15+ Demo Survey Questions To Help You Refine Your Sales Process

You run a demo for your product or service, sweating nervously and waiting for your potential customer to show interest or ask questions. The demo is complete and the attendees are giving you a poker face: you have no idea whether you did a good job.

So, why not ask them?

A demo survey is a superb way to get feedback from your prospects about various aspects of your presentation. Sending one is easy and the customer feedback you get, including quantitative and qualitative data points, can be invaluable.

Today, we’ll show what demo surveys are, how and where to send them, as well as provide you with examples you can use right away.

What’s a demo survey and who should use one?

A demo survey is a survey that you run after a potential customer attends a demo with your company representatives. The goal of a demo survey is to find out how well the demo of your product or service went. 

Moreover, a demo survey is used to collect insights about what to improve in future demos, and can be about the product, the presentation, the presenters, the customer experience, and anything else that comes to your mind.

Note: while a demo survey is a general designation for this survey type, any type of survey can be used in this situation. Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES) are just some of the many survey types that you can send out after a demo.

For example, you can launch a CES survey in a matter of minutes with our survey template:

If you’re looking for some more inspiration on how to run surveys and improve your customer experience, take a look at our library of free survey templates.

Reasons to run demo surveys

If you’ve never run demo surveys before, you might not know that they’re a good idea. Let’s dispel your doubts and show you some great reasons to send out surveys to people who attend your product demos.

Feedback on the quality of information

You may have a fantastic product or service but it does not mean you’re presenting it in the right way. Perhaps you’re missing out on crucial information that your prospects were expecting to hear in the demo, but they did not. 

The demo survey lets your attendees tell you what you got right and what you’re missing in terms of information that your existing customers may already have. This way, you can improve your customer journey and refine your positioning and messaging, just by asking the right survey questions.

Feedback on the relevance of the information

You don’t present the same information in every demo. For example, you could be selling accounting software and there will be two different demos for a 5-person startup and a Fortune 500 company. A demo survey will let prospects tell you if the information you gave them is relevant to their needs and requirements.

Feedback on the technical aspects of the demo

Broken connections, faulty microphone, a camera with grainy image quality… These are just some of the many things that can go wrong in an online demo. You can ask the attendees if they found the technical aspects satisfactory, or if you need to upgrade your gear or software. 

This is some of the most valuable information that you can get and the cheapest way to improve demo experience. Send these survey questions on a regular basis to ensure no glitches fall through the cracks and customer satisfaction is at a high level.

Feedback on specific sales staff and customer service team performance

If you have more than one salesperson running demos, you may want to compare their performance and customers’ impressions of them. If you constantly get complaints about certain team members, it may be time to invest in some training.

Feedback about your customers and their needs

Demos are a superb way to dig deeper into your customers’ actual needs. You may be making too many assumptions and trying to formulate a persona. In reality, your customers could be in need of something entirely different and you could be lacking something obvious to improve customer satisfaction. 

Analyzing your existing customers is a great way to refine your customer journey, but asking new customers about their needs is another method to gather feedback.

How and when to run demo surveys for the maximum effect

The demo is done and you want to collect feedback and your prospect’s sentiment. What do you do next? 

Send the survey quickly

Humans are not really good at remembering things. The short-term memory of the average person fades anywhere between a few seconds to a few hours after something happened. While you may be sure that your demo left a lasting impression on your target market, the reality is that they might forget your demo pretty quickly.

For the best impact of your demo survey, send it as soon as possible after a finished demo. You can set up the survey to go out automatically with the right combination of survey software and email marketing tool. For example, you can set up customer effort score surveys immediately after signup.

Keep the survey short and simple

The shorter the survey, the better the response rate. With each survey question you add, the responses drop significantly. Ideally, use one to two survey questions and you’ll get lots of feedback. This is why it’s crucial to determine what kind of information you want to get from your demo attendees.

If you take a look at our free survey templates library, you’ll notice that most of them have just one or two survey questions. That’s no coincidence, as these short surveys (such as the NPS survey) are more effective than lengthy questionnaires that take ages to fill out. It’s the quickest way to gauge customer satisfaction and customer experience without overwhelming your audience.

Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions

To get powerful insights, you want to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. The way to do this is by using survey software with skip logic, such as Survicate. Here’s how it works. 

At first, you ask the attendee if they enjoyed the demo. If they say no, they get a follow-up question. If they did enjoy the demo, they get a different follow-up survey question, asking them to describe in their own words what they liked the most.

While both survey question types are great in their own right, mixing them together in one survey allows you to uncover more data about your customers’ pain points. If you’re not sure how to get the right combination of survey questions for the best insights, you might want to take a look at our free survey templates.

Be consistent

If you run demo surveys, don’t send them occasionally or when you sense that someone didn’t particularly enjoy a presentation. Setting up an email flow to send out surveys is a matter of a few clicks, so make sure to send them after each and every demo. An excellent customer experience is built with habits and not being reactive only.

Use free survey templates

If you don’t want to rack your brains wondering about the best questions to ask, use survey templates instead to get valuable feedback. You’ll find a large number of survey types in our template library, including the most popular ones, such as Net Promoter Score, all the way to highly specific ones such as assessing the content of your blog articles. 

Types of demo survey questions

Depending on who’s receiving the surveys and what kind of feedback you want to collect, you’ll be sending different types of demo surveys. Here are some of the most common question types and examples of each.

Demo survey questions about the product

The ultimate goal of every demo is to get the prospect familiar with the product, to such an extent that they consider purchasing it after being blown away with the amazing customer experience. 

To do this well, you need to not only give a clear overview of your unique selling points but also cater the demo to the people attending it. 

Ask these survey questions to find out if you’re doing a good job:

• How would you compare our product to our competitors based on the experience you had in the demo?
• How could we improve our product to better meet your needs?
• Which product features do you find most valuable?
• What important features do you think we are missing based on the demo you attended?
• Did we highlight all of the features you were interested in during the demo?
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the quality of the demo you attended?

Note: this is a typical customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey question where customers can tell you how (dis)satisfied they are using a numeric scale. You can use this survey too with our free template:

Demo survey questions about the technical aspects of the presentation

You need to ensure that the technical aspects of a demo run smoothly. This means a perfect internet connection, high-quality sound and image, and reliable equipment. Depending on the platform you use to run demos, there will be different aspects you can ask about in your demo survey.

Examples:

• On a scale from 1 to 5, rate the quality of sound and image at the demo.
• Did you hear and see everything clearly at the demo?
• Rate the quality of the screen sharing during the presentation.

Demo survey questions about the performance of the sales representative

Maybe your product is flawless but the person delivering the demo is not performing at their best. Perhaps their presentation skills are on point, but they’re missing the key information that your customers want to hear. In any case, it’s a good idea to ask about your sales rep's performance because it may improve the customer experience greatly.

Examples:

• On a scale from 1 to 5, rate how knowledgeable the sales representative is about the product.
• Did the sales representative give you all the information you need to make a decision?
• Did the sales representative give you enough opportunities to ask questions?
• Was the sales representative’s presentation clear enough and easy to understand?
• Did you have enough time to ask all the questions that you wanted during the demo?

Further questions about the customer and their inclination to buy

At the end of the day, it’s all about the money and how likely a customer is to purchase. Asking potential customers about their likelihood to buy and objections they have before purchasing is a great way to push them further down the sales funnel and improve your demos in the future.

Examples:

• Did this demo make it more likely to purchase the product?
• Based on the demo and your overall experience with our product so far, how likely are you to recommend our product to others?

Note: this is a typical NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey question. To ask this NPS question to potential and paying customers, simply use our survey template:

Which areas of our demo presentation should we pay more attention to and improve?

Run your own demo surveys today

Demo surveys have a high return on investment, considering how little it takes to send them out and gather feedback from your demo attendees. If you don’t feel like sending out demo surveys is a painless process, maybe you’ve been using the wrong survey software.

With Survicate, creating and sending out a survey to your target market takes just a few minutes. There are 125+ free survey templates to choose from, so you can always find something to collect customer feedback from your entire customer base.

Start your journey towards actionable customer insights by joining Survicate for free. Our 10-day trial with essential features is waiting for you. And check out our pricing.