The Startup Nation of Israel has churned out another impressive startup with the launch of Walnut, a platform for sales teams that makes it easy to produce personalized sales demos. This new tool for sales specialists provides an intuitive way to produce, customize, and manage sales demos.

The company recently closed a $2.5 million seed round funding led by renowned venture capital company NFX. It also received investments from notable tech industry figures including the CEO of Wix Avishay Abrahami, Liquid2 partners Joe Montana and Michael Ma, Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Plangrid Co-Founder Kenny Stone, Graph Ventures Partner Matt Wyndowe, and RoundForest CEO Alon Gamzu.

From art to science

"Our mission is to turn inside sales from an art form to a  science," explains Yoav Vilner, the CEO and co-founder of Walnut. While there is a lot of science in the field of sales and marketing, most companies tend to approach it with a lot of subjectivity and unscientific estimation. Vilner explains that the sales team platform they are offering with Walnut takes away the guesswork in the methods used to sell products.

The "human touch" and personal skills of salespersons are by no means unwanted. However, infusing more science into the sales process can result in significant improvements. "By fully automating the process, sales teams will be equipped to perform exponentially better, with minimal effort and at a much higher conversion rate," Vilner adds.

Smart product demos and remote sales

One of the best features of the Walnut platform is that it enables sales teams to present product demos as a live experience. The product being featured does not have to be digitalized and put out online. Walnut provides the tools necessary to stage a successful product demo experience. The platform's users can easily add or take down product features and details, come up with custom content, and use the system's powerful analytics tool to objectively examine the performance of a sales campaign.

Walnut provides a seamless way to conduct the sales process while working remotely. It removes the need for back-end teams to be involved in the production of product demos. Conventionally, product developers, visual designers, and even research and development teams have to meet to discuss how to develop a compelling product demo. With Walnut, the marketing and sales teams are empowered to produce the product demo on their own.

Walnut makes it possible to create sophisticated product demos without the need to learn technical skills. With its no-code drag-and-drop interface, anyone in the sales team can come up with something that rivals the output of a multi-department endeavor. The platform also provides the "storylines" feature, which is a collection of customizable templates produced based on previous projects. This feature makes it faster and easier to start with new projects, especially if they are related or connected to the same client.

"Nearly every company has to face the challenges of demonstrating live products during sales calls. Now with the switch to remote sales, the product is seeing a surge in demand from early-bird clients and the waiting list is growing every day," said NFX Managing Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss when she was asked for a comment on NFX's decision to invest in Walnut.

Wix for sales teams

Walnut is touted as the Wix for sales teams because of its highly intuitive interface that does not require technical knowhow to use. All users need is their creativity and a good grasp of what their product is about. Wix websites are built by simply dragging and dropping page elements. The same convenience is now available for sales teams through Walnut.

In addition to the ease, Walnut also delivers the advantage of speed. It allows the rapid production of product demos to let sales teams showcase new products in real-time. Many competing companies, especially in the retail sector, put a premium on being able to introduce a product to the market first. Through Walnut, the availability of high-quality product demos is unlikely to be a cause of delay for product launches.

Moreover, just like Wix, Walnut provides an analytics tool. It is easy to determine if a sales campaign has failed, but assessing success is rather complicated. For this, Walnut's analytics feature comes in handy to quantify various aspects of the sales process and decide whether or not expectations were met.

A sales platform designed for startups and large enterprises, Walnut brings together various technologies and expertise to help sales teams deliver the best product demos even with remote work. Staging a sales demo can be a daunting experience especially when done live or in real-time. Walnut provides an excellent platform to do it together with a host of features to meet every sales team's needs.