Let’s start with some basic definitions.

Demonstration content, or “demo content” for short, is made-up, placeholder customer data that businesses show to users in order to demonstrate a product use case that is relevant to them.

For example:

• Made up project data for a project management tool
• Made up sales call data for a sales CRM tool
• Made up browsing data for an analytics tool

Demo content is valuable for SaaS products for two main reasons:

1. To see if your product works

For example, if you were testing an online course platform that you built, you’d need to put in some dummy users before being able to show it to real customers.

It would be foolish indeed to expose your online course site to customers if they were unable to register on it due to a technical issue — one that you could have easily discovered through testing it.

2.To sell your product

Buyers want to see how something works before they buy it, and this is especially true online. A demo can be sales-led or self-service.

Most often, demo content is shown to users when they first sign up for a particular SaaS product, or during sales calls.

In both instances, the thinking is that it would be harder for a new user to really experience the “Aha Moment” without seeing how the product works in a practical sense — complete with real data.

On sales calls, the salesperson is able to harness the demo content to illustrate to the customer what they can expect from using the product. We actually do this at Userpilot as well by using a dummy product called Campfire.