The Company

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Upland Software Inc. (NASDAQ: UPLD) helps global businesses accelerate digital transformation through cloud software. The company provides a suite of enterprise work management software applications for the information technology, process excellence, finance, professional services and marketing functions within organizations. Today, the company boasts of 30+ products that provide last mile plug-in processes, reporting, and job specific workflows to over 10,000 customers.

The Team

Matt Weissberg is currently the Director of Solution Consulting at Upland Software. He has been with the company for over 2 years now and oversees the solution consulting aspect of Altify - a Salesforce focused Upland business unit. During his time at Upland, he has won some major awards in the Enterprise Sales and Marketing business unit, including the MVP award. 

The Problems

The majority of Upland's problems circled around shipping - the ability for anyone in the team to be able to quickly design demos and share them outside. More specifically,

📌 Time Consuming Sales POCs

Before Storylane, there was no quick way to generate demos for new prospects as well as existing clients. The method was painful as well as very time consuming because Matt and his team had to build the demos from scratch for every new request.

This was compounded by the fact that the Account Executives (AE) only knew how to do very boiler plate demos at best. Some of them couldn’t do it at all, and Matt wanted to fix that. Because it resulted in his Senior Solution Engineers (SE) not really having time for anything. They were spending 40+ hours a week, between meetings, configurations and customization of these demos.

📌 Inability to Scale the Demo Infrastructure

Initially, Matt’s team was spending on average 15 to 20 hours a week per person building custom demos and it was increasingly getting difficult to do more quickly. There was only one demo environment and without any customization at all; meaning it was getting very difficult to put on a good demonstration because of no way to personalize it.

This was a problem because while Matt was still able to build some customizations using developer tools, the process wasn’t scalable. He couldn’t teach it to his SEs as they didn’t know HTML or CSS very well making it tougher and time consuming. 

Why Choose Storylane? 

According to Matt, Upland has a very thorough process when it comes to purchasing new tools. This becomes more stringent for younger startups given their software is often buggy, making it difficult to get through the review process. But Storylane was able to do that rather quickly without any jitters which speaks volumes of the engineering excellence behind the tool. 

Additionally, there were 3 more reasons behind Matt’s zeroing on Storylane for his demo automation needs,

1. He liked Storylane’s demo experience as it was focused on the value that he can derive out of the software. He didn’t receive the right kind of support with other products in the category. He says Storylane has a much better, more empathic and a very customer centric sales process, with the team being generous with the amount of time and efforts. 
2. According to Matt, Storylane’s product is engineered much better and he really liked using it. Most of the other products in the category don't work inside Salesforce which was a big problem for him. Moreover, he didn’t find Storylane buggy at all and even minor fixes were done within a day which was incredible. 
3. He also found the platform to be very flexible and liked the scope of building multiple product tours inside the same demo. Their ability to conditionally go from one story to the other, allowing people to guide themselves, has proven to be really helpful for Matt’s team. He loves that he can get really creative with his demos in Storylane.
   

The Trial

Upland Software tried the Storylane pilot while demoing to one of the largest health companies in the world. Matt utilized it to share an interactive POC that he built within Salesforce. They were able to easily walk through each step to see for themselves what they can do with Upland and the resulting benefits. In a complete PLG fashion, this ended with them signing a multi year contract with Upland.

Around 25 people in the buyer organization tried the Storylane demo that Matt built and the deal was closed in 2 weeks which otherwise usually takes months. The considerable reduction in time was because everyone who had to come to the table to make that decision was able to assess it all at once.

"It helped me do my job as a solutions architect, helping save time for me and being able to actually show them how everything works and be able to send it quickly to them. It was a huge win for me."

-Matthew Weisberg, Director of Solution Consulting

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The Solution

After a week-long onboarding session with Storylane's CS team, where all the members of Matthew's team were give a step by step walkthrough of the platform, they started creating actual demos and immediately saw landmark improvements. More precisely,

📌 Quickly Sharing POCs Without the Need of Technical Know-hows

Matt and his team love that they can jump in Storylane and send over a demo to anyone quickly, after just updating the logo or making minor tweaks. This otherwise requires hiring salespeople who are technical or teaching them how to use the browser console, add HTML, etc, to carry out these tasks. 

With Storylane however, one can do all these tricks without any technical knowledge, which translates into an awful lot of benefit that can’t be quantified. The global search and replace option for updating demos along with password protection have proven to be very helpful. As a result, doing sales POCs with Storylane has been a huge time saver. 

📌 Achieving Operational and Performance Efficiency in both Marketing and Sales

By using tools like Storylane, Matt and his team have been able to find operational efficiencies leading to savings both in terms of time and cost. By spending one half of the value of one person they’ve been able to extract 2-3 times their output. Hence, even in adverse market conditions they didn’t have to fire anyone because of the overall effectiveness they’ve been able to achieve - something that some other company might have to go through if not for using the right tools.

Since bringing Storylane onboard, Upland has seen marked improvement in a number of areas concerning both marketing and sales. These include, website conversion, pipeline growth, sales velocity as well as closed won deals. Everyone in the team has been able to achieve what they wanted in terms of performance conversion.

"You tell salespeople to come to a meeting so we can train you on this new thing or show you some new stuff, nobody will come. So instead, we send them a Storylane that they can enjoy or test at their own time asynchronously. And we’ve seen a much higher conversion rate as well as enabling many more people to actually assess our product during the proof of concept stage."

-Matthew Weisberg, Director of Solution Consulting

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The Impact

Matt says that Storylane has beaten out at least two other solutions that other teams inside Upland were using for building demos and he didn’t have to try hard to get them to switch. In his own words,

"I just showed them the tool and how it works and within half an hour they were like, “we’ll use Storylane from here.” And that’s not because Upland has a contract with Storylane, so every team is bound to use the same tool. It was because Storylane is actually that good."

-Matthew Weisberg, Director of Solution Consulting

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With some good success, here is qualitative data on 3 demo sets compared over a 1 month vs 3 month period. Two of these demos are being used as website embeds and the third one as an email leave behind, for one of Upland’s products called Altify.

• For the embedded demo, the average completion rate hovers around 40% which is remarkably better than the average of 25-30% that we usually see. 
• Moreover, the average time buyers spent exploring the embedded demo goes up to 15 minutes for a 10 step demo.