Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Veronika Riederle, Co-Founder & CEO of Demodesk:
Q: Tell us more about Demodesk – regional markets, professional industries, etc?
A: Alexander Popp and I founded Demodesk in late 2017. We developed a unique screen sharing tech solution that uses virtual displays instead of recording the presenter’s local desktop screen. Building upon the revolutionary proprietary technology, demodesk provides an intelligent, cloud-based online meeting platform for customer-facing sales and success teams.
Now, 150+ customers worldwide – including Treatwell, Personio, and Forto – use Demodesk to sell products and services remotely, onboard and support customers online. We have raised $8 million in its latest Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, increasing the total raised to $10.3 million.
We saw how complex screen sharing tools were; being used to demo software remotely to customers. Meeting participants with difficulties joining the meeting due to software downloads, firewall problems, and bad conferencing information provided. Across all industries, the majority of meetings are starting late with up to 15 minutes delay. When the meeting finally starts, the presentation itself suffers from transmission lags, bad resolution and frustrating interfaces. In a time where many B2B companies build web-based software, it’s needlessly complicated to route screen sharing through local desktops still.
There had to be a better way of sharing cloud-based content than recording a video of your local desktop screen. We found it.
Demodesk is a sales and success-focused online meeting solution that assists reps in real-time during the call, automates scheduling & CRM logging, and provides next-level analytics.
Demodesk helps sales and success teams increase productivity and conversion rates by automating sales coaching & training and cutting down time spent on manual scheduling, preparation and follow-up.
Our platform was built as a revolutionary online meeting technology that utilizes a virtual screen rather than sharing your local desktop. By doing that, it can provide real-time guidance on the presenter’s side without the customer seeing it.
Demodesk also provides a no download solution that works with any browser and device and enables instant control sharing with multiple participants for engaging and interactive meetings, HD video conferencing and international phone dial-ins.
Demodesk automatically loads the right playbook into every meeting – providing sales reps with presentation content (websites, web apps, slides, documents), speaker notes, and battle cards for handling sales objections.
Structured note taking is built into the meeting tool and notes are automatically logged into Salesforce after the call.
Demodesk offers a complete scheduling suite that automates meeting scheduling, synchronizes Google or Microsoft calendars in real-time and automatically keeps Salesforce up-to-date. Users can also schedule directly out of Salesforce and set up advanced round robin and territory assignment rules.
Advanced meeting analytics help sales operations analyze bookings, meeting attendance and team performance. Demodesk logs all data automatically back to the CRM. You can get a detailed overview of what is happening in your meetings and see what has been shared at which point in time.
Recommended: Q: What makes your company unique?
A: What differentiates Demodesk from traditional tools is the unique approach to screen sharing. Traditional tools only record a video of the presenter’s local desktop screen. Demodesk sets up a 100% web-based virtual display instead, that anyone can access by just clicking a link.
By utilizing a virtual display, the software can automatically load the right slides and websites at the meeting start, provide real-time conversational guidance along sales playbooks and help handle sales objections on the spot.
On top of providing real-time sales coaching, the software includes automated scheduling, CRM integrations, and in-depth meeting analytics.
Another game changing feature especially for customer service professionals is the ability to instantly share mouse and keyboard control and collaboratively work on the virtual display for interactive onboarding and support.
Q: Can you describe a typical use case or customer scenario for your solution?
A: We have seen our customer base double, in response to this need, and today more than 150 customers across Europe and the US – featuring Treatwell, Personio, and Forto – use Demodesk to close deals.
Typically our customers are B2B SaaS sales and customer success teams that are looking to increase conversion and retention rates while eliminating the meeting pain too many people are familiar with. However, the current situation has brought a wider range of customer profiles to Demodesk including businesses in solar, furniture manufacturing, and more. (see next question for more customer information).
Q: What are some of the real-world results enterprises can expect with your solution?
A: Personio uses Demodesk to eliminate the pain associated with online meetings.
“Before using Demodesk, our customers faced technical issues in 10-20% of the demos. Now that’s close to 0%. Demodesk helped significantly improve the customer experience and our demo conversion rates.” -Emil Mahr
“We worked with three different systems in parallel and needed to manually set up and update meeting details. Very often, we have 3-4 sales demos per day – so the time for managing those administrative tasks summed up quickly.” -Victoria Röper, Team lead Inbound Sales @ Personio
Results: Demodesk helped Personio increase sales demo conversion rates by up to 20% and save each sales rep up to 60 minutes per day.
This is only one example of how a Demodesk customer made their sales process more effective. In general, Demodesk helps make the whole sales process more efficient with various integrations, including Salesforce, scheduling and email automation, and preloaded sales content so that everything is prepared ahead of the meeting. Interactive screen sharing capability also helps to increase conversion rates and give the meeting participant a more in depth understanding of the product presentation.
Forto (freight forwarding business with an intuitive platform to book, manage and analyze global transports easily) is also a customer of Demodesk that was seeking a similar solution.
“We’ve tried many different screen sharing tools but we weren’t happy with any of them. Demodesk finally solves the screen sharing pain. My sales reps are now 5-10% more productive each day. And Demodesk took our product demos to a more professional level.” – Michael Wax, Co-Founder, and COO
“With Demodesk, it became much easier for our BDEs to schedule product demos and allocate prospects to the right AM based on their location and other variables. Besides time savings, Demodesk saved our AEs thousands of kilometers when traveling to offline meetings. That way, we are able to save a lot of time, increase efficiency and eliminate human errors.” – Matthias Stammen, Sales & Growth Operations Manager
Results: Demodesk helped Forto increase conversion, efficiency, and accountability for Inside Sales. With Demodesk, the sales team’s productivity has increased by more than 10%.
Recommended: Q: And, I have to ask, what can we expect to see from Demodesk later in 2020?
A: We have built a strong base for the online meeting side of the platform including virtual screen sharing capability and the viewer itself. This year we have been putting a lot of our efforts into making Demodesk the perfect tool for sales teams by introducing and updating various integrations, workflow automation, playbooks, battle cards, and more. Seeing out the rest of 2020, we will make sure that these features and functionalities reach their full potential to support these teams. Next year we will further develop the reporting and analytical functions of the platform.
Last Updated on November 1, 2020
