You sat through a demo recently and the tool did everything the person said it would. It was always going to. I know, because I build them too. A demo is the one path that works, rehearsed until it looks like the product.
Yesterday morning I sat in the buyer's chair for an hour with my own product open, and found three things it got wrong before a prospect could. Not one of them would have come up in the version I usually show.
WHAT WORKS
Bring your worst example and make them run it live.
Nobody builds a demo dishonestly. You build it out of the first case you got right, then you show it two hundred times, and somewhere in there you stop being able to see the shape of what you left out. The demo is true. It is also the narrowest possible sample of the product, chosen by the person selling it.
So stop evaluating the demo. Interrupt it.
Before the call, find one real item from your own business that is ugly. The client with two email addresses. The project that changed scope twice. The invoice that came in two parts, late, against a different reference number. Have it open in another window.
Then ask for four things, in this order.
- Run mine. Not the sample. The item you brought, in the call, while you watch. Whether they can do it now or need a week to set it up is already an answer.
- Show me a real time it got this wrong. One actual case, what it did, and what happened afterwards. A hypothetical does not count.
- Tell me what it is bad at. Anyone who has run this in production for a year has a list and will say it out loud without flinching.
- Tell me what leaving costs. Where the history sits, who exports it, and what stops working the day you cancel.
The order matters. The first two are expensive to fake in real time. The last two are cheap to answer honestly and get vague fast when there is nothing behind them.
One reply ends the call for me. It is when "what is it bad at" comes back as a benefit. It keeps learning. It handles that automatically. Said once, in passing, that is a founder being proud of their work. Said in place of the list, it means nobody there has met the failure yet, and you will be the one who does.
Below is what happened when I ran this on my own product yesterday morning. Three things it got wrong, and the pattern all three shared, which is the thing I would go looking for in anything you are about to buy.
Read the rest of this issue on our website: https://ankushchauhan.com/what-works/demos-dont-trust-mine
The product I was rehearsing is mine. It is called Alacrio, it runs my client follow-ups, and two of the three gaps are already closed, because an hour in the buyer's chair is cheaper than hearing about it from a client.
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