It is not unusual for vendors to ask for several hours to do a product demonstration and then only reluctantly show the product towards the very end of the sales meeting. Even when they talk to seasoned industry analysts, vendors tend to find 60 minutes too short. Unfortunately most CMS vendors are quite bad at giving compelling product demonstrations and many buyers waste their time going through dull sales pitches.
Imagine if you were buying a new car. Would you accept if the car dealer required you to attend a 3 hour sales meeting before taking the test drive? I would certainly walk out and find a less arrogant dealer. Perhaps after falling in love with the new car, I would be interested in learning about the fascinating history of the car or the specific technical details.
Admittedly, buying a car is different from buying a CMS, but I still don’t understand why so many prospects accept that the CMS test drive happens so late in the sales cycle. It is not unusual for vendors to say that a demo will only confuse the buyer and that buyers need to understand the product before they can have the demo.
A good CMS demo does not need to be any longer than 60 minutes. In the first 30 minutes you should at least be able to see:
- How to create, update, preview and delete content (in multiple languages if relevant)
- How to manage layout
- Administration, including roles and users
The final 30 minutes could then be an interactive session with your team deciding what they would like to see. This way you also get a very good impression of how deep the product knowledge of the vendor team is. Remember that if you stick with the same demo agenda for each vendor, it is easier to compare the products afterwards. You may consider using testable stories.
For a face-to-face meeting with the vendor, it would be reasonable to set aside 2 hours, in particular if the vendor has travelled to your location. Still, make sure you get to see the product after no more than 10 minutes and for at least 60 minutes. Two hours should give you enough time to also talk through your project, learn relevant things about the vendor and discus how the vendor would approach your project.
To avoid wasting time in the meeting, set up a pre-meeting call with the vendor to agree on the ground rules. Explain your project and your team setup as well as your goals for the meeting, and allow the vendor to ask questions. Also, inform the vendor that if they plan on showing you slides, you need to receive them at least 3 work days in advance. This way you force the vendor to prepare and can intervene if they intend to show you 10 slides of their corporate background. You can distribute the slides to your team in advance so that they can be better prepared.
If you think 60 minutes is still too much, you’ll enjoy our Web Idol competition, where you can see several good 6-minute vendor demos and hear pithy comments from the judges.
A final note: Remember that on average organisations change their CMS every 3 years, so chances are that you may be changing your CMS before you change your car.
Thanks to @GergelyOrosz, @IanTruscott, @puf, @roodlicht, @sandhaus and @walterhanig for valuable input.
Tom August 24th, 2009 19:41
Janus,
Agree with all your points.
I try at get into a demo within the first 10-15 minutes of a meeting. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a demo is worth 1000 slides. Generally speaking, I prefer to avoid slides entirely. A demo and whiteboard is all I need, especially when presenting to architects.
My typical demos tend to be in the 30-45 minute range, plenty of time to show content authoring, workflow, page+site assembly, content targeting, analytics, multivariable testing, etc. It’s all about proper preparation- knowing the customer requirements and how to quickly get demonstrate them without getting deep into the feature/function abyss.
There is absolutely nothing worse than a vendor demonstrating their product knowledge when instead they should be demonstrating their knowledge of your business.
Chris Herring August 24th, 2009 19:41
This is really good advice, Janus. I’ve sat through dozens of these demos and they’ve ranged from okay to disastrous. In my humble opinion, a good CMS should demo covering the points you outlined above should be very easy and simple for all members of the stakeholder team to understand.
Red flags should go up if anything was confusing or clearly cobbled together at the last minute. Theoretically, the vendor should be doing these demos all the time. Where I’ve seen some vendors struggle is when they try to customize the demo with specific content for a specific client. Those demos inevitably fail because they haven’t been fully tested, and there’s a good chance the vendor doesn’t (yet) fully understand the customer’s business needs or pain points.
Jon Marks August 24th, 2009 19:41
I think it depends what the purpose of the demo is. If it is a general sales demo or and early round of a selection process (to get to a shortlist, for example) I’d agree 100%.
If, however, it’s the final presentation to go from short list to award of contract, I don’t think an hour is enough. Especially if the customer is sitting in the room with long checklists and scoresheets and the vendor feels obliged to cover everything ’cause they know how stupidly robotic procurement scoring can be. Also, I far prefer an interactive session when the customer asks to see things and takes the vendor off script. You can’t do this in an hour either. I think a 2.5 meeting is about right: 90 minutes of interactive demo around your testable stories, 30 minutes discussing intagibles and 30 minutes of questions. No corporate slides
Buying a CMS is a big deal and they’re not simple things. You need to get to the detail. And you aren’t going to get there in an hour.
Jon
Janus Boye August 24th, 2009 19:41
Thanks for the excellent comments.
Just to clarify: 60 minutes is for the early round of a selection process.
Cheers,
Zander August 25th, 2009 19:41
Thanks for that clarification, Janus — a quick demo is fine early on, but if you’re actually going to use comprehensive user stories or scenarios to evaluate all vendors consistently, it can take a solid 2 hours even when not including any sales chat.
Having said that, I generally wouldn’t recommend product demos early in the selection process, as an attractive UI or a few bells and whistles can easily distract clients and stakeholders from the key requirements and objectives that the product needs to satisfy. (Then again, I’ve seen those bells and whistles distract them at the end of the process, so what do I know!)
Tony Bailey August 26th, 2009 19:41
I’d agree with Zander – if an organization is in serious buying mode, I would recommend avoiding any vendor interaction until there is a clear vision for what functionality is (and isn’t) needed and the user scenarios are well understood. I’ve seen too many selection exercises go sideways and customers buy shelfware because they get star-struck by a flashy demo and subsequently lose focus.
With the maturity of the WCM market, many buyers are on their second or third product and have seen the demo of publishing press releases and doing a drag-and-drop of the CEO’s picture. I think it’s more fun to give the vendor sample content ahead of time and see how they would handle real-world templates and mock up actual publishing processes. Another fun one is to see if they can install their software in the customer’s environment.
Graham Oakes August 26th, 2009 19:41
I agree with the comments that the length of time needed depends on where you are in the process. By the time you’re down to the last 2 vendors in a procurement, you want some time to get hands on with the system — to start configuring sites and entering content for yourself. At this stage, your ideal is to get a few days to try out the system for yourself.
However long the demo is, it helps a lot if you take control of the agenda. Don’t just say to the vendor “You have 2 hours, show me some nice stuff”, but say “I want you to walk through these 4 user scenarios in the first hour, then I want 15 minutes on your technical architecture, then 15 minutes on your service and support organisation, and etc…”. And if the vendor goes off the agenda, steer them back to it. It’s your meeting, not theirs.
Cheers
Graham
Sigurd Magnusson August 27th, 2009 19:41
Whether the demo is 1 hour or 100, I would say the customer should spent serious time themselves getting to know the tool. Making the decision purely from a demo is not likely to consider important issues uncovered by actually attempting to use the software. A good example of a customer doing their homework:
http://www.silverstripe.com/air-new-zealand-to-migrate-websites-to-silverstripe/
Kas Thomas August 30th, 2009 19:41
It takes a great deal of experience with and knowledge of content management technology to even understand what you’re seeing in a 60-min demo if you’re not an expert. I would say your advice holds true if you’re in a room full of very savvy power-user types. Ordinary business users (if you’ll forgive the term) won’t even know what they’re seeing, IMHO. They will if you prep them properly, of course. But that takes a lot more than 60 minutes.
I agree with the comments about getting past death-by-Powerpoint. This is harder to do than you might imagine. Many vendors will seduce you with “just 10 minutes and we’ll be done with slides, I promise,” and meanwhile a half hour later you’re telling them (nicely) to shut up and get on with it. At that point half the meeting is gone.
Users in different roles will want to see (and deserve to see) entirely different 60-minute demos. I know what I’d want to see as an admin. I also know what I’d want to see as a tech-savvy business user. Totally different demos.
Overall, though, I agree with your main point, which is not to let early-phase demos become all-consuming, and not to let well-meaning marketing folks waste gobs of time showing slides that everybody can just as well read offline, in advance of the demo.
Sethu Iyer September 1st, 2009 19:41
Having had delivered innumerable product demonstrations of Content Management Systems and Portals I would agree that the 60 minutes threshold would be great for an audience that has a good understanding of the inner workings of such products. I have tried doing shorter demos, and have run into situations where it takes time to explain even the basic conceptual steps such as approving a content item and publishing the content to multiple delivery end-points, or things like separation of management from presentation, or features such as content entry templates and content delivery templates, the ability to re-purpose content etc., which are basic features of almost all CMS systems.
Ideally, the vendor should spend enough time prior to the demo to understand the underlying need for a CMS and how such a system would impact the business, and then craft a presentation/demo to showcase how the system will address their issues, and quite often such a demo would go beyond 60 minutes. In my opinion, a generic demo is a waste of time for both the vendor and the prospect.
I agree that clients should ask for PowerPoint slides at least 2 days in advance of the demo to ensure that the vendors and clients are themselves prepared for the demo.