Learn how Forma’s product marketing lead empowers sales with customized demos at scale to show companies the true value of their flexible employee benefits platform.
About Forma
Forma is on a mission to help companies offer meaningful benefits to every employee, no matter their lifestyle, stage of life, or location. Their solution gives employees the freedom to choose how they use their benefits, from wellness to caregiving to professional development, helping HR teams stand out in a competitive talent market.
But with that level of flexibility comes a lot of customization in the sales process. Every employer has a unique setup, culture, and benefits philosophy, which means showing the value of Forma requires more than a one-size-fits-all demo.
Before Walnut: the challenge
As Forma’s product marketing lead, Danielle Ross needed a way to support a growing sales team without getting pulled into every deal. Selling an inherently flexible product to enterprise organizations means the team can’t rely on static demo environments or generic screenshots.
It’s really challenging to demo a customizable platform using fixed environments due to the fact that every employer is different. Forma wanted to reflect that in how they sell.
Forma needed a way to scale demo creation without sacrificing customization, while also giving prospects an authentic, hands-on look at the product early in their journey.
“As you might imagine, it’s challenging for us to demo a product that is very customizable and flexible if we’re just showing our own accounts or if we have a set of standard demo environments. So the way that our sales team is using Walnut is to help build out customized demos for our prospective clients. Or if it’s more of that upsell / cross-sell opportunity with existing customers, we’ll help them visualize what the future expansion might look like. It’s really about helping to create a customized demo that can ultimately create the empathy and understanding that we want the customer to have from us – we want them to be able to see what Forma will look and feel like for their unique employee population.”
After Walnut: the solution
Forma’s sales team uses Walnut to build personalized, interactive demos that mirror each prospect’s unique setup, whether it’s for an initial discovery call, an upsell opportunity, or a late-stage enterprise evaluation.
But the demos aren’t just for account executives. Danielle and her marketing team use Walnut for some key use cases:
- Events: interactive demos are available on iPads and laptops for reps to walk through in real-time with attendees.
- Lead nurture: prospects can explore on-demand demos right from the website, getting a taste of the product before booking a call.
- Enterprise prospects: the team can qualify enterprise leads pre and post-call to determine market fit.
These early, templatized demos are especially helpful for self-qualifying smaller accounts, allowing Forma to prioritize high-fit enterprise leads while still delivering value to others.
“Walnut empowers our sales team to build custom demos that reflect every prospect’s world. It’s fast, intuitive, and makes it easy to showcase our flexibility, without needing cross-functional team members to step in every time.”
How they did it: quick demo creation
To keep things efficient, Danielle built a series of customizable templates that AEs can personalize using Walnut’s variables and find-and-replace features. This allows the team to spin up tailored demos in minutes, even with minimal notice. “One of our AEs told me she could hop on a call with 10 minutes’ notice and still show a custom demo. That responsiveness is huge,” said Danielle.
Even better? With Walnut’s ease of use, the sales team can own their own demo creation, freeing up Danielle to focus on strategic GTM efforts.
“Something that Walnut has done a superb job of is continuously releasing new features and functionalities that make it easier for us to create demos. Because we want to create a really custom demo, it can be time-consuming to go through and update every single aspect of the platform. One of the features that I know that Walnut released is variables. We’ve leaned on the variables to be able to help our teams get 80 percent of the way to building their custom demos.”
Results
- Hundreds of hours saved building and updating personalized demos
- High adoption across sales with AEs and account managers creating their own walkthroughs
- Better-qualified deals thanks to early demo exposure
- Improved qualified leads who are informed and educated prior to live calls
- Greater event ROI by equipping field teams with live click-through demos
The team is already seeing massive value from increased engagement and customization.
The impact
For Danielle as a product marketer, Walnut isn’t just a sales tool, it’s a way to get closer to the customer. By building and even presenting demos herself, she’s able to gather insights, validate positioning, and support sales from a place of authenticity.
“As a product marketer, I think a lot about the value for the customer and for the employee out of our product. When I do get the opportunity to demo, I go in as almost an unbiased party. Of course, I want us to win the deal, but I’m not necessarily there to sell to the client. I want to make sure that you, prospective client, understand the value that you’re going to get out of this product. ”
She also highlighted the support and responsiveness of the Walnut team who is always available to help.
“Walnut helps our team put our best foot forward in every conversation. It’s easy to use, super customizable, and has become an essential part of how we go to market for our enterprise buyers. Plus, the partnership has been dynamic. We see that Walnut is open to our feedback and consistently delivers improvements.”
