1. Avoid them – for some software products or appliances, an evaluation phase may actually highlight some of the product’s weaknesses if ease of installation, setup, and management are not strong suits. For some such deals, you’re better off avoiding playing the game. If you must give them proof then offer to show them a customer deployment where you have screaming performance or a working system at your demo center.

2. Do an end run – I’ve seen savvy sales executives actually go toe-to-toe with customer executives and tell them that doing an evaluation is expensive for both companies. Why not both save some money and skip the evaluation phase altogether? Offer an additional price concession for skipping this phase backed by a satisfaction guarantee to lower the risk of a buy decision.

3. Change the game – if you can present a lower priced, lower risk offering the customer may see that it’s better just to buy and try rather than try and buy. This is one of the big attractions of Application Service Providers (ASP) or Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) models. You might consider a low-end entry point solution that gets you in the door and upsell a larger solution after you’ve earned some trust.

4. Charge for them – you may be surprised to learn that we see software companies getting paid for proofs-of-concepts and evaluations up to 25% of the time. It’s not a profit center but a way to qualify out the tire-kickers or professional researchers.

5. Plant land mines – if your product really shines in an evaluation setting, give your customer a proposed set of criteria based on your own customer base. Of course they know you’re biased, but you lay some land mines (e.g. hard to beat features) that might be very hard for competitors to match.

6. Give a deadline – it’s almost predictable that many customer prospects will ask for an extension on a 30-day evaluation period the day before time-out. Stay on top of the evaluation install/setup, better yet, do it for them within the first five business days. If it doesn’t happen the first week, it won’t happen in a month.

7. Build a coalition – too often sales teams will focus only on the technical evaluator whose role is to beat on products and vendors. Reps do this at their peril. Use this trial phase to ask for meetings with other stakeholders in the organization especially higher ups. Naturally, the project manager will try to block this but position it as helping them build a cross-functional core team that you’ve seen as critical to successful deployments.

8. Go last – the last vendor to be assessed actually does have an advantage in terms of mindshare…again, assuming your product performs at least as well competitors’. But don’t wait till the end to do the other steps above like working the organization, planting land mines, and insisting on urgency.

9. Show off your people – better run organizations have technical evaluators (or their boss) use evaluations to assess vendor performance as much as product performance. Be sure to highlight your team’s responsiveness, technical expertise, support capabilities, and domain knowledge. Remember, the best product doesn’t always win. Give them a “services datasheet” that documents all your strengths outside the product feature/benefit laundry list.

We hope you find these tips useful to your sales staff. Make evaluations an agenda item at your next sales staff meeting to see what’s worked and not worked in the past. Chances are your systems engineers will have the most to say on this topic and may resonate with the tips given here. Good selling!

© 2006.