The #2 problem with getting demos to select software is that most demos aren't driven by the needs of the company trying to select software.
Don't get me wrong--a demo is an important part of selecting software. But not a demo of the features that work best in that particular software.
Demos--if they are done--should address (primarily) the key needs of the business. Here's an example:
Several years ago, I spoke to a company that wanted software to control the delivery of their service. It would take the particulars of the (sometimes very complex) contract and manage the delivery of the service (which many times involved coordinating a number of different activities over a period of several months). The company was known for providing very personalized service (knowing names of family members, etc.), and the idea was to support not only the service side, but the scheduling and delivery side.
I didn't participate in the demo, but the only demo that would make sense in this case would be a simulation of the contract delivery support the system can provide. Specifically, I'd want to see
- Setting up a contract
- Setting up the parameters (contacts, family member names, etc.)
- Simulation of several of the common scenarios (from both the customer service and the operational side of the business)
- Opportunity to address several unusual "what-if" situations
- After all of this, I might have questions about accounting, export to Excel, Access, and Word, and the database backend. I might even want to look at the report writer and the database structure. If I planned on customizing the stuff, I'd want to see some of the representative code (I'd pick the functional area of the program and the function I wanted to see code on.) BUT (and this is a big but)...I'd want the answers to these questions ONLY AFTER I was convinced that the software could meet the needs I'd expressed in the needs analysis
Of course, this assumes that there WAS a needs analysis.
