Virtual Product Tours and Demonstrations - with Andrea Wunderlich, Maxio

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you, to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Andrea Wunderlich, the Director of Product Marketing at Maxio. We'll be covering three primary topics today with Andrea. First, the genesis of the Maxio TUR Center. Second, overcoming the concerns of competitors knowing about your product's feature function and an open source type demonstration venue and channel. And third, measuring the impact of buyer self-directed solution overviews and demonstrations. So, Andrea, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Andrea Wunderlich** (1:17)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Ray. I'm really excited about our conversation today. But yeah, as you mentioned, I'm leading product marketing and customer marketing over at Maxio. So, Maxio is a billing and financial operations platform for primarily B2B SaaS companies, but any recurring revenue business can take advantage of Maxio. I believe we connected back in 2022, Maxio was just starting to lean into this influencer marketing strategy. And so, I personally was tasked with looking around in the finance, accounting, metrics communities and seeing who are the top voices, who has really good opinions, who do people listen to? And so, that's how we originally got connected a couple of years ago. And now we've had a great partnership between the two companies and we've produced some great original research content, some thought leadership content. So, yeah, it's been a great ride.

**Ray Wright** (2:16)
Well, I was really excited to invite you to be a guest here on the show. When I first saw the Maxio Tour Center, because I truly believe in this concept of opening up a product's feature function to the broadest audience as possible, so that you can even be engaged in that initial analysis of the different solutions we may want to use. But here's something that has a long time, marketing and sales leader, that I've heard debated again and again before we get into the Maxio Tour Center. That is, when to provide a potential customer, a prospect, a product demonstration? Should it be one of the first activities in the sales process? Should it only be done after deep discovery and they're well qualified? Then we're going to talk today about even doing it early in the process, top of the funnel. Do you have an opinion on when a product should first be demonstrated to a potential customer?

**Andrea Wunderlich** (3:11)
Yeah. I come from my backgrounds in B2B SaaS. I've been at several B2B SaaS companies now, most of them with a primarily sales led growth motion. There's account executives, there's you submit a demo request, you hop on a discovery call, then you see a demo, then you go to next steps, yada yada. I think the answer is it's changed in the last couple of years.
Buyer behavior has changed. People have more expectations that their B2B buying experiences are going to mirror their consumer buying experiences, and that involves a lot of showing the actual product early on in the process, whereas before it used to be after several conversations with maybe potentially a couple of different people at a company. I think the answer is as soon as possible in today's climate. I don't think that there's any downside to showing people the product, especially when you caveat of like, hey, especially when you have a complex software like Maxio, it's highly configurable to individual use cases. I think people understand that. I think they want to see, show me the basics, show me the art of the possible, and then they understand, hey, there could be a more tailored demonstration with a salesperson or a sales engineer down the line.

**Ray Wright** (4:39)
I totally agree with you and I think there's also these two, I'll call mega trends regarding this topic in the industry. Number one is product-led growth, right? Companies have went to the extreme of, hey, use my product without being a paying customer often, right? And so that's one. And number two, if we believe all the Gartner research and Forster research, about 65, 70, 80% of the buyer's journey is done before they talk to a salesperson, I sure as hell want that buyer to have evaluated what my product at least does at a macro level, right? So, I'm in the discussion. I totally agree with you. Now, you have the Maxio Tour Center which stimulated this. What was the catalyst of having a, I call it a self-directed buyer demonstration capability on your website before you even talk to the potential customer? What was the catalyst?