Should You Invest in Incentivized Demos?

Intro to Incentivised Demos 

The goal of this tactic to generate qualified meetings with key prospects, and educate them on your product in exchange for an incentive as thank you for their time. 

The result is your ideal prospects spending 15-30 minutes with your sales team that would have otherwise never booked a call because of timing, perceived value, or other factors.

The average cost per incentivised demo can range from $125 - $500 where as the average cost per non-incentivised demo will typically range between $500 - $1,000+ 

The key to making this tactic work is great targeting, problem-focused messaging, and scalable unit economics when factoring incentive costs and opp conversion rates. 

What Incentives Should You Offer? 

When deciding on your incentive there's two key points to take into consideration:

1. Perceived value = how valuable does your prospect perceive your incentive to be? if you're offering them a Starbucks gift card but they drink Dunkin Donuts it won't land. The better you understand your ICP then the easier it will be to brainstorm incentives. 
2.  Ease of fulfillment = how easily can you send the incentive to your prospect after attending the demo? You can have the most valuable incentive in the world but if it's hard to operationaly fulfill you're not going to be able to scale. 

The most proven and common examples are Amazon gift cards due to it's high-perceived value (you can buy ANYTHING on Amazon) and ease of fulfillment (you can automate this). 

Other examples of incentives we've seen are:

• Donation to a charity of your choice
• Exclusive merchandise
• Starbucks gift cards

How to Fulfill Incentives

When first starting with incentives we recommend manually fulfilling the offer first before automating it. The goal is to get proof of concept before scaling it. 

Who is responsible for delivering the gift card will vary by organization but the most common examples are:

• Account executives delivering the incentive after qualifying the prospect.
• Marketing managers who will do so after seeing the prospect was qualified via a report. 

Once you have proof of concept and are ready to scale incentivized demos you can do so with tools such as Sendoso, and Postal.

Expected Returns on Incentivized Demos

After cumulatively investing over $5M in incentive ads across SaaS clients in varying industries here's the expected return we find on this play:

We've found incentive demos to convert for enterprise, midmarket, and small business segments the key is great targeting, problem-focused messaging, and scalable unit economics when factoring incentive costs and opp conversion rates.