Context
Vish is a colour intelligence platform for salons: smart scales at the colour bar track every gram of product dispensed, so salons can charge accurately for what they use, cut colour waste, and reorder inventory before they run out. The product's value is physical and visual: a stylist weighing colour into a bowl, a dashboard catching waste in real time. That made it hard to sell from a slide deck. Sales demos historically leaned on live customer accounts or a handful of screenshots, so every pitch was slightly different, live accounts risked exposing real client data, and screenshots flattened the exact thing that makes Vish compelling.
Problem
The sales team needed a repeatable, believable way to walk a prospect through Vish's core workflows, from the stylist mixing colour to the owner reading the ROI. Live salon accounts raised privacy concerns and could be corrupted mid-pitch. Engineering couldn't build one-off demo accounts for every call. And a screenshot deck couldn't answer the question every owner actually asks: "what would this be worth in my salon?"
“The problem I'm trying to fix is our salespeople. It's hard to coach them because they all do it a little bit of a different way. We're trying to make it uniform across the board.”
My role
This project began May 2026, and collaborated closely with C-suite executives and sales and marketing leadership to create the demo environment end to end: the narrative structure of the walkthrough, the interactive product simulations inside it, the ROI model that closes the pitch, and the build itself. I worked closely with the sales team to pressure-test the flow against real calls, and iterated through structured feedback and QA rounds.
Goals
- G1Give every rep the same strong narrative out of the box: a guided flow they can run on any call, with no engineering setup and zero risk of exposing customer data.
Make the pitch consistent and self-service.
- G2Let prospects feel the product, instead of being talked at.
- G3Quantify the value in the room.
Process
- 01Mapped the existing sales pitch to identify the moments where prospects typically ask questions or want to see the product in action.
- 02Recreated the key workflows as working simulations such as the stylist Colour Bar, the front-desk POS widget, and the owner dashboard.
- 03I ran structured feedback and QA rounds with the team, turning each pass into a prioritized task list. These ranged from flow-level changes, to polish.
Turning point
From script to conversation
Early versions of the demo followed the CEO's original narrative in strict sequence, closer to a PowerPoint deck than a live tool, so reps moved forward one screen at a time with no way to jump around. In practice pitches, that broke down fast: prospects don't ask questions in the order a script expects, and a rep locked into a linear flow had no way to answer an out-of-sequence question without losing the thread.
The fix was to keep the recommended narrative as the default path, but let reps jump to any step from a menu mid-conversation and return without breaking the story. It's a small structural change, but it's what lets the demo support an actual conversation instead of just running a script, and it's the piece of the demo that's gotten the most praise internally since it shipped.
Key design decisions
Decision 01
Simulation, not screenshots
Every product moment in the demo is a working recreation, down to the pour: the prospect (or the stylist in the room) holds the button and watches the scale fill toward the target formula. It demos the exact physical behaviour that makes Vish different, and there's no faster way to make a colourist lean in than handing them the pour.
Decision 02
Guided but flexible
The demo follows a recommended 12-step narrative with keyboard and chevron navigation, but reps can jump to any step from the menu mid-conversation. Real pitches aren't linear: when an owner asks about inventory in minute two, the rep can go there and come back without breaking the story.
Decision 03
Personalize everything downstream of discovery
The prospect's name, salon, size, and market flow through the whole experience: "Annastasia Salon" on the dashboard, their stylist count driving the loss slider, their currency on every price. Once it's using their own name and their own numbers, it reads less like a demo and more like a preview of the product they'd actually be using.
User flow
Step 1
The rep completes a quick discovery form, and the demo opens on the industry problem: an interactive slider showing what a salon of the prospect's size loses to colour waste each year.
Step 2
The walkthrough moves through value for every role (stylist, front desk, owner), anchored by the interactive Colour Bar demo, POS integration options for both integrated and non-integrated salons, and the owner dashboard's results timeline.
Step 3
Social proof (a map of salons on Vish with video testimonials) leads into the ROI calculator, which converts the conversation into an annual value figure, a recommended plan, and a clear next step: trial, quote, or follow-up.
Outcome / impact
Still gathering data.
Once real metrics are available, this section will be updated.
Reflection
The best demo is one that lets a prospect picture themselves using the product, without feeling staged or oversold.
Next project
Real-Time Skill Assessment