribution, sales enablement, and any other challenges you're facing with interactive demos.

The next session is Wednesday, July 22nd at 12PM ET.

→ Register now - It's 100% Free

So that’s it. Our 71st 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
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Show, Don't Tell

Learn how to create remarkable interactive demos that make your SaaS product easy to understand and buy. 3 practical tips and examples every Tuesday.

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