How We Scaled Product Demos at Intercom — WistiaFest 2017
June 13, 2017
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Phil Byrne
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Phil Byrne, Product Education Manager for video at Intercom, describes how the company scaled their product demos. Five phases later, they’ve learned to give people what they want, when they want it, using video.
During Intercom’s first demo phase, co-founder Des Traynor scoured the internet for any prospects he believed would be a good fit for their business. Traynor presented people their data in direct emails, but doing so exerted maximum effort and gained minimum reach. The team said goodbye to phase one and learned they needed to trade personalization for more eyeballs on their demos.
With phase two, they began using GoToWebinar as a tool. Intercom grew as a product, and Traynor tried hosting live demos for people overseas. This process wasn’t scalable so they hired a team to make live demos every day for their different products. However, rotating different people across demo topics was difficult to standardize. From this experience, Intercom learned scaling demos was a good thing for increasing reach, but they must also scale their content.
To scale their content, they provided slide decks from their demos for people to share with their team. Intercom saw minimal reach increase in phase three so they created hybrid demos. Using pre-recorded video content, the team aimed to create better reach and connections with people. They inserted video in onboarding messages, demo reminders, and their live demos. Putting more effort into content production proved to be more efficient, but demo attendance was still undesirable.
Realizing people would rather learn from Intercom on their own time, the company is now on-demand, removing barriers to watch their demos. Videos embedded on Intercom’s pages are geographically inclusive and offer viewers a shorter time commitment. Intercom saw a massive increase in viewership as well as an unexpected increase in post-demo behavior.
Watch Byrne’s presentation to learn all about how Intercom scaled product demos with video.