Most product demos are rehearsed performances. The vendor knows which features photograph well and which questions to glide past. That is not dishonest -- it is simply their job. Your job is to interrupt the script with questions that surface how the product behaves on a normal Tuesday.
Send the questions in advance
Email these to the vendor before the call. Good vendors will prepare honest answers; vendors who resent the homework are telling you something useful.
The seven questions
- Can we use our own data? A demo on sample data hides every rough edge. Ask to see your file, your records, your edge cases.
- What does setup actually involve? Get a week-by-week picture of the first month, including what your team must supply.
- Show me the workflow when something goes wrong. A failed import, a rejected record, a sync error. Recovery paths reveal product maturity faster than the happy path ever will.
- Who answers when we are stuck? Chatbot, ticket queue, or a named human -- and what are the real response times.
- What are the limits of our plan? Seats, records, API calls, storage. Find the ceilings before you hit them in production.
- How do we get our data out? Export formats and the exit process. A clear answer signals a vendor confident in earning your renewal.
- What do customers like us complain about? Every product has a weak spot. A vendor who names theirs is far more trustworthy than one who claims there is none.
The most revealing demo question is not about a feature. It is “what goes wrong, and what happens next?”
Take notes against a fixed template
If you are evaluating several products, score each demo on the same sheet immediately afterward. Memory blends vendors together within a day, and the slick presenter always wins a fuzzy recollection.
The bottom line
A demo you steer is a working session; a demo you watch is an advertisement. Seven questions are enough to take the wheel without turning the call hostile -- and the vendors worth buying from will thank you for the structure.