The ultimate guide to sales demos

A great sales demonstration can make or break a deal. Skilled sales reps use demos to tell a story, solve a problem, and engage prospects. Get it right, and prospects will see your product as the obvious solution.

This guide covers everything you need to know about sales demos. We’ll break down sales demo best practices, share templates to get you started quickly, and offer key tactics to help you run demos that convert.

Key highlights:

Sales demos show product value and move a deal forward.
They build trust, create urgency, and close deals faster.
Live demos are suitable for high-value leads, while pre-recorded demos offer flexibility and scalability.
Using Mural enhances engagement and collaboration with templates, interactive sessions, and AI features.

What is a sales demo?

A sales demo is a live or recorded presentation that shows a prospect exactly how your product solves their problems. Rather than listing features, a great sales demo is your opportunity to connect the dots between what your product does and why it matters to your prospects. In fact, one study shows top performers (selling 120% above quota) focus less on features and more on problem-solving (Gong).

Sales demos are sometimes confused with product demos. Product demos are more general and are used in marketing or for onboarding to show features. Both are important, but reps should focus on sales demos that are customized, convincing, and aimed at solving the prospect’s problems.

Why is a sales demo important?

A sales demo moves a deal forward. Instead of making prospects imagine your product, you demonstrate it in real time, showing in clear detail why your product is worth the investment.

Aurea Nogues, Sr. Account Executive at Mural, shares her take on why sales demos matter:

“Sales demos are crucial in the sales process because they provide a tangible experience of the value your product offers. Using Mural helps me communicate ideas in simple and creative ways, and drive engagement and interest from the individuals I’m speaking to.”

Your goal as a sales rep is to ‌make the buying journey and decision process easy. When done right, a sales demo can:

Shorten the sales cycle by addressing objections early.
Increase win rates by making your value clear.
Keep prospects engaged so they don’t lose interest before buying.

What are the benefits of a sales demonstration?

By the time you’re ready to demo your product, you’ve probably engaged with your prospect a few times to learn more about their needs. A strong sales demo presentation does more than just explain your product. It’s your opportunity to further engage your prospect with a personalized, visual, and interactive experience. Through a great demo, you can:

Build trust by showing expertise: Demonstrate your knowledge through a visual, interactive demo, making your expertise tangible.
Create urgency by making the problem (and solution) feel real: Use visuals to show the prospect’s problems and your product as the obvious fix.
Differentiate your product from competitors: Highlight unique features and advantages with visual aids, setting your product apart.
Close deals faster by removing uncertainty: Engage prospects in a collaborative demo, addressing concerns in real time, and building confidence.

Types of sales demos

Consider how you’d like to approach demos with your prospects. First, you’ll need to decide if you’re meeting in person or on a video call for a live demo, or if you’re better off using pre-recorded demos.

Live video demos

These are real-time, interactive presentations conducted in-person or via video conferencing. This method allows for immediate feedback and Q&A, fostering a dynamic and engaging experience. These types of demos are best for high-value leads, enterprise prospects, or customers who need a hands-on experience and provides a personal touch.

Aurea offers her top advice for running interactive demos:

“It’s crucial to engage the audience as much as possible, and to be empathic and understanding at all times. I try to add fun activities such as icebreakers or games before running live demos using Mural. My goal is to help ‌prospects to learn something new so they leave the demo feeling positive and inspired.”

Ready to get started? Before the demo, send a calendar invite that includes a clear agenda for a 30-45 minute meeting. Include a link to a mural that might look like this:

An icebreaker, timeline, notes on pain points, demo hyperink, and section for questions are visualized on a mural canvas.

Here's a sample agenda with timeblocks:

Welcome (3 minutes): Start with an icebreaker or warm-up, if you wish. Review your agenda and goals.
Discovery (7 minutes): Discuss your prospect’s major pain points.
Relevant features (15 minutes): Show key features that address the prospect’s specific pain points.
Interactive activity (10 minutes): Let the prospect interact with the product through a small task or activity.
Wrap-up (5 minutes): Summarize the benefits and suggest follow-up actions.

Pre-recorded video demo

Pre-recorded presentations are for prospects who want to watch at their convenience, or for sales reps who are trying to scale their outreach. This method is flexible, allowing prospects to review the demo multiple times and share it with other stakeholders. It’s best for cold leads and inbound requests, or clients who request flexibility.

Video demos can be impactful because they’re scalable and let prospects engage on their own terms. Here’s some tips on creating effective pre-recorded demos:

Pick your tool: Choose an easy to use video recording tool, like Loom.
Keep it snappy: Your video should be short, around 2-5 minutes. Hook them in the first 10 seconds with a compelling problem.
Create a compelling narrative: Show, don’t tell! Narrate as you walk through a real use case. Add credibility by including a brief customer story.
Create urgency: End with a call to action, like booking a live demo or a follow-up conversation. Specify a timeline, like “today” or “this week” to inspire your prospect to take action.

Tailored demos for specific audiences and use cases

Tailored demos are essential for showcasing how your product fits into the unique workflows of various prospects and business sizes. Compared to a generic walk-through, prospects will more clearly see how your product fits into their world.

To run an impactful, tailored demo, you’ll need to:

Be prepared: Run deep discovery sessions before the demo to confirm their pain points. An empathy map canvas template or 5 whys template are great places to start to structure your discovery before a demo.
Get specific: Research to understand the prospect’s business, including their products, audience, company, and industry. Demo the prospect’s exact use case, not generic features. Use their data and examples when possible.
Know your audience: Understand the audience you’re speaking to. If it’s an enterprise organization, focus on long-term ROI, security, and compliance, and cost-effectiveness at scale. For SMB, focus on ease of use and quick wins, with a simple setup and quick adoption.
Stay flexible: Leave room for customization, and adjust the live demo based on their feedback. Prospects can contribute to a simple feedback template throughout the session, and reps and quickly address live.

Here’s a few examples of use cases and audiences, and different approaches you might take using Mural:

Financial Services: Selling fintech software to CFOs and finance teams in B2B financial services? Turn complex payment workflows into simple visuals that resonate.

Flowcharts show how funds move through your prospect’s system.
A Mind mapping template highlights pain points and inefficiencies in their current process.

Marketing: Selling automation tools to SMB CMOs and marketing teams? Show how automation increases efficiency with hands-on collaboration.

Customer journey mapping illustrates how automation nurtures leads through the your prospect’s funnel.
A campaign planning template help teams ‌see how ‌automation tools can improve campaign execution.

Consulting: Selling consulting services to Fortune 500 companies? Turn abstract transformation strategies into tangible, co-created visuals.

A value stream template to help clients visualize the value of your proposed transformation.
A SWOT analysis template guide interactive discussions on customer strategy.

Tech: Selling AI-powered analytics tools to innovation teams? Show how your technology improves business intelligence.

A Problem Tree Analysis template aligns stakeholders on key AI challenges.
A “How Might We” questions template for brainstorming fosters discussion on innovative applications.

How to use Mural for your sales demo

I’m guessing you hear “demo” and think “presentation”. But that’s only one part of a great sales demonstration. Our visual collaboration platform has been around for over a decade, so we know you can do better than a slide deck and talking at your customer.

Because Mural is an interactive workspace, your sales demos can be an elevated experience: more engaging, collaborative, and effective than slides. And slides can‌ be a barrier to your success. This study found reps were 17% less likely to achieve a follow-up call because they signaled a presentation, not a conversation.

Aurea shares her favorite ways to use Mural for her own sales demo best practices, starting with modifying pre-designed templates:

“I tailor existing Mural templates using my prospect’s logo and brand colors, and run conversations using LUMA’s human-centered design methods. Both are extremely useful and easy to personalize, so I use them on a regular basis.”

Here’s a few easy ways to get started:

Tailor a template: Use a pre-built simple sales presentation template to guide your conversation and keep your sales demo structured. Use Mural to create a more compelling two-way conversation.
Engage your customer: Make your discovery interactive. In your mural, include existing pain points from past conversations, and encourage your prospect to add new sticky notes to go into more detail. This helps them be co-creators of the solution.
Narrow the focus: Help your prospect identify key challenges and solutions. If there are many pain points, ask your customer to use the Voting feature, or have them prioritize with priority bullseye template. This way, you know what to emphasize during the demo.
Stay organized: As you guide your prospect through the interactive portion of your demo to try out your product, keep their feedback and questions organized with a feedback template.
Save time with AI: Mural AI can help synthesize live feedback or questions quickly during your demos so you move faster.
Continue the collaboration: Share your mural after the sales demonstration to keep the discussion going asynchronously. Use comments to send follow-up reminders directly to your prospect’s email.

Human-centered methods for more impactful sales demos

An experience diagram with colorful stickies is shown in the mural canvas

Make sales demos more interactive with LUMA, a framework for human-centered problem-solving. Beyond a standard one-way presentation, engage more deeply with how your product solves problems for your prospect.

Here are a few simple LUMA methods you can try during your sales demo:

Affinity Clustering: Organize and prioritize a prospect’s pain points in real-time.
Experience Diagramming: Map out your prospect’s current workflow and visually show where your product improves it.
Rose, Thorn, Bud: Quickly identify what a prospect likes (rose), dislikes (thorn), and is curious about (bud) during the demo.

Try using these methods to make your sales demo more consultative and engaging (and read on about human-centered design training.)

Turn sales demos into a visual conversations with Mural

A compelling sales demonstration is a collaborative conversation with your customer. Mural helps you go beyond static slides by turning your demo into an interactive, visual experience.

Get started by talking to our team to learn how to transform your sales demos into visual collaborations.