AMA with our CEO: Making Storylane work for Sales

Arthur (Head of Community & Customer Marketing): Okay. Welcome to the first ever AMA with my CEO. I don't know how I convinced him to do this, but here we are. We got a ton of questions submitted from all of you, so thank you all for that. We're super excited about this event. We scheduled it for forty-five minutes, however, based on the number of questions we got, we'll stay to the top of the hour. So if you do drop off for any reason, totally understand, but this is super exciting for us to bring to life. As we're letting people in here, before we dive in and explain what the event is: I'm Arthur, head of community and customer marketing here. I've actually only been here at Storylane for five months. But, Nalin, you said something around the product philosophy that I thought was so interesting — how you built Storylane through the voice of the customer. So I'd love for you to start off with how you think about the product philosophy and everything we build here at Storylane.

Nalin (Co-founder & CEO): Lovely. Nice to see you all here today. We're very excited to share a little bit more about what we're building, specifically around sales workflows, and how we think about building product itself. For everybody joining in, I'm Nalin, co-founder and CEO of Storylane. We started Storylane about four, five years back, and we're product thinkers in general. I'm a product thinker myself, so we look at pretty much everything we build from that lens. Today with AI, everybody is aware how incredibly fast it is to build things. One of the most important things for me was that it's not just about building and shipping things — we want to make sure they're impactful, impactful to our customers. A lot of times we miss that and we focus a lot on shipping. So this is a great opportunity for me and the team to connect quickly, and we plan to do this a lot more so that we get that feedback and are able to build the right things to create impact for you all.

When you talk about impact, it's about looking at what your current workflow looks like today, some of the complexities that are there, and how we're able to change that — in terms of speed, ease of use, whatever that may be. That's how we start looking at everything we're building in the product. Then we think about use cases from marketing or sales. We started getting questions like, "How do we see Storylane being used by an AE more effectively, by an SDR, or by a presales person?" So what we're building is around how we change those workflows so that you can have more impact. We have a lot planned to build out this year, and with the way things move fast in AI, we've completely rethought how we build roadmaps. We iterate every two months, so things change incredibly fast. That's how we started building, and that's our philosophy.

Arthur: Yeah. I saw Luca in the chat — it's crazy the amount we've been able to ship even in my short time here. I'm going to get into everything we'll cover, but I know almost the number one question, the reason a lot of people joined, is: where can Storylane be used across the GTM function? I know there are multiple use cases, so maybe you could share a little bit around that to get us started.

Nalin: Awesome. That's one of my favorite questions people ask — "Where can it be used?" I always feel two things. One, we're doing great, because they can see Storylane is useful in every place, that's fantastic. And also, I feel like we need a lot more education on how we're doing it and how we're solving it in the product. So let me share my screen — it's much easier to visualize. This conversation is going to be a bit more tactical, so it's not just me talking; we're going to share our screen and show things.

What I like to start with is, in a simple way, the three products we offer. Demos — you'll all be familiar. Hubs — think of a hub like a deal room where you can bring in multiple demos plus videos, case studies, materials, everything together. And the third product we launched recently, a few weeks back, is RepX. It's a conversational agent that can qualify the leads coming onto your website and drive them to sales. Buyers don't want to talk to sales right away — they're very sophisticated today. So you want to give them a sneak peek of the product, give them the ability to have a conversation, and also understand the questions they're looking for. Those are the three products we offer, and within demos there are many different ways people use them.

I'm not going to spend too much time on slides, but I want to make sure everybody in the webinar can see how Storylane is used. There are four broad areas. The top two are marketing. When we started out, Storylane began a lot with marketing — people using it on website conversions, events, conferences, campaigns, and product releases. Sales is something we started expanding into after the first year, more and more. So top of the funnel, definitely a lot of use cases. And within sales, whether it's an SDR, an AE, presales, or a sales leader, they all see value. A few things to highlight: in outbound, you can send demos. Sometimes somebody wants to get on a live call with your sales rep, and before that call you can send a demo to give them a sneak peek of what your product offers before they get on the call. In live calls, you have a rep that needs to be trained and up and running quickly, and that's where we come in with sandbox demos. Post sales call — how do you get your stakeholders going? There's the follow-up of sharing demos. People don't always want to watch a one-hour recording; they want to get tactical about what the product offers. Of course, it's also used in expansion, partners, and resellers. So that's how we see Storylane used across the board in GTM. There are other use cases we'll dive into separately, but today we're going to focus a lot more on the sales use case and how it can be effective there.

Arthur: Love it. I see we already have some solutions engineers joining in the chat, so we've got a lot for you — we're about to get tactical. Just to explain how we got to this point: I think we got over 200 questions submitted when we reached out to all of our customers asking, "What do you want to ask our CEO, specifically around the sales use case?" Because all of you came in from different titles — SDR, AE, sales leadership, sales enablement — we really broke it down by those personas. So we're going to jump into each persona. I'm going to change seats and ask Nalin, as an SE, as an SDR, what the different ways are to use it, and we've grouped a lot of your questions based on themes.

At the same time, I've already seen the chat light up, which is great. We do have a Q&A portion on your right side. So if you think of a question as Nalin is speaking, we'd ask that you put it in the Q&A piece — that would be great, because the chat can get a little messy. We do have CSMs monitoring the chat, so if you prefer to put your question there, we'll try to keep it. But if you really want it answered, the Q&A is best — we'll attempt to get to it live, and if not, we'll make sure to get you an answer over the next few days.

So without any further ado, the first one — and you're in luck, Ronnie — we're going to focus on the SE. As an SE, my job is to build and enable the reps who use the demos. So, just to frame it, what's the most impactful way someone in an SE role can get the most out of Storylane?

Nalin: Great question. Think of SEs as the people who build demos in Storylane — we call them the creators. So your role becomes more about enabling the sales team so they can effectively use the demos. Let me share my screen and walk through a quick framework.

The way I look at it: once you start using Storylane, you should have a plan and map it out. Here's a simple grid. This may not map directly to your org, but it gives you a general blueprint of how we think about it. As an SE, you have an impact across the board, because you know the product the best. You know exactly what the capabilities are and exactly what a buyer will be looking for at different stages. You're a product thinker in a lot of ways, because you solve the problems. So now you're enabling different segments of reps. Let's say we have three here — an SDR, a growth AE for small/mid-market, and an enterprise AE. At different stages, I like to put a map like this and see what type of demo, and the right demo, we need to use so that we can excite the buyers.

Think of a simple case like prospecting. That's a demand-gen outreach, and an SDR should start using guided demos in the outreach, in whatever outreach tools they're using. If a growth AE is full-stack and is trying to source the leads himself, what's the best way for them? Maybe it's the same guided demos, depending on the market. Similarly, for an enterprise AE, you can use a hub — I'll talk about hubs in a minute. The idea is you put a grid like this and have a clear understanding of which demo to use where. That's one thing I'd always recommend, so that there's a clear enablement plan for how this gets deployed across your team. As another example, discovery: maybe in your case there's a show-and-tell, so you can create lightweight demos. Storylane has a presenter mode, which we'll talk about, so you can show these demos directly in live calls to do discovery. Same with an enterprise AE — for early demos you can run standard demos with sandbox and run them with templates, in terms of how you set up templates within Storylane. At the end of the day, for follow-ups, you send these demos, you track the analytics, and you understand what the engagement metrics look like. If you need templates like this, you can reach out to our CSM — we're going to build out these kinds of templates. It's a great way to start deploying it into your team.

Arthur: Amazing. To get a little more tactical, we've got a lot of SEs saying, "Hey, our product team ships features all the time. How do we maintain all of this — managing these demos when our product is being changed so often?"

Nalin: 100%. I'll answer this in two parts. Let me get into our editor. By the way, if you're seeing something here a little different in terms of the user interface compared to what you're used to, that's because we're launching — some of you already have access to it in beta — a new version of our editor, which is just better and easier with a lot more capabilities. We're rolling that out as we speak, this week and next week. That's why you're seeing something different.

So, how do you manage them? Part one: what's there today and how people do it. Part two: what's coming up later this month, which will be very exciting. How do people do it today? Here you can see a bunch of content that's captured. When we capture content, there are two types. One is scraping your pages' HTML, which captures the look and feel of your product. The other is screen-based and video-based recording, which is great for quick demos and top-of-funnel. The limitation there is you can't edit the content. What you're seeing here is an HTML-based demo we captured — let's say this is just an example environment.

What we recommend is tokenizing. Once you've created a token, we treat that like a template. Tokens are a great way to do this — it can be text, date and time, or images. The idea is you're able to repeat it: once you build it, you can start using it. In this case, I want to personalize this and put in a first name, and maybe in some cases a date. I want to personalize — it's March 12, it's actually supposed to be April 2 — so I'll create a token for that. There's a way to do this using date-times or text only. For example, here's a date-time; I'll insert a date-time token. The idea is you're not managing this one-off each time, but creating it once and tokenizing so you can reuse it quickly every single time. That's one — definitely recommend it.

If I have things to edit or modify quickly, there's a quick search-and-replace. For example, search for the word "daily" and replace with "trader." You can quickly search, identify all the screens where those appear, and replace them. You can see it shows up two times here, and I can replace them. It's a quick way to edit and modify things. And let's say you have a new screen added to your demo, or your product changed — one part of it changed. We don't have them all bundled together; these are discrete steps, discrete screens. So you can see all the screens here, which means you can swap them out and replace them.

That's how people do this today. What we're also releasing — I'll go back into this — is completely rethinking how you can modify the same thing with AI. What I mean is, we're so used to building apps through Lovable and Replit and everything, where you can prompt and make the changes you want. So here's a new editor that's coming out, just for changing your HTML content. Let's say it's the same screen, and I want to change all of these transactions into restaurant names. All I do is tell Storylane.ai, "Can you go and update all the transaction names into restaurant names?" It starts analyzing, looking at the content and the screens, and it understands what needs to change. Maybe it's the "to" and "from" fields you're referring to — I'll pull up restaurant names. In a matter of a couple of minutes, you're able to change big data sets inside your screens — tables, structures, images, everything. You can see it's already applying the changes... and there you go. All of this is done very quickly. Now it's your choice to accept it and start editing it. This is how we're thinking about it, and this is something we'll be releasing sometime in April.

Arthur: Amazing. It looks like we're getting some questions around what we'll be releasing. I know the final question for this SE persona — a lot of them are very protective over how they create, manage, and organize their demos. What's the best way to do that within Storylane?

Nalin: Yeah. So the question is, "I've built all these demos and content, I've edited them, made them polished, have great templates — how do I enable my reps to use this effectively?" Let me go back and open up our dashboard. What you'll see is a dashboard you're probably very familiar with, where you manage your demos and hubs. At the top, you'll see my team demos, the demos you built, and the demos shared with me. You can share demos across teams. The simplest way to think about it is to set up different teams within your organization. In this case, I have a sales engineering team, a product marketing team, an EMEA sales team, demand gen, and my SDR team. Once you create different team structures with the right members and the right permissions, then as an SE you're building all these demos, or as a PMM we've built these demos, and I want to share them with someone. All you have to do is give them the right access and permissions. You go ahead and say, "The SDR team can get access to this, but they can only view it, they can't edit it." That's it. So as an SDR, I have access to the demos you're building right now. You group them and start sharing them. This is the easiest way I'd recommend: have one place, one source, where you offer all of these demos and share them across your teams.

Arthur: Amazing. I know we got a lot of questions from SEs — if you continue to have them, please put them in the chat or the Q&A section — but we're going to jump now into Storylane for AEs. This is something I'm very familiar with; I used to be an AE once upon a time, juggling multiple deals, selling to different verticals. For the AEs watching this, or the sales leaders trying to understand how their AEs can use this, what's the most valuable way an AE can use Storylane today?

Nalin: As an AE, there are three places you'd use it. First — and I'll show you in a minute — you should look at how you can use Storylane before somebody gets on a live call with you. Then, after they get on a live call, how do you do the follow-up? And the last use case is you can use it in show-and-tell live demos, depending on your product and use cases.

Think about pre-call. Somebody books a time with you, they want to chat — they're qualified at this point. You want to provide enough info about what your product is doing early on, so that more people show up and you don't have drop-off issues. We tried this within Storylane itself. I'm going to show you some quick stats. Let me share this... just a second, the share didn't work this time. There you go.

So the stats I want to show you: let's say you have HubSpot — it can be in any place. Somebody books a call and wants to talk to your sales rep. You can set up an automated email sequence. Here's an example of an email set up in our HubSpot: "Thanks, you're going to talk to our demo strategist. Here are a couple of things you'll want to see before you go in to talk to a strategist." You can send an example of a demo or a hub. We call this a pre-call, so they click through it and understand what your product is doing. This is something you can completely automate and set up inside your workflow. Once you set this up — and if you need help with the setup, definitely ask a CSM — you can get the analytics and stats. Your rep, before getting on a call, will know exactly whether the prospect engaged with the demo or not. The way it performed for us: 50% of the people actually clicked and viewed the demo. Of everybody who opened the email, 50% definitely engaged and spent a lot of time on these demos before coming on a live call. That gives them a lot of context about your product and lets them ask deeper questions. So that's one use case — pre-call, before getting on live with an AE, you send them a demo.

The second use case is post-call: how do I effectively share this? Let's say you go into your HubSpot. I'm a contact in HubSpot — and again, this could be in Salesforce as well — and you just did a call with this prospect. With Storylane, you have a quick way to click on the Storylane icon and pull up the right set of demos. A lot of teams don't use it this way. We have a plug-in across many different systems today — Seismic, Highspot, Salesforce, Gong, Outreach — wherever you're sending emails from. So you click the icon, pull it up, and on the right side you'll see the email is automatically filled out. I want to send a demo to this prospect. You click on it, it immediately creates a new link that you can copy and insert and send. Let's say I'm using my own HubSpot to create an email draft — it gets inserted for you automatically. You might have templates, pull in the templates, and send it out. We make that workflow pretty easy so you can pull exactly what you want to send as a follow-up. You'll get analytics on who's engaging, both inside Storylane and as an email notification. Every time someone views it, you get an understanding of who's viewing the demos, so you can quickly look at it from the extension itself.

Arthur: Amazing, that's great. This next question is focused more on the live environment. They're asking: how do I keep a click-through tour feeling live and dynamic in a demo without rebuilding it for every single call?

Nalin: Got it. This goes into how you use this in live calls, and we have capabilities like presenter mode. I'll talk about this in two parts. Storylane is not your full live demo — if you're running a one-hour live demo or a POC, that's on your environment. Where we shine with sandbox is the lightweight sandboxes you can put together, stitch together, and use in live calls to show and tell. It's like an early demo. Remember the slide where I showed an early demo — you want to run a templated one, you can use these.

For example, let's say I want to open a demo for a particular prospect. I'll go back to this prospect, and I have my extension. I'm an AE, so I'm not a creator on this demo, but I have demos that were shared to me by my SEs. How do I pull this up? You have quick access — these are my favorite demos. Now I want to present a live demo. You'll see three options. Open in presenter mode. When I click "open in presenter mode," this demo opens in a mode where your prospect can navigate, and you can also have presenter notes launched. I have presenter notes — you won't be able to see them because I'm not sharing that window — popped up as well. I can walk the user through it without the tooltips and guides. Essentially, we're letting the user, or your sales rep, navigate through the product, and you have presenter notes giving you talking points. This is a lightweight sandbox where we've stitched things together. It's not a full clone, but it gives you enough to show and tell in early demos.

Let me reshare this in full screen so you can see the presenter notes I was referring to, since they're in a separate window. There you go — now you can see the presenter notes. These are the notes that show up. Again, your buyers will not see this because you're only sharing that specific window. That's why you couldn't see it before. So in live demo use cases, you can go back, have this click-through, walk them through specific use cases, and have these notes in a separate window so you have the talking points you want to use. This color you're seeing isn't fixed — you can control it completely. We won't go into the details of how you build and control colors and spacing, but all of this is definitely configurable.

Arthur: Perfect. I know some people had questions around guided tours versus sandbox. They're asking: which one do you see convert better in the sales motion?

Nalin: I think there are a few ways to look at all the demos. There are guided demos, sandboxes, presenter-mode demos, and there's also a hub. Let me go back and show you. I like to think about where to use what demo within a framework. At a very early stage, for awareness, definitely a lot more guided demos. These are the website demos — lightweight, under 10, max 15 steps — giving awareness of what your product is doing. As the interest from your buyer increases, which is where they get into SDRs or early demo calls, that's where you'll start using more personalized demos, and hubs. I'll show you the hubs in a moment. Then, as they go deeper, that's where you start using sandbox demos and presenter demos — I showed you a little about those — because this is where they're making decisions and evaluating.

When you want to share these demos back, it depends on your product. If your product is complex and it's a technical buyer, I recommend sharing more of a click-through where they can do a sandbox, as a follow-up. If your buyer is more SMB, less tech-savvy, I'd recommend using simpler guided demos. Hubs are useful if they're not going to make a decision just based on demos but need more things beyond demos.

As a quick example of what a hub could look like — let me launch a hub here, this is our hub. When you share a hub, this is what your buyer receives, and they get to choose what they want to see; they build the experience themselves. "I want to learn more about demos, a bit more about hubs, about pricing, how your integrations work." Let the user choose. Maybe I want to learn about RepX — maybe that's important, maybe I'm not ready there. So the user chooses what they want to learn about, and they continue. On the left side, you'll see it's built out all the experiences they've chosen. This gives your buyers an opportunity not just to see one or two demos, but a collection of them along with videos and case studies, so they get a sneak peek of what your product is all about. I highly recommend it if your product is multi-product — let the buyer choose what they're most interested in. And with that interest screen where the user chooses, that data comes back to you as a rep in HubSpot or Salesforce. That becomes a great way to start your conversation, to understand what they're really interested in for your follow-ups and where the buyer is in their decision-making.

Arthur: Awesome, we got some questions there. We also got Rebecca in the house, who's very excited about the SDR use case, so let's jump right into it — keeping an eye on time. I'm an SDR. I live in outbound sequences — cold email, LinkedIn, all these channels. So before we get tactical, what's the main way you see SDRs using Storylane?

Nalin: You're probably using a tool like Lemlist or Smartlead — there are a lot of tools out there — or maybe running campaigns in HubSpot. The easiest way: let me open a quick Lemlist. Let's say I'm running a campaign. Here's an example of a campaign email sequence I'm going to send out. You have that email template. But keep in mind, it's incredibly hard to get a response back from people today when you reach out. Two things happen: they want to understand what your product is doing, or they want to talk to a chat agent quickly before getting on a call and committing to a full thirty or forty minutes of a demo with a sales rep. That's the driving factor.

The best and easiest way is, inside your sequence, you can insert a couple of things. Here's a template email, and I want to pull in my demo and insert it. Like I showed before, you open the extension. "I'm reaching out to a CRO," and I want to create a link and put it in Lemlist. I click on this, and you can see the "outbound" option. Choose outbound, and since you're on Lemlist, I'll choose Lemlist here. We support many of these platforms, where the links are automatically customized to track who's clicking. Now I want to put a GIF here — I copy the GIF and paste it. You can see the demo is inserted. So anybody clicking on this will let us know exactly who clicked after they open the email. As an SDR, you get to know exactly what the interest level is. And it's not just SDRs — it could be an AE doing outbound prospecting, anyone. Now you know exactly who clicked and who engaged. This data comes into your CRM — Salesforce, HubSpot, wherever your system of record is. Now you have a scoring mechanism. You know what the intent is, and you can retarget that user. Maybe they're not ready for a call, so you can also send RepX — where without a salesperson, they can have a conversation and understand your product. So that's another way, because outbound is harder to get responses; you can start inserting these to show the product.

Arthur: Around the SDR use case specifically — I know we often have best practices for each persona — what do you recommend in terms of the length of the demo when you're sending it out to a cold prospect?

Nalin: I'd go back to this: it's creating awareness. As an SDR, the prospect has absolutely no idea what your product does — it's cold. So at the awareness stage, definitely recommend guided demos, or send an agent like RepX to have them talk to it. The demos have to be shorter — 10 to 12 steps. You want to grab that attention and take your buyer through that funnel. Give them a sneak peek, get them interested, and push them through. Then they'll come down into evaluation and decision-making. So always start with a very small set of steps.

Arthur: Perfect. Next, we're going to move into Storylane for enablement and sales leaders. What's the main way you see someone in more of a leadership role getting the most value out of Storylane?

Nalin: As a leader, the situation is: my team is sending all these demos, my reps are sharing them, and you want to start looking at the metrics. There are a few ways to build out the metrics. First, how you can build this in your Salesforce report or in HubSpot. It comes down to how it's impacting deals and how many deals are getting closed. Let me pull up a couple of reports. I'll pull up this HubSpot report — and by the way, if you need help setting up reports for your team, definitely reach out to our CSM; we'll pop up a link for setting up time with our integration specialist. We can set these up for you.

Because all the data gets pushed into your CRM, HubSpot or Salesforce, this report gives you information like: what's the average time to close a deal that had a high demo interaction, versus a medium interaction, versus no interaction at all? You can track metrics like this — sixty days, forty-five days, thirty days. So you can see that anyone who interacted with the demo, we're reducing time-to-close by 25% easily. You can set up metrics like this inside HubSpot, and understand how many of your contacts and what volume of deals were impacted. Similarly, you can pull information on how many didn't interact — these are the contacts that didn't interact. You can see exactly which demos are performing better and understand the impact of that demo on the deal. You can measure those, or which hubs are performing better. And lastly, you can see which reps are performing — if I have a team of 10 reps, who's actually sending these demos and links, how many they're sending, how many of those deals have closed, and what the dollar impact is. All of these reports can be built out, in HubSpot and similarly in Salesforce. So as a sales leader, this is probably what you'll be looking at to understand the impact and performance.

Two things I'll also call out: this is probably already in your workspace today, we're rolling it out. Inside Storylane itself, you can see — one is building the comprehensive reports in HubSpot, where your sales enablement and ops will be. But within Storylane, you can go to user activity today and understand across the board how everybody on your sales team is performing — how many links they shared, how many views each got, how many accounts we reached, how many leads we generated and impacted. You get those stats pretty quickly. The second thing: inside Storylane, you'll also be able to see deals soon. Deals will give you all the demos, what the intent looks like, the deal amount, how many times they viewed it, who the stakeholders are, who the rep is, and what the impact looks like. For example, the demo-influenced pipeline will tell you how much of your pipeline is impacted by demos. Some of this will be within the platform, and reports are going to be more exhaustive in terms of how we set this up.

Arthur: Perfect. Maybe this next question came from a sales leader looking at these dashboards. He's saying some of his reps are using Storylane and some are not. What actually separates the teams that get Storylane adopted from the ones where it stalls?

Nalin: A little philosophical answer: I think it's best to model your top reps. Maybe run a session on how your top AE or top rep is performing, how they're modeling and sharing demos. A session from them to drive other reps to use it would be great. So internally, how do you get other reps to use it? That's one way. There are two parts. One is the human side — how you teach them about it and model based on the top-performing rep. The second is what I showed you: the rep activity / deals dashboard gives you a sense of how each one is performing. Within this dashboard, you'll know exactly which reps are performing. You go into Storylane and see the rep activity. Think of it like a leaderboard, to understand how each one is performing. You can ask, "Why is it working very well for one rep whereas another isn't performing?" Ashley is doing great, whereas Nicole has only sent 10. You'll have the data, and then you impart that through multiple sessions internally to drive adoption.

Arthur: One of the best tips I've heard from a couple of product marketers: they used to go up and do these enablement sessions themselves, but they realized that as a marketer, they might not have as much credibility with sales. So they started taking some of these top reps — let's say Jordan here, who's very successful — and having them present to the sales team. There's something about having a top rep talk about how they're using it and how they've won deals that often leads to a lot of adoption across the sales team. So that's another tip I'd recommend.

Okay, moving right along. This one comes from folks that have an enterprise sales team — selling complex deals to multiple stakeholders. What does a winning Storylane setup look like for that motion?

Nalin: I think it's all of what we talked about today. For me, a winning setup goes back to that slide — first and foremost, having a framework like that. Once you have a framework, adoption within your enterprise sales motion becomes a lot easier. You know exactly how it's streamlined. So first and foremost is having that framework, and then following through in all the different stages — whether from your website or an SDR doing prospecting, an AE using them before and after, doing a quick show-and-tell demo in more templated ways. That's where the biggest value is. And of course, the SE is preparing these demos, having different demo templates, sharing them, and enabling them across all the teams. So that sums up everything we talked about — the framework becomes super important. Without the framework, it becomes more like, "I built a demo, and this AE didn't use it right." Once you have a framework, you know exactly how different types of demos need to be used in different scenarios. So I'd definitely start with that.

Arthur: Awesome. Maybe this is someone that's an earlier customer, but what would you say is the single best leading indicator you've seen from customers that tells you Storylane is working, before you're actually seeing any pipeline impact?

Nalin: Absolutely. Pipeline impact we talked about — that's a given. Once you start adopting and using it, there's always a measurable pipeline impact. But the biggest thing I see over and over is more than the pipeline impact: people see value in building the demos itself, because today buyers want to see it. Your product is changing faster, buyers want to see what it is, and there are always 10 different competitors they want to look at. So the more you tell the product story about what your product is to your buyers throughout their journey — from the website all the way to close, involving multiple stakeholders — creating these assets quickly and sharing them, the time to educate the buyer comes down quite a lot. You need something that spins up things faster. That's one thing we focus a lot on: how do you build these demos faster and share them efficiently. Time-saving is the biggest difference I see. Let's say you have to use an agency or demo experts to build these demos — that's a lot of time and commitment. Instead of spending that cost and money, you're able to save time. Apart from pipeline impact, that's one thing I see a lot more.

Arthur: Perfect. I know we had a lot to get through, and we're at time. But for those of you staying on, I definitely want to open it up to Q&A — feel free to put your questions in the chat or use the Q&A tab. One of the things people were curious about is the product roadmap. So if you could share something there, that would be great while we queue up some questions.

Nalin: 100%. I mentioned this in the beginning — we look at the roadmap as things going incredibly fast. Look at OpenAI or Anthropic; the speed at which they're helping us build things is incredible. So we rethought the roadmap. Nobody is going to predict the next twelve-month roadmap. We look at every two months what we're shipping that's impactful for you all, releasing every week in that way. I'll give you a quick sneak peek of what's coming in the next two months so you have an idea. Things change incredibly fast, so we want to be very nimble and adapt, and we keep updating our roadmap constantly. This session is great for getting feedback, and you'll start seeing that get into the roadmap. Let me share my screen and quickly show you a bit of the roadmap.

First, before getting into the roadmap — just a few weeks back we launched RepX. That's something you all should try out. We have a first design partner who launched it, Hospitable, a few days back. You can go talk to OpenHospi, and that will give you an opportunity to see what RepX does. We're going to constantly make improvements, and we're working with a few more design partners; a few customers are going live with this as well.

Now, into the roadmap — what are we building in April and May? In no particular order: I showed a bit of the v2 editor that's going to have a lot more video editing, more guide types, and a different demo-building experience. We've started giving that to a lot of our customers, and you'll start seeing it in the next two weeks. If you need access, just let your CSM know and we'll enable it right away. Next, the AI demo builder: how you can take a video and convert it to a demo, put in a Figma file and convert it to a demo, or just a bunch of images or slide decks — it'll all convert. I talked about speed-to-value, and how incredible it is to build these things and share them with buyers. We already have some of this out, and we're adding more — it's in beta. If you need access to the AI demo builder, let us know. Deal intelligence: I showed a bit about how, within the product, you'll start seeing deals, the impact, and rep usage. The ones you see in orange are all in beta right now; we're rolling it out, so if you need access, we should be able to give it to you.

A few other things coming out: of course, the new HTML editing I showed you — that's going to be part of how you edit and modify demos, as part of the demo builder. LLM embeds — this is more top-of-funnel, on the marketing side. If I embed my demos, can these demos be queried on LLMs? Can they be surfaced? Can somebody ask a question in ChatGPT and get a response, because these demos talk about the product specifics? That's exactly what we're trying to solve — making your demos searchable in LLMs. Going back into AI building: AI hub building. Building hubs is pretty quick, but now can I just prompt it and build the entire hub for me for different personas, pulling your PDFs and everything together? So AI demo builder, hub builder, and demo editing — we'll be releasing this in April. Multi-language support: I have a demo, but I want to support 20 different languages. Can we detect what language the user's browser is in and automatically serve the right demos with the right captions? That's what we're building. And then collaboration: I have five people building demos across different teams — can I add comments and collaborate with them? Also, I shared these demos with a buyer — can they leave feedback? We're trying to build that loop where you as a demo builder can collaborate internally, but also where your prospects looking at these demos can provide feedback, so as a seller you have a way to collaborate with them. And overall demo experience — we're adding tons of things so it doesn't feel like learning a product; we want to build that experience a little better. Again, this is not for the next twelve months — this is the next two months, just to be clear, April and May. Of course, there are a lot of small things we constantly ship, but this is how we're looking at it for the next two months.

Arthur: Amazing. There you have it, folks — a little insight into what we're looking to ship over the next two months, and I know Nalin wanted to show this to hold us accountable. So keep an eye out for some of those things. We still have some time, and I know we've got some questions coming in. I see one from you, Edgar, we'll get to in just a sec. We do have a poll here, because we're aiming to make this a three-part series and we want to make it as focused as possible for what you all want to learn more about. So if we could launch that poll, Ranga — what would you want to go deeper on for part two? Navigate to the poll section on the right side of your screen. We have the RepX deep dive and learning more about the dashboard, hubs (how to build and manage hubs for sales), and the marketing use case — interactive demos for campaigns and websites. So let us know where you'd want to go deeper for the next session.

Okay, to start with Edgar's question: is Model Context Protocol something you'd be open to in the future?

Nalin: Yes, 100%. As we're building this over the next two months with a lot of AI, 100% we'll be open to it. And let us know — reach out to me. We're already building out a few things, and with MCP, we'll be doing that.

Arthur: Amazing. Simple question — yes, we are doing it. And it looks like Maxwell's excited about Figma integrations as well.

Nalin: Cool. By the way, on Figma integration, we do have a plug-in today, so you can try the Figma plug-in. You'd open the Storylane Figma plug-in to build the demos, or to import all the data inside. With AI plus Figma, you don't even have to build the demos — it creates one for you. That's the key for us.

Arthur: Awesome. Mindy actually gave some great feedback here — it wasn't an option in the poll, but Storylane for customer product training; she'd like to see more of how we use Storylane for that. And then Justin asks: did you say you'll be offering an AI presenter that will host demos with customers? I think he's referring to RepX. Justin, that's something we just launched a couple of weeks ago — you can see it on our website. We have a couple of design partners doing that. That's one of the "future is now" products we have here at Storylane. How do we take all the things you're already using in Storylane — interactive demos? We can feed it top sales reps' transcripts, and the idea is it can start to handle those inbound requests and qualify. And he continues to ask: is that full conversational RepX? Can it take a customer A to Z through the demo?

Nalin: Not today. What it does is top-of-funnel — educating them with different assets, more discovery, and qualifying them. Our plan is to take this further. RepX is focused on awareness today, like I talked about — awareness, engaging them, not through the full evaluation at that point. We believe there's a human salesperson who's going to be involved at that stage; RepX will be assisting them as we push it down the funnel. RepX focuses a lot more on the top, but what we're building later this year is RepX helping during evaluation and during live calls as well. You'll hear more on RepX updates in a separate session — what's coming in RepX. So definitely, we're able to do that too.

Arthur: Awesome questions, Justin. Maybe Edgar can expand a little more, but he said it would be super cool to have a more robust version control system on building demos, especially for HTML sandbox demos.

Nalin: Version controls? My understanding is, two things are coming. One — the sneak peek I gave you around how you edit sandboxes and manage them is going to be a lot more interactive, like a chat, where you prompt it. I showed a little early on, but that's going to completely change how you manage your bunch of different screens for your sales use cases. The second is we're building out versioning, along with the multi-language support — versioning so you can go back to your older versions if needed. But it's not right in this month, April or early May. That's something — it's not a roadmap; we're focused on building some of the things we showed in the next forty-five days. But share that feedback. We change priorities quickly and keep building more things.

Arthur: Awesome, so hopefully that answered it. He said it's regarding change logs and quickly reverting edits. So yeah, we'll have that. And thank you so much, Michael, for joining — you're always helping us think about new ideas, and I love how he's been able to use it in sales, product marketing, and solutions engineering. He's been our main persona across the same company, which is pretty cool.

Awesome, folks. Thank you so much to Nalin and the team for putting this together. This was the first time we've ever done this, so we welcome your feedback. Thank you for the poll results — it looks like people are very interested in hubs, how to build hubs, and more around the marketing use case. So that's probably what we'll go deeper into for part two, and we can also share how marketing is actually using the hubs product and how a lot of our customers are doing that. Otherwise, thank you all so much. This was a great first session, and we'll be looking to do that second session sometime in May, but you'll definitely hear from us when we have the next one scheduled.

Nalin: Awesome. Thank you, everybody. It was great, and looking forward to the next session as well.

Arthur: Awesome. Thanks, everybody.