Demandbase uses Pendo to accelerate customers’ time to value and optimize AI agents
Demandbase at a glance
Demandbase is the AI-powered GTM platform that helps B2B teams drive pipeline and revenue by targeting, engaging, and converting the accounts that matter most.
Challenge
Demandbase needed a way to quickly get users to value on its comprehensive but complex platform, and do so in a way that scaled.
Pendo’ing it
Using Pendo Embedded Guides, Demandbase streamlined and automated a key workflow to drive feature adoption and created PLG motions to convert existing customers on new paid features.
Results
Demandbase simplified a 20-step workflow into two steps, drove cross-sell and upsell opportunities in-app, and collected key feedback on AI agent performance.
Contents
In any successful go-to-market (GTM) program, alignment is everything. Sales, marketing, and advertising need to operate from the same playbook to deliver a seamless customer journey. That’s the value of Demandbase. It brings all of those motions together in one place.
But with powerful platforms comes complexity. As Chad Holdorf (VP of Product) and Tom Keefe (Principal GTM Expert) shared, new users can feel overwhelmed by the breadth of features. To help customers get to value quickly, the team built interactive playbooks. These walk users through high-impact workflows step-by-step. “These playbooks are designed to help customers and prospects see exactly how to use the product—from basic actions to advanced use cases,” Keefe said. “It’s all about adoption.”
To empower customers with these playbooks most effectively, they turned to Pendo and its Embedded Guides.
A playbook for getting value from the product, fast
Unlike traditional in-app overlay guides, Embedded Guides are, well, embedded in your site. This allows teams to quickly deploy modules that look site- or product-native in a way that doesn’t require dedicated engineering resources.
Demandbase started with a playbook designed to show customers how to discern competitive intent reliably from signals in various accounts. Initially, this playbook lived on the Demandbase site and involved taking 20+ steps to complete.
Pendo changed all that. “Chad said we should put [the playbooks] in the product. I said, ‘No, we can’t.’ And then he started showing me what Pendo could do, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I wish I had this when I was running marketing operations!” said Keefe.
Holdorf and Keefe took the 20+ step playbook and created a two-step guide from it to educate users on finding competitive intent. To radically shorten the process, they leveraged Pendo guide automations to fill in key fields for customers and speed up the process. “I could have told engineering to go build all this,” Holdorf explained, “and that would take me probably a few weeks, maybe a month, and we would go back and forth.” With Pendo, however, they could build it right then and there.
Orchestrating cross-sell and upsell opportunities in-app
In addition to educating customers, Holdorf and Keefe also leveraged Pendo to drive product-led growth. In order to promote a new paid feature called Orchestration, they targeted a key subset of 100+ customers who did not have it in their subscription and created a custom Embedded Guide to promote it based on layout and copy the marketing team sent them.
The result? Four customers who’ve seen the guide have already booked Orchestration meetings because of it. All thanks to a guide that could be created in a few hours without any engineering involvement required.
Going forward, the team is looking into testing different variants of cross-sell guides to see which drive the most conversions. “The beautiful part of this is we could change [the guide] anytime we wanted to. We could change the images and copy, we can work on it, and we’ll eventually do A/B testing with different types of guides,” said Holdorf.
Improving AI agents with real-time, in-product feedback
As Demandbase builds AI agents into the platform, it needs to know if they’re actually helping customers work faster and close more pipeline. Pendo makes that possible by collecting feedback from users in the product, while they’re using it.
“Right now, we’re using agents to synthesize and summarize and help customers filter data ten times faster than what they were used to doing. And if you can get your pipeline closed faster, you can increase your deal velocity—that’s huge for a customer,” Holdorf explained.
Now that the agents are live, Demandbase is collecting feedback through in-app polls using Pendo. “We’re getting input directly inside the product, right as users interact with the agents,” said Holdorf. “We’re learning whether it’s helping them do their job, whether it’s actually moving pipeline. That kind of feedback is critical to building the right agents—and improving them fast.”
For each of these projects, Pendo has enabled Demandbase to move smarter, faster. “Every product manager tries to figure out every option that they have in order to solve customer problems. And traditionally the thinking is, ‘Let’s just have engineering change it.’” Holdorf reflected. “The thing is, there is a limited number of engineers. That’s why we use Pendo to navigate as many options as we can.”
Want to learn more about how Demandbase is using Pendo to drive better customer and business outcomes? Check out the full webinar discussion with Holdorf and Keefe below:
