About Groundswell

Groundswell is a modern corporate giving platform for companies that want to make philanthropy an employee benefit. Groundswell allows companies to support charitable demand by providing tax-advantaged personal giving accounts to employees, like a 401(k) for charitable giving. Groundswell’s proprietary Philanthropy-as-a-Service platform gets a company’s giving program up and running within hours and eliminates the administrative burden of managing a donation matching program. 

Founded by serial social entrepreneurs, Groundswell aims to democratize corporate giving and unlock the modern philanthropist in everyone. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA and backed by GV, Human Ventures, Felicis, and Moonshots Capital. To learn more, visit www.groundswell.io

The Problem

Initially, Groundswell’s sales team manually created and used a sandbox environment for about six weeks but then started to face many limitations with that. Foremost of all was the ability to scale up the operations, which, in addition to the tedious process, was becoming more difficult to achieve through a small sales team. More precisely, Groundswell wanted,

1. To tell a compelling story of how their product works and recreate an actual product experience for their prospects. 
2. Showcase numbers and data in their product demos to prospects, courtesy of being data-driven.
3. Ability to customize product environments for different personas belonging to small, mid-market, and enterprise companies quickly and easily, without having to build these from the ground up.

All these posed serious challenges in getting an effective sales motion running. As a result, they started searching for an interactive product demo platform that would fit their use cases.

The Solution

Criteria to evaluate potential product demo platforms

Groundswell’s sales team was looking for a fully integrated, interactive product demo platform to build and share personalized demo environments. Their top priority was to arm the sales team with demo environments that could be created and customized quickly. 

While evaluating a demo experience platform, they wanted to:

• Create custom sales demo environments quickly.
• Showcase all their product features and essential data in demos.
• Easily update demos with their product’s latest features.
• Have a repeatable set of demos to share with different prospects.
• Improve the sales experience for prospects.

The Search for a Solution

While testing out Storylane’s demo creation capabilities, Groundswell was able to create a set of demos for their sales team easily without any coding. They could customize demo environments and update them with new features they launched in real-time using Storylane’s demo editor. 

Groundswell’s sales team was able to give their prospects a hands-on experience of how their product works through these custom demo environments. With Storylane, the sales team was also able to create personalized interactive demos that could be repeatedly shared with small, mid-market, and enterprise-level prospects.

Features they love in Storylane 

Storylane’s free trial gave the sales team enough time to evaluate the extent to which Storylane’s interactive demos could highlight Groundswell’s features.

Brooke Morrissey, the Product Marketing Manager at Groundswell, loved how little time and effort was needed to build and manage demo environments created in Storylane. 

A few features in Storylane that the sales team at Groundswell love are:

• Easy and intuitive demo experience platform.
• Build no-code sales demo environments.
• Ability to customize demos with tokens.
• Option to create live demos and guided demos.
• Integration with Hubspot.
• Excellent customer support.

“We have our product team pushing releases all the time. I can create guided demos using Storylane for our sales team to show prospects, features before they have gone live and are coming up in weeks or months.”
‍
Brooke Morrissey, Product Marketing Manager at Groundswell

Results with Storylane

• No engineering bandwidth utilized to build demo environments.
• Multiple guided demo environments for companies of varying sizes and industries. 
• Quickly show Groundswell’s value and features to prospects.
• The sales team can create sample demo environments easily.
• Replaced their existing sandbox environment with Storylane’s demo environments and brought in more prospects to the sales pipeline. 

Groundswell’s interactive product demos have been well-received by their customers. Using Storylane to create product demos has enabled Groundswell to showcase its value, and tailor the product demo experience to their prospects.

‍The Future

Groundswell is excited to try out using guided product demos for their marketing campaigns. They are planning to leverage these guided demos for multiple stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. By bringing in Storylane’s interactive demos for more marketing use cases, Groundswell will be exploring it as an avenue to increase their lead generation efforts as well.