The six formats at a glance
Read the table by the last column first. It is the part a vendor's page will not tell you.
| Format | Who is driving | What it can show | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recorded video | The vendor, in advance | What the product is for and roughly how it looks | Anything you did not see on screen. A video cannot be asked a question. |
| Click-through tour | You, along a fixed path | The layout and the intended workflow, at your own pace | Whether the software works. A tour is a set of screenshots with hotspots; nothing is being computed. |
| Live sales demo | A sales engineer | Answers to your questions, and features outside the standard path, if you ask | How it feels to use without an expert at the keyboard. |
| Self-serve sandbox | You, freely | Real behavior: you can enter, edit, break and delete, on sample data | Your data, your volume, your integrations, more than one real user. |
| Trial on your data | You and a few colleagues | Whether your own records fit and whether the daily task is tolerable | Production load, a full roll-out, the vendor under pressure. |
| Pilot | A real team, for weeks | Whether people keep using it once nobody is watching | Little, but it costs the most and is hard to walk away from. |
Recorded video
A video is marketing, and that is fine. Use it to decide whether the product is in the right category at all. Two minutes is enough to learn that a tool is built for a company ten times your size, or for a different industry, and to stop there. Do not score anything from a video. Everything in it was rehearsed, and the edit removed the waiting.
Click-through tour
Interactive tours look like the product and are not the product. They are captured screens stitched together so that clicking the highlighted button advances to the next capture. That makes them fast to open and impossible to break, which is the point. The test for whether you are in a tour or a sandbox is simple: type something the tour did not expect. If the field refuses input, or accepts it and shows the scripted result anyway, nothing behind it is running.
A tour is still useful. It shows you the vendor's own idea of the main workflow, which tells you what they think the product is for. If your task is not on that path, ask why before going further.
Live sales demo
A person shows you the product on a call. This is the format most vendors of complicated software insist on, partly because their product needs explaining and partly because a call qualifies you as a buyer. Its strength is that it is the only format you can interrupt. Its weakness is that the presenter knows every safe path through the product and will stay on them unless you move them off. Running a sales demo covers how.
Self-serve sandbox
A sandbox is a working copy of the software that you can use without a call, normally loaded with sample records so the screens are not empty. This is the first format where the software is really running: what you enter is stored, rules are applied, and errors are real errors.
What a sandbox proves is behavior. What it cannot prove is fit, because the data in it was written by the vendor to suit the product. The demo checklist is written for this format, and what a demo hides lists the gaps a sandbox leaves.
A sandbox is shared infrastructure run for strangers. Find out whether your workspace is private, how long it is kept and whether it sends email before entering anything. See demo data and privacy.
Trial on your own data
In a trial you get an environment of your own for a limited period, usually to load your own records. Some vendors offer this self-serve at no cost; many offer it only after a conversation, and some charge for it. A trial answers the question a sandbox cannot: do your records, with their gaps and odd cases, go in without being bent out of shape?
Trials fail quietly. The period runs out while everyone was busy, nobody loaded real data, and the decision gets made on a first impression anyway. A trial needs the same things a proof of concept does: one question, a named owner and an end date you chose.
Pilot
A pilot puts the product into real work for a small group, with real consequences, for long enough that the novelty wears off. It is the only format that tests adoption, and it is close to a purchase: by the end, data and habits have moved in. Agree before it starts what happens to your data if you say no, and get the answer in writing.
Choosing the format for your question
- Is this the right kind of product? A video or a tour. Spend minutes, not meetings.
- Does it do the thing it claims? A sandbox, or a sales demo where you set the scenarios.
- Will our data fit? A trial with a real sample, or a proof of concept.
- Will our people use it? Only a pilot answers this.
The order matters because each step costs more of your time than the one before. A vendor who offers only the expensive formats is asking you to commit before you can check anything. That is a reason to ask for a cheaper one, and to note it on the scorecard if the answer is no.