Last month, Demostack announced its launch out of stealth and the close of a $13.5 million Series-A round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Des Traynor (CEO of Intercom), Clark Valberg (CEO of Invision), Tomer Tagrin (CEO of YOTPO), and GTM Fund. This round of funding coming together almost immediately after an unannounced $4 million seed round in December 2020 led by Amiti Ventures, with participation from Operator Collective, Cerca Partners, Assaf Rappaport (CEO of Wiz), Dan Adika (CEO of WalkMe), Tomer London (Co Founder and CPO at Gusto), Micha Kaufman (CEO of Fiverr), Nir Zohar (COO at Wix), Slavik Markovich (SVP Product at Palo Alto Networks), Javi Ortega (VP Sales at Hopin), and Boaz Hecht (VP Platform at ServiceNow). All seed round investors expanded their support, participating in the Series-A round.
In the age of Covid-19, remote selling has become the default and delivering great software sales demos remotely is as important as ever. Prospective buyers increasingly expect more personalized and seamless sales experiences. They are also more knowledgeable than ever about their buying options before entering a sales process, increasing the need to differentiate from the competition early on in the buying cycle.
Demostack aims to give software companies a competitive advantage by enabling them to create and deliver world-class product demos at scale.
“Demostack gives every software business a powerful competitive advantage, allowing them to better engage their prospective customers, doing away with old school temperamental demos,” said Adam Fisher, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “The response to the company’s product has been resoundingly positive and we are excited to partner with this talented founding team to create and lead a compelling new SaaS product category.”
Until now, to create custom product demos that are tailored to the prospective customer, sales teams would have to work with their engineering team to add and manipulate data in their product, often requiring weeks of work. In some cases, key features of the software, such as analytics, are impossible to customize for demos, greatly limiting sales’ ability to showcase their product’s value with the prospect.
“Demostack is our dream demo environment. Before customizing our dashboards and analytics to tell a story of WalkMe’s impact was impossible. With Demostack we can easily edit graphs and showcase data-driven product stories for any deal – It’s a total game changer for us,” said Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe.
Creating fully custom product demos, visually tailored to the wants and needs of the prospect, is accomplished in minutes with Demostack using similar no-code, point-and-click design features available in web design tools like Wix and Invision.
“Empowering businesses to craft a professional digital presence with no coding or design skills needed is core to our mission at Wix. I invested in Demostack, because we share this mission in common and I am impressed with how they are achieving it for creating sales demos,” said Nir Zohar, COO & President of Wix.
“Enabling sellers to design tailored product demos promotes confidence and showcases Yotpo’s value utilizing realistic examples. In doing so, our prospects are able to visualize precisely how they will be interacting with Yotpo on a daily basis,” said Tsvika Vishnievsky, VP of Revenue Operations at YOTPO. “This helps accelerate deals through the sales funnel and provides agency partners with a valuable tool to use when speaking with their clients about Yotpo’s commerce marketing platform. “
Product demos created with Demostack are interactive replicas of the product’s front-end design and functionality. While they look and feel exactly like the actual product, they are completely independent, eliminating typical issues that arise with software product demos, including technical bugs, accidental sharing of sensitive customer or internal data, as well as connectivity issues.
“The dread of having a demo fail on you is terrifying, I’ve felt it. It can happen at the worst time to the best of us. Even the best demos can fail, but we are determined to make them as fail proof as possible,” said Jonathan Friedman, Co Founder and CEO of Demostack.
In addition to being presented live, Demostack product demos can be seamlessly shared for prospects to explore and pass around within their organization. Demostack automatically tracks when someone visits the left-behind demo, such as a new stakeholder, along with other never-before-possible insights that can help the sales person get the deal done.
“The hand off demo is going to have a huge impact on organizations getting deals done faster. Demostack offers the best solution I’ve seen to get product in the hands of prospects and gain deal-winning insights in exchange,” said Leyla Seka, Partner at Operator Collective and former EVP at Salesforce.
With the increased flexibility and speed Demostack provides with creating custom product demos, Demostack believes other revenue-generating and customer-facing teams beyond sales can now leverage demos to help accelerate revenue and deliver more seamless customer experiences between each team. Customer Success teams can more easily demonstrate the value of upgrading services and train users on functionality. Partnerships teams can give partners product demos they can use for reselling and showcasing integrations. Marketing teams can drive new leads by giving access to a product demo after submission of a name and email address.
“Every company with a digital product and a sales team is building two products: their actual product and another one for showcasing. Taking away R&D resources to build showcasing products to demo doesn’t make sense anymore, “ said Jonathan. “Your product needs to tell the story of the value a prospect needs to see to become a customer. You can’t force them to imagine it.”
“We invested in Demostack because sales demos do not go as well as hoped, are not personalized, and even more importantly going forward, have no chance to keep up with the pace of new features being introduced by SaaS companies especially given the release acceleration enabled by microservices and shift left trends,” said Ben Rabinowitz from Amiti. “We looked around and the Demostack team was clearly the best team among all start-ups to address all these challenges and revolutionize the sales process.”
With $17.3 million in the bank and top investors and brands bought in, Demostack plans to aggressively grow it’s global footprint across R&D, sales, and marketing, and position itself as the market leader of demo experience solutions for midmarket and enterprise organizations.
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