{"id":1786,"date":"2011-02-16T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1786"},"modified":"2011-02-16T10:13:42","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T18:13:42","slug":"evaluating-the-demo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1786","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating the Demo"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll admit that a while back (wow \u2013 are we going on 10 years now?) I was an SC.\u00a0 You know \u2013 those guys from the vendors that the salespeople count on to demonstrate product during the sales cycle.\u00a0 SC\u2019s are a highly valued commodity.\u00a0 They are highly trained product experts that must float between the functional world that many of the HR practitioners in their audience live in, the technical world that many IT people in their audience live in, and the sales world that they are part of.\u00a0 I mean seriously, how many people do you know that can have a functional, technical and sales conversation all at the same time?\u00a0 The best SC\u2019s are truly rare, have extraordinarily hard jobs, and in my humble opinion are actually quite underpaid for what they bring to the table.<\/p>\n

I was attending the HR Demo<\/a> show in December (put on by the one and only John Sumser<\/a>) and it was really quite interesting watching back to back to back demos.\u00a0 It was even more intriguing to listen to the commentary and watch the twitter feeds at the show.\u00a0 Personally, I watched 3 demos (I was only there for the first day).\u00a0 Not in any order, there was a horrific demo of a terrific product.\u00a0 There was also a middling demo of a middling product, and a terrific demo of a fairly poor product.\u00a0 However, I\u2019m not sure that the verbal or twitter commentary really reflected this.\u00a0 Part of this is the varying degrees of capability in driving through to what the core product capabilities are from either a functional or technological perspective, and reading past the SC\u2019s ability to sell (that is after all what they are there for).\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it, a 1-hour demo of a product is designed and probably scripted to show all the best that a product has to offer.\u00a0 The best SC\u2019s are going to show all the flash in a way that looks incredibly simple.\u00a0 Even if the product is absolute crap (I\u2019m not saying I saw anything that was), the sales job is to convince you that you can do everything you need to do within the product and that the capabilities are not only sufficient, but that you love them.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the technologists in the room are looking around at the exact same demo and not listening to a word about functionality.\u00a0 Instead, they are watching the screens, table driven values, background integration, web architecture and all sorts of other things that are not being explained verbally.\u00a0 Thus, I can watch an incredibly dry presentation but still come out of it saying, \u201cwow, that was cool\u201d while the functionally driven people in the room might be saying, \u201cwow, that sucked.\u201d\u00a0 Functionally, if we are talking about core HR, I\u2019m going to say that the product capabilities of the best demo and the worst demo were within 5% of each other.\u00a0 However, technologists and functionally driven practitioners are going to come out of a demo with different perspectives.\u00a0 Unless you are an analyst or have a specific background, I\u2019m not sure that you\u2019re going to be able to pull together these perspectives in a single individual.\u00a0 That\u2019s why, even though some HR people get a bit tight, we invite very broad teams of HR, IT, Finance, etc to watch demos.<\/p>\n

As a parting thought, here are a couple of hints when you ask questions during the demo:<\/p>\n