Online Product Demos to Win Over Your Customers (and Your Sales Team)
Continue to Online Product Demos to Win Over Your Customers (and Your Sales Team)…
So, you’ve decided that you want a demo of your behind-the-login site or application… Great choice! Site demos allow sales people and potential consumers to observe the experience of a secure environment in the absence of an actual login. There are lots of reasons why creating a demo to simulate these sites is a good idea:
Our experience designing complex behind-the-login applications makes us uniquely qualified to create demos of these experiences. In fact, we’ve written in the past about the value of demos and different ways to approach their development.
This article focuses on what we’ll need from you to ensure a smooth implementation of your demo and will provide some pro tips on things to consider before getting started.
Often our clients expect that because we are rebuilding something that already exists, that they we’ll be able to complete the work with little or no input from them. This is an assumption that has gotten us into trouble in the past. In this article, we get real about what it takes to create a demo of a behind-the-login site or application.
The most important resource that we will need from you as we develop a demo of your site is time.
First, there will be time invested in helping us determine the scope of the project. We don’t recreate every piece of content and functionality of the secure environment. Rather, we focus on key functions and content– the ones your potential customers will be most interested in viewing. We’ll need you to help us decide where to focus our efforts and exactly what should be built.
After the scope has been finalized, we will need continued access to our clients to ensure that we are proceeding according to plan. More often than not, we create demos of applications that we did not design. We require input from subject matter experts to answer questions that arise about how to handle a new scenario or situation. If you plan to spend time digging into the details with us throughout the course of the project, we can avoid delays that arise from a lack of input.
In order to create a high-fidelity demo that behaves like the real environment, the Crux Collaborative team is going to need access to that environment. There are three ways that this access can be provided.
Its important to figure out how this access will be provided and we sometimes need a lot of lead time to get it setup. Our clients often need to coordinate with IT, risk management, or even HR to get us what we need to create demos.
Often, there are different behind-the-login experiences for different users— additional features may be available to users that have a certain medical plan or who live in a specific part of the country. It’s important to remember that our demos are static and decisions will have to be made about what features and functionality we want to show. If you’re trying to incent potential customers to purchase additional products, then including optional features/functionality is a great idea. However, if you’re demonstrating a health-care management portal to potential customers, they will be disappointed if their experience differs from what they saw before signing up.
These situations are handled in one of two ways.
Like anything else worthwhile in life, creating demos requires time, energy, and attention to detail. Our experience has taught us that these demo products are well worth the investment. If you are thinking about creating a demo for your website or application, contact us. We’d be happy to walk you through our process.
Continue to Online Product Demos to Win Over Your Customers (and Your Sales Team)…
Continue to 7 Typography Formatting Tips for Better Usability…
Continue to New Accessibility Guidelines: What You Need to Know…