How proptech companies can give a demo to every brokerage, team and agent
Live demos cap how many prospects you reach. Here’s how to demo to all of them, even the ones who won’t get on a call.
I spent over a decade in proptech. My last company, Spacio, sold open house sign-in software to brokerages and franchises, and I ran sales myself. Spacio was acquired by HomeSpotter (now Lone Wolf) in 2019.
If you're a proptech founder or sales leader, I'm guessing you'll recognize the walls I kept hitting:
I only had the bandwidth to prospect the top 200 brokerages out of roughly 100,000 in the U.S. Thousands more never heard from me.
Brokerages that didn't want a call had no low-pressure way to see our product, and no way for me to stay in the conversation.
I wanted to sell directly to agents and teams, but a live demo never made sense for the deal size.
Those same 200 brokerages got pitched by everyone, every day, because every vendor had the same constraint I did. My growth had a ceiling, and I had to live with it.
The ceiling on your pipeline: Live demos
Here's how most of us sell. We chase prospects all day and all night, hoping that at some point they'll book a call. Then a rep or founder runs the demo, and we try to fit in as many as we can.
Live demos are great when you can get them, and your biggest accounts deserve a real conversation. The problem is you can't get everyone on a call. Plenty of prospects don't reply, and that doesn't mean they aren't interested. They never get to see your product, and you never find out they wanted to.
The only way to scale sales is to scale headcount. One person can only do so many demos, because every one needs a slot on their calendar. Even with more people, two sides still have to show up at the same moment, and you only control one of them.
Agents and teams make it even harder. A live demo rarely makes sense for a single agent's deal size. But added together, they're where the bulk of your revenue sits, especially if your business model depends on the upsell.
Their schedules don't help either. Agents rarely know where they'll be in two hours. T3 Sixty did a business impact study for eWebinar, titled "Humanly Impossible Scale." In one of its anonymized interviews, a brokerage VP explained that agents won't show up for a demo they booked five days out. But if they land on one starting in five minutes, while they're interested, "now you got the sale."
Click here to see the full T3 Sixty report: Humanly Impossible Scale
A common misconception about demos
I know the knee-jerk reaction. Letting people see the product without you feels like losing control of the sale and missing a chance to connect. So we gate the demo behind a booking link and call it qualification.
But gating doesn't move the deal forward. It puts you between the buyer and their research. TrustRadius' B2B Buying Disconnect report found that 40% of buyers are less likely to buy when they're forced to contact sales just to see a demo.
The misconception underneath the fear is that a demo has to show everything. It doesn't. You get to decide what your demo is and what information you want to share.
A demo can be a 10-minute overview of what you do and why you're different, just enough to get someone to the next step, whether that's booking a call or signing up.
Sell to the prospects who'd never book a call
At Spacio, I tried sending recorded videos instead. It didn't work. I had no idea who watched, no lead capture and no way for anyone to ask a question while watching, which is the whole point when someone's seeing your product for the first time.
I hated staring at the growth ceiling and not being able to do anything about it. So after Spacio was acquired, I built what I'd been daydreaming about for years.
eWebinar turns your recorded demo into an interactive session prospects can join anytime, with chat that works like texting. You reply whenever you can, in real time or later by email.
It's how we sell our own product. Around 300 people join our demo every month from our homepage, and I don't give a single one live. If I required a call first, I'd be lucky to get 5 -10% of them on one. This way, every single prospect who's curious about our product gets to see it.
Most of them sign up on their own, because we're a self-serve product. Some larger companies ask for a call, and when we get on it, we focus our time on their strategy and use case instead of me demoing the same thing again.
Today we work with close to 100 real estate companies, including RealScout, Cloze and Inside Real Estate.
How to give a demo to every brokerage, team and agent
It's super easy to get going.
Upload your demo video.
Record the version your best rep gives on their best day. Keep it tight. It doesn't have to be perfect, and you can iterate on it based on feedback later.Add interactions.
Add polls and questions to learn who's watching and what they need. Then add a call to action at the end to book a call or start a trial.Publish it and put it everywhere.
The more places your demo lives, the more ways people find it. Here are some ideas:Your homepage, like us
Every rep's email signature
Blog posts, ads and retargeting
Cold outreach messages and follow-ups
Nurture sequences for leads who went quiet
Your demo now runs around the clock, even when your team isn't working. Your reps also get an outreach asset for every prospect who won't get on a call.
Your sales companion, not a replacement
eWebinar doesn't replace your sales calls. It makes them better.
Brokerages that aren't ready to talk can explore on their own. The ones who raise their hand to book a call with you have already qualified themselves, so the call skips the overview and goes straight to their situation.
Agents and teams too small for a live demo still get to see your product, and can sign up on their own without you.
It doesn't stop at the sale. Many of our proptech customers also use eWebinar to onboard and train agents 24/7, without adding a single member to their team.
Experience eWebinar the way your prospects would
The best way to understand how this works is to experience it.
Hop into our demo at ewebinar.com. It runs on eWebinar, so you'll see exactly what your prospects would see if your demo worked this way. You can ask me anything in chat while you watch. See you there!