Show Prospects Your Product Without Booking a Demo

Each of the five formats is a different way to let a buyer see the product on their own. Below is what the buyer sees in each, what it takes to build and keep current, what it cannot do, and how often the audit found it.

Recorded demo video

What the buyer sees. A screen recording of the product with a voice-over, played on the page. Some companies show one overview video; others keep a library, one per feature or role.

Effort. The cheapest format to make: one person with a screen recorder and a script. Keeping it current means recording again whenever the interface or the pitch changes, and an old video shows an old product.

What it cannot do. The buyer cannot click anything, skip to the part they care about unless you recorded it, or ask a question. Unless the video sits behind a form, you also learn little about who watched it.

How often we found it. 18 of 100 companies offered a recorded demo, and 8 offered it and nothing else. It was the second most common format after a free trial.

Click-through interactive tour

What the buyer sees. Captured screens of your product with hotspots and captions. The buyer clicks through a set path, and it looks like the product, but nothing behind it runs. This is an interactive demo.

Effort. A tour tool captures the screens and a marketer writes the steps, so no engineering is needed. Each change to the interface that a tour shows means capturing those screens again. For tools and their published prices, see Supademo alternatives and Navattic alternatives.

What it cannot do. It shows only the screens someone captured, in the order they chose. A buyer who wants a screen nobody captured, or asks how something works with their stack, reaches the end of the path. Some tour tools now add an AI agent over the captured screens. Interactive demo vs. AI demo agent compares the two approaches, and interactive demos vs. AI demo agents covers where each fits on a page.

How often we found it. 13 of 100 companies offered an interactive tour. 4 offered only the tour. Of the others, 6 also offered a free trial and 5 a recorded video.

Sandbox or demo account

What the buyer sees. The real product, or a copy of it, already filled with sample data. The buyer can open any screen and try things without setting anything up.

Effort. Several tour builders sell a sandbox demo on higher plans or as an add-on (the Supademo alternatives page shows which), and like a tour it has to be captured again when the product changes. Building one yourself is the most work of the five. Someone has to keep the sample data believable, reset it between visitors, stop one visitor's changes reaching the next, and keep the copy in step with every release.

What it cannot do. It does not guide. A buyer dropped into a full product has to know what to look for, and nobody is there to explain why a screen matters. Anything in the account can appear on a prospect's screen, so it must not hold real customer data.

How often we found it. 5 of 100 companies offered a sandbox or demo account, the rarest format we found. All 5 also offered a free trial or free plan.

Free trial or free plan

What the buyer sees. Your actual product, in a new account of their own, after they sign up.

Effort. The product itself has to work self-serve: sign-up, onboarding, and an empty account that still makes sense. That is ongoing product work rather than marketing work, but a trial never goes stale, because it is the product.

What it cannot do. It works only when one person can reach value alone in a session. Analytics, CRM and security products look empty until they are connected to something, and a trial reaches one user rather than a buying group. A sign-up is also a form of its own. Free trial or product demo? covers when each fits.

How often we found it. 46 of 100 companies offered a free trial or free plan, the most common format by far, and 32 offered nothing else. Every company in the sample also had a demo request page, because that was the rule for being in it, so the question is what that page asks. A trial did not make the demo form much shorter. The 44 with a trial whose form we could read required a median of 5 fields, and 15 required a phone number. The 51 without a trial whose form we could read required a median of 6, and 17 required a phone number.

Live AI-led demo

What the buyer sees. A demo that starts when they ask. An AI agent shows the product and answers their questions as they go, by voice or text. What it shows depends on the type of agent: captured screens, a prepared copy of the product, or the live product signed in to a demo account.

Effort. It depends on the type. An agent over captured screens inherits the tour's upkeep, and one on a prepared copy inherits the sandbox's. One that drives the live product always shows the current interface, but it needs a demo account with data any prospect may see, and what it knows about your flows still needs refreshing when they change. Whichever type you pick, someone on your team should check what it says against what you sell.

What it cannot do. Not every buyer wants to talk to software, so keep a way to reach a person and a self-guided option on the page. An agent cannot fix a weak demo: if your team has no clear story for what to show first, the agent inherits that. And the evidence is still thin; published results so far are mostly vendors' own case studies.

How often we found it. None of the 100 companies offered a live demo that starts on request. The only live demos we found were scheduled group sessions that you register for and join on a set date.

Where Floe fits. Floe is an AI demo agent of the live-product kind. A visitor who asks gets a live, voice-led demo of your real product, signed in to a demo account you provide, and can ask questions at any point. Floe asks your qualification questions during the demo. Asking for an email is optional: you choose whether Floe asks for one, and when. When the visitor is ready to talk, Floe offers your booking page, and a summary reaches your team. Floe has no tour to embed and no sandbox for buyers to explore alone, and it does not publish prices. See the product, or compare it with other agents in the best AI demo agents.

Which formats companies combine

Most companies that offered a way in offered one. 44 offered exactly one format, 17 offered two or more, and none offered more than four. A free trial was part of 14 of those 17 combinations. The commonest pairs were a trial with a recorded video (7 companies) and a trial with an interactive tour (6), then, tied on 5, a trial with a sandbox and a tour with a video.

15 companies offered a way to see the product with no trial at all, each a video, a tour or both. If your product cannot be tried alone, they are the closest comparison: they show the product first and keep the demo form for anything more.

What companies with no self-serve option ask for

39 of the 100 companies offered no way to see the product without a call. For them, the demo form is the only way in. Their forms showed a median of 7 fields and required 6. 24 of the 38 forms we could read asked for a phone number, and 14 required one. 4 loaded a scheduling tool.

Companies that did offer a way in asked for a little less: a median of 5 required fields, with 18 of 57 forms requiring a phone number. Offering a self-serve option did not make the demo form much lighter. Most kept a demo form for buyers who want a meeting and gave everyone else a second way in.

How to choose

One person can reach value alone in a session. Offer a free trial or free plan, and keep the demo for larger accounts.

Buyers need to see a workflow, not use it. A recorded video or an interactive tour costs little per viewer. Plan to record or capture it again whenever that part of the product changes.

Buyers want to click around real-looking data. A sandbox works if you can keep its data believable and reset it, and if buyers know what to look for.

Buyers have questions the page cannot answer, and sales cannot take every call. A live AI-led demo answers them as the buyer watches. Plan to review what it says as the product changes, and keep a person reachable for the deals that need one.

Decide where the gate goes. Formats that cost you little per viewer lose most by sitting behind a form. Gated vs. ungated demos covers where the gate can go instead.

Method and source

The counts come from Floe's book-a-demo page audit. On 7 November 2026 we loaded the demo request pages of 100 B2B SaaS companies from the Forbes Cloud 100 and recorded what each offered before anyone submitted. We counted a format when it was on the demo page or in the site's nav, footer or pricing page; a trial you request through the sales form does not count. We counted a form's fields on its first step. The full dataset is published under CC BY 4.0, and you can recount every number above from it.

The sample has a limit worth stating plainly. These are large, well-funded companies, not the typical SaaS team of 20 to 200 people. One visit, from one region and one browser, also catches each page in one state, and nothing that appears only after submitting a form is counted.