Offer better software demos using the data you already collect

All marketers use lead capture or registrations forms in their marketing programs.  How else would we generate leads for our sales departments?  Some marketers keep things simple and only ask for the necessities, some ask for everything under the sun and some assess what they really need to know and conduct testing to see what their audience will bear before increasing abandonment rates.  By the way - I highly recommend balancing the information you need with what's nice to have and test your conversion rates, but we can save that for another post.

In most cases registration forms will include a few optional questions outside of the contact fields, intended to help us understand more about our visitors - whether the information is used to help marketing define their "buckets" or to help sales target their pitch -  is really moot when it comes to your visitors.  What if you used this information instead to help provide a more customized experience for your visitors?  If you positioned the questions in a way that made it obvious that the answers would better help your visitors find what they're looking for, I can almost guarantee that your visitors would be more likely to answer the questions.

Here are a few examples:

1. Ask a question that provides the opportunity to offer a specific demo suited to your visitor's needs
 One of our clients, Intuit Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions (QBES), uses the question "What is your business type?" to identify the visitor's vertical industry.  This is important to the marketers so they know what verticals they need to be targeting, but its also helpful for the visitor because QBES develops different versions of their product for different verticals.  In the screen shots below, you can see how when I answered "Distribution & Wholesale" I was offered the TestDrive online demo of their "Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition", saving me the effort of figuring out which version of the software I should try.

2. Find out who your competition is and take the initiative to show why you're better
Intuit QBES also asks their trial visitors what their current accounting solution is.  Not only does it give the marketers insight on which competitors they should be paying the most attention to, it also gives them the opportunity to target that competition specifically. Depending on your selection, you will receive an automated email, addressed to you, either explaining why you should upgrade to the new version of QBES (with a special discounted offer) or why QBES is better than the solution you're using now - also providing links to resources that may help in your information gathering. 



In the example below, you'll see that I selected "Peachtree", then I received an email with the message "Upsize" as well as a link to learn more about the Free Peachtree to Quickbooks Conversion tool.  "WOW! So if I switch they will take care of moving all my data over to Quickbooks and I don't have to worry about a thing??  I'm SOLD!"

You can even take it a step further and make your registration forms "dialogs".  Instead of just asking a series of questions, let your visitors know why you're asking them.  Instead of "tell us about your business", position it as "So we can provide you the best demo of our software, please tell us a bit about your business.  We'll provide a customized demo to suit your needs".

Give your visitors what they want and you will have a much higher chance of converting them and closing the sale.  Make it easy for them to see why your software is the right solution for their needs and you can get the same results.  So why don't we ALL do this??

I can think of a half dozen, but the initial ones that come to mind are:

I just didn't think about using my data that way.
I don't have time to go through this exercise; I have so many other marketing programs to implement!
It's going to take so much time and I don't have the resources to create the content needed.

We're all being asked to do more with less, and for software companies your software demos are one of the key sales tools and I'm sure a lot has already been invested in them.  Putting a little focus on this process and what you can do to better meet your visitors' needs and creating more customized experience can really pay off in spades.  And remember, you don't have to do it all at once!  Start small and build up from there.

Are you doing anything right now to make better use of the data you are collecting or doing anything to provide a software demo that actually addresses what your visitors are looking for?