The Best Demo Is: No Demo!

A demo is, generally speaking, a form of proof or vision generation.  Our objective in sales is to secure the order using the least expensive form of proof. 

With that in mind, here, in order of increasing expense for the vendor, are forms of proof for a customer:

-          Reference call (to another, similar customer or peer) – basically free

-          Vision Generation Demo – very little resource required

-          Technical Proof Demo – moderate resource required

-          POC – (often) enormous resource required

-          Pilot – yet more (although some Pilots are paid-for, they still potentially consume huge amounts of vendor resources)

Our objective in a sales process is to stay as high as possible on this list.  (And shame on the sales team that offers a POC without the customer requesting it…!)