Ideally, the vendor should spend enough time prior to the demo to understand the underlying need for a CMS and how such a system would impact the business, and then craft a presentation/demo to showcase how the system will address their issues, and quite often such a demo would go beyond 60 minutes. In my opinion, a generic demo is a waste of time for both the vendor and the prospect.

I agree that clients should ask for PowerPoint slides at least 2 days in advance of the demo to ensure that the vendors and clients are themselves prepared for the demo.

I agree with the comments about getting past death-by-Powerpoint. This is harder to do than you might imagine. Many vendors will seduce you with “just 10 minutes and we’ll be done with slides, I promise,” and meanwhile a half hour later you’re telling them (nicely) to shut up and get on with it. At that point half the meeting is gone.

Users in different roles will want to see (and deserve to see) entirely different 60-minute demos. I know what I’d want to see as an admin. I also know what I’d want to see as a tech-savvy business user. Totally different demos.

Overall, though, I agree with your main point, which is not to let early-phase demos become all-consuming, and not to let well-meaning marketing folks waste gobs of time showing slides that everybody can just as well read offline, in advance of the demo.

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However long the demo is, it helps a lot if you take control of the agenda. Don’t just say to the vendor “You have 2 hours, show me some nice stuff”, but say “I want you to walk through these 4 user scenarios in the first hour, then I want 15 minutes on your technical architecture, then 15 minutes on your service and support organisation, and etc…”. And if the vendor goes off the agenda, steer them back to it. It’s your meeting, not theirs.

Cheers
Graham

With the maturity of the WCM market, many buyers are on their second or third product and have seen the demo of publishing press releases and doing a drag-and-drop of the CEO’s picture. I think it’s more fun to give the vendor sample content ahead of time and see how they would handle real-world templates and mock up actual publishing processes. Another fun one is to see if they can install their software in the customer’s environment.

Having said that, I generally wouldn’t recommend product demos early in the selection process, as an attractive UI or a few bells and whistles can easily distract clients and stakeholders from the key requirements and objectives that the product needs to satisfy. (Then again, I’ve seen those bells and whistles distract them at the end of the process, so what do I know!)

Just to clarify: 60 minutes is for the early round of a selection process.

Cheers,

If, however, it’s the final presentation to go from short list to award of contract, I don’t think an hour is enough. Especially if the customer is sitting in the room with long checklists and scoresheets and the vendor feels obliged to cover everything ’cause they know how stupidly robotic procurement scoring can be. Also, I far prefer an interactive session when the customer asks to see things and takes the vendor off script. You can’t do this in an hour either. I think a 2.5 meeting is about right: 90 minutes of interactive demo around your testable stories, 30 minutes discussing intagibles and 30 minutes of questions. No corporate slides

Buying a CMS is a big deal and they’re not simple things. You need to get to the detail. And you aren’t going to get there in an hour.

Jon

Red flags should go up if anything was confusing or clearly cobbled together at the last minute. Theoretically, the vendor should be doing these demos all the time. Where I’ve seen some vendors struggle is when they try to customize the demo with specific content for a specific client. Those demos inevitably fail because they haven’t been fully tested, and there’s a good chance the vendor doesn’t (yet) fully understand the customer’s business needs or pain points.

Agree with all your points.

I try at get into a demo within the first 10-15 minutes of a meeting. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a demo is worth 1000 slides. Generally speaking, I prefer to avoid slides entirely. A demo and whiteboard is all I need, especially when presenting to architects.

My typical demos tend to be in the 30-45 minute range, plenty of time to show content authoring, workflow, page+site assembly, content targeting, analytics, multivariable testing, etc. It’s all about proper preparation- knowing the customer requirements and how to quickly get demonstrate them without getting deep into the feature/function abyss.

There is absolutely nothing worse than a vendor demonstrating their product knowledge when instead they should be demonstrating their knowledge of your business.