How PandaDoc scaled their sandbox personalization and achieved 10x faster demo creation

About PandaDoc

PandaDoc helps businesses of all sizes work smarter with software that simplifies their everyday documentation tasks. The documentation management platform handles everything from creation and signatures to payments. PandaDoc envisions a future where success isn’t limited by company size, offering teams a complete 360-degree agreement solution that speeds up document workflows and closes deals faster. Operating in a competitive industry, PandaDoc serves organizations across sectors that need dependable, scalable solutions for their essential business processes.

The growth team, where Kate Walsh works as the Senior Product Marketing Manager, focuses on growth initiatives and creating compelling product experiences that drive adoption across different customer segments. They prioritize developing personalized marketing campaigns, supporting sales teams, and maintaining consistent messaging across all customer touchpoints. The team recognizes a crucial principle in document management: quickly demonstrating product value often determines whether prospects choose PandaDoc over simpler alternatives or established competitors.

At PandaDoc, cross-functional collaboration drives success. All teams work hand-in-hand to create exceptional customer experiences. This approach ensures strategies support business goals while effectively addressing user needs and market requirements.

Challenge

Unreliable sandbox infrastructure created operational bottlenecks

PandaDoc struggled with unreliable sandbox infrastructure, which created bottlenecks across its customer-facing teams. This made it difficult to get the right resources in the proper timeframe. Sales reps frequently found themselves without working demonstration materials during prospect meetings.

"There were a couple different issues that we faced – one was sandbox environments, were constantly breaking. It was difficult for us to get resources in a proper time frame."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

The instability forced the team to maintain multiple backup sandboxes, but even these contingencies proved unreliable when faced with complex customization requirements from different prospects. Solution engineers spent significant time troubleshooting environment issues instead of focusing on product development priorities. This created a reactive maintenance cycle that prevented strategic improvements.

Solution engineer dependencies slowed demo customization

"There was a lack of consistency in the different demos that were out there. We had no single source of truth when it came to a library of demos; things were scattered all over the place, and it was really hard for us to tailor demos to the specific customer names, or the products, or the use cases in a timely manner."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

The dependency on solution engineers created bottlenecks in the process. Sales teams couldn’t respond quickly to prospects’ needs and struggled to create demos that addressed specific use cases effectively.

Fragmented demo resources undermined messaging consistency

PandaDoc lacked a centralized place for demo materials. Instead, content was spread across multiple platforms with different team members maintaining resources independently. Without coordination, salespeople delivered inconsistent messages about the platform’s capabilities and positioning, which confused prospects.

Without unified demo guidelines, sales reps created their own scripts, resulting in dramatically different experiences for similar customers. This inconsistency undermined PandaDoc’s professional image and made it impossible to identify successful patterns, optimize demonstrations, or implement improvements across the sales team.

Solution

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PandaDoc transformed their operations through self-serve interactive demonstrations that eliminated pre-sales dependencies and enabled advanced personalization capabilities. Guideflow implementation let the team focus on creating scalable, maintainable sandboxes that could adapt to various customer scenarios without requiring ongoing pre-sales support or infrastructure maintenance.

Eliminating pre-sales dependencies with self-serve demo creation

The PandaDoc growth team can now create sophisticated, personalized demonstrations on their own without needing pre-sales support or managing complex sandboxes. Interactive demos enable a self-serve approach. This has eliminated bottlenecks that once slowed responses to prospect needs and ensures demos are always available regardless of solution engineers’ workload.

"I think the first demo that I ever recorded and put tool tips in and customize took me 10 minutes. It was so easy and I was able to spin up multiple demos within the same day. Very very easily and everybody loves them."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

They can now respond to prospect requests instantly, crafting custom demonstrations during sales calls or right after discovery conversations. This quick response boosts prospect engagement and smooths the sales cycle by removing delays in demo availability.

Personalizing demonstrations for specific customer workflows

PandaDoc built highly customizable interactive demos with Guideflow to directly address each prospect’s unique needs. Using advanced personalization features, they injected variables into the HTML capture that transformed generic demos into personalized customer experiences.

These variables let the team easily swap text, numbers, and images — adding prospect names, company logos, custom branding — and even hiding sensitive information or anonymizing data with AI. This created demonstrations that perfectly matched what customers actually needed to see.

Their approach went well beyond simple name changes. Teams crafted complete scenarios showing exactly how PandaDoc would solve specific documentation challenges in the prospect’s actual workflow. This proved especially effective with enterprise clients, who typically reject generic demos that fail to address their complex requirements and unique business processes.

Benefits

10x improvement in demo creation efficiency

PandaDoc successfully eliminated technical bottlenecks by streamlining demo creation and customization. Teams that previously required hours or days to coordinate customized demonstrations could now create sophisticated, personalized experiences in minutes with minimal solution engineers’ involvement. Time savings proved particularly significant for advanced customizations that previously required extensive technical coordination.

"In the time that maybe one demo would have taken me to build end to end, add in the copy and the tool tips, grab the screens, edit the screens, I could make 10 Guideflow demos in that amount of time."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

This efficiency improvement freed solution engineers to focus on other high-priority initiatives while enabling the growth team to respond immediately to prospect needs and market opportunities.

Variable-driven personalization accelerates deal velocity

The variable functionality and HTML editing capabilities enabled PandaDoc to create demonstrations that resonated much more effectively with prospects’ needs and use cases. Sales teams could now incorporate prospect-specific elements like company names, relevant industries, and specific workflow scenarios that made demonstrations feel genuinely personalized.

"I can go in there, build demo myself in 5-10 minutes, enabling on-demand demo delivery without having to wait on solution engineers’ resources. This speeds up delivering customized, personalized demos that get into customers’ hands faster, accelerating deal velocity, which ultimately leads to faster revenue gains."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

The personalization improvement led to higher user engagement during demonstrations and more productive conversations focused on specific business outcomes rather than general product features. Prospects responded positively to seeing their company context within demonstrations, creating stronger emotional connections to PandaDoc’s value proposition.

Increased messaging consistency across customer interactions

The demos created with Guideflow ensured consistent messaging across all sales interactions while providing the flexibility for different customer segments and use cases. The team gained confidence that key value propositions and positioning elements were consistently communicated regardless of which team member conducted demonstrations.

"As a product marketer, I care very much about uniform messaging, and I can sleep easily at night knowing that the way that we want to talk about our solutions and what we solve for customers is uniform and consistent across all these different demos that are out there."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

This consistency enhanced PandaDoc’s credibility while ensuring that all prospects received accurate, comprehensive information about platform capabilities and business benefits.

Why Guideflow

Guideflow’s intuitive interface proved essential for enabling non-technical team members to create sophisticated demonstrations without extensive learning curves or ongoing support requirements. The platform’s ease of use meant that PandaDoc could begin creating practical demonstrations immediately rather than investing weeks in training or technical onboarding processes.

"I want things to just work. I want to be able to quickly understand how to use software and achieve my goals with it. That’s what stands out most about Guideflow, there was no learning curve."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

PandaDoc leveraged variable functionality to personalize demonstrations for different customer segments without developing separate versions for each scenario. This allowed their team to build scalable templates that adapt to various use cases while keeping messaging and quality consistent across all demonstrations.

In addition to variables, PandaDoc is now exploring Guideflow’s AI voiceovers that enhance user experience by eliminating the need to read CTA texts. Instead, users receive vocal guidance through the interactive content they watch.

"The other thing that we’ve been playing around with, we haven’t gone live with yet, is voiceovers which I think adds another nice touch because then it goes beyond simply just showing the screen or having a tooltip, but actually having a person’s voice speak at a high level about a benefit or add in something else because, you know, not always people are gonna read everything that they see on the screen. So, actually hearing somebody is kind of nice and then we started to play around with some AI features."
– Kate Walsh, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Guideflow’s reliability went beyond technical features and provided PandaDoc with consistent demo availability, eliminating the infrastructure problems that previously plagued their operations. Teams now schedule demonstrations with confidence, knowing they won’t face technical failures that could interrupt important prospect meetings or harm their professional image. The platform combines advanced capabilities like AI-powered features and intuitive editing tools with user-friendly design. This balance gives PandaDoc room to grow as their demonstration needs evolve, while team members at all skill levels can quickly learn and adopt the system.