How Synack Transformed Their Demo Strategy

If your demo program feels like it's held together with duct tape and hope, you're in good company. Many B2B teams wrestle with messy staging environments that overtake the calendar of solutions engineers and leave prospects underwhelmed.

Synack lived that reality for years. Their solutions engineers spent a good chunk of their week resetting demo data and rehearsing safe click paths. Engineering burned time updating seeding scripts every time a new feature shipped. And despite all that effort, demos still broke at the worst possible moments. At a major conference, their CEO demoed to a big prospect and hit a blank error screen.

That failure became the catalyst for change. By counting the hidden costs of their homegrown environment and turning feature tours into short problem-solving flows, with Demostack woven in from the start, Synack cut demo build time from months to hours and freed SEs to focus on buyers.

The Hidden Costs of Homegrown Demos

Synack combines human researchers with machine intelligence to find security vulnerabilities across complex attack surfaces like web apps, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and mobile. Their platform coordinates thousands of vetted security researchers who probe client systems for weaknesses, then triages and validates every finding before it reaches the customer.

It's a sophisticated orchestration of people, automation, and data that needs to come alive in demos. Like many teams selling complex products, they built a staging environment seeded with fake vulnerability data and relied on a carefully memorized click path to avoid broken pages. The setup worked….until it didn't.

With this homegrown approach, they found that their solutions engineers were spending roughly 20 % of their time, or about one working day per week, just resetting demo data, cleaning user accounts, and rehearsing the safe path for every call. While engineering burned precious time and effort updating the seeding script whenever new features shipped.

Sellers call this reset chaos, among other, more colorful terms. It steals time from the only thing that matters: talking to buyers.

Even with all that effort across the team, the demos still were hit or miss. At a major conference, Synack's CEO tried to demo a familiar flow with a big client and was hit with a blank error screen. And that was the end of that sales cycle. That single failure turned their simmering annoyance with their demo approach into a board-level concern and triggered the search for a safer platform.

But the real cost wasn't just the broken demo. It was the constraints of their homegrown platform. Every demo followed the same flow, hit the same pages, clicked the same buttons, and told almost the same story. CISOs sat through technical weeds while analysts endured executive dashboards. It was a mess.

Worst of all, AEs wouldn't present without an SE there to guide every click, which created another bottleneck. Now every demo required an hour or more from a solutions engineer.

Marketing couldn't repurpose anything for the website or customer onboarding because they had no visibility or access to the homegrown environment. The demo was trapped in pre-sales, doing a fraction of the work it should have been doing across the entire buyer journey.

Other companies have measured what this costs. Gainsight saved more than 40 SE hours per month and improved win rates by 25% after abandoning their homegrown environment for a dedicated platform. Synack saw the same pattern in their own numbers and made the call: change was worth the investment.

A Moment of Truth and a Mindset Shift

After the conference disaster, Synack's leadership formed a tiger team to find a better solution. The first step was simple: figure out how much demo maintenance is costing us.

They tallied the hours spent resetting data and counted every engineering ticket tied to demo maintenance. The number shocked them. It costs a full-time engineer’s worth of time and salary each year just to keep the main demo running. Once they saw that number on paper, there was no going back to their homegrown environment.

But the team didn't just want to fix the technical problem. They wanted to rethink the entire demo strategy. Their old approach tried to show every feature and prove the platform could do everything by overwhelming the prospect. That needed to change as well.

Prospects don't want to hear a list of capabilities; that’s what the website is for. They want to see how the product solves their specific problem in a handful of clicks. So Synack started building focused stories for each persona, mapping pain points to high-impact moments. Their goal with each demo quickly shifted from a generic product walkthrough to a personalized problem-solving session.

That insight about the cost of demo maintenance led to another realization across the team.

Demos couldn't stay locked in the SE team. AEs needed to run demos without an SE sitting on calls, watching every click. Marketing needed assets they could put on the website. Customer success needs onboarding experiences. None of that was possible with a fragile homegrown environment where one wrong turn broke everything.

They needed clone environments that looked and behaved like production, modular assets that could be assembled into different stories, and tools that let non-technical users operate confidently. The requirements were clear. Now they needed a platform that could deliver.

Selecting the Right Demo Platform

Synack's evaluation came down to three non-negotiables. A platform that wouldn't break during a board meeting. Modular demos that could be mixed and matched without calling engineering. And the ability for everyone on the go-to-market team to run demos without an SE on standby.

Demostack met those requirements in ways their homegrown setup never could.

First, the security and stability problem. Synack needed sandboxed replicas of their production environment with no back-end dependencies. Demostack clones the product so prospects see a version that looks, feels, and behaves like the real thing without touching live systems or exposing customer data. No more safe paths, no more memorized click sequences, no more crossing fingers before a big presentation.

Second, the modularity problem. Instead of one monolithic demo that tried to show everything to everyone, Synack wanted short, focused flows they could assemble for different personas and buying stages. Demostack makes that possible. Solutions engineers build a library of modules (a CISO dashboard here, a vulnerability report there) and sellers pull the right pieces together in minutes. Live demos, self-guided tours, leave-behind sandboxes. All built once, then mixed into playbooks for discovery, technical evaluation, or executive review.

Third, the speed problem. Synack needed to keep pace with product releases without waiting on engineering to rebuild environments every time a feature shipped. Demostack's cloning tools and AI-driven data editing meant updates could happen in hours instead of weeks, with no technical support required.

Fourth, the accessibility problem. Demostack puts demos within reach of the entire go-to-market team. Deep links embedded in internal wikis let sellers grab the right demo in one click, customize a few details if needed, and launch. The same assets work for customer success onboarding and marketing can embed tours on the website. When anyone can find and use a demo in seconds, it stops being a pre-sales bottleneck and becomes a company-wide asset.

Synack's decision reflected what Demostack has been building toward for years: clone your app quickly, tell modular stories, put demos in everyone's hands, and iterate based on what works. By choosing a platform that supports live demos, async tours, and leave-behinds, Synack could meet buyers wherever they were and keep the story consistent no matter who delivered it. Now they just needed to implement it.

Mini-Demos + Accelerated Sales Cycles

Once Synack had the platform, they rebuilt their approach. Hour-long feature tours became 10 to 15-minute demos woven throughout the sales cycle. Sometimes even shorter.

An SDR on a qualification call might show a 90-second glimpse of the CISO dashboard when a prospect mentions visibility concerns. A later technical conversation digs deep into vulnerability reports. This nuanced approach respects the buyer's time and delivers the "aha" moment in the first ten minutes instead of burying it forty-five minutes deep into a slog.

With this new approach, SEs built a library of focused assets like dashboards, reports, and workflows. Sellers grabbed what they needed to build personalized Playbooks for each conversation.

AEs ran demos without an SE babysitting every click. Customer success used the same assets for onboarding. Marketing embedded ungated tours on the website, and lead conversion improved because prospects self-qualified before ever talking to sales.

The time savings were real. SEs stopped spending 20% of their week on demo hygiene. That's a full working day they got back to spend with customers. And engineering stopped burning tickets to fix broken seeding scripts.

The culture also shifted throughout the company. SEs moved from maintenance mode to designing flows and coaching colleagues. The whole company rallied around telling a consistent story.

Synack isn't alone. Gainsight saw a 25% increase in win rates and saved more than 40 SE hours per month after making similar changes. Motive's trial conversions and win rates improved almost overnight. Qualtrics generated 1,000 marketing-qualified leads and $7.2 million in pipeline within 90 days. When you combine modular demos with company-wide access and fast iteration, the results follow.

A Blueprint for Scaling Your Demo Program

Synack didn't just swap tools and call it done. They rethought their entire approach to demos. The shift from fragile staging environments to a scalable platform required changes in how they built demos, who could run them, and what they measured. These lessons also map nicely to what we call the D.E.M.O. Framework. It's a repeatable approach that other teams can follow to get similar results.

Audit the hidden costs. Before you can build the business case for change, you need to know what the current approach actually costs. Count how many hours your SEs or engineers spend resetting demos or updating data each week. Synack found they were burning the equivalent of a full FTE just on demo management. That number shocked them and built the business case for change.

Obsess over your customer's story, not your product features. Once you understand the cost, shift your focus to what buyers actually need. Synack stopped trying to show every button or screen and started focusing on their key personas’ pain points. They built short demos that solve those problems in five minutes or less. And cut the rest. This is what the D.E.M.O. Framework calls the Diagnose step. Take the time to dive deep during discovery to understand what matters to the buyer, then map those pains to high-impact moments in your product that solve them. Less is almost always more in this case.

Put demos in everyone's hands. After you know what to build, create the infrastructure that lets anyone use it. Clone your application into a new environment and create modular assets you can mix and match. Synack built its library of modules once in Demostack, and now sellers assemble custom playbooks in minutes. Make demos accessible throughout your team so anyone can launch them without calling engineering.

Treat demos as flexible assets. The final step is extending demos beyond the sales call. Synack doesn't just use demos for live calls. They embed tours on their website, include them in emails, and tailor them for different conversations. Track what prospects engage with, sync that data to your CRM, and use it to refine your approach. When demos work across the entire buyer journey, they stop being a bottleneck and become a growth lever.

Synack's story shows that scaling enterprise demos isn't about doing more. It's about doing demos differently. Homegrown environments and monolithic narratives sap resources and frustrate buyers. By adopting a clone-based platform, focusing on the buyer's problems, and empowering the entire go-to-market team, Synack turned demos from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage.