Before committing to an MES project, most factories sit through demos from several vendors. The demos look alike: the screens flow, the reports are full, and problems on the shop floor are solved in a few clicks. None of this is surprising. A demo is built to show the vendor on their best day.

How vendors prepare their demos is spelled out in sales books. In this post we read two sources from the buyer's side: the presentation and demo chapter of Founding Sales, which Pete Kazanjy wrote for founders and others in first-time sales roles and which can be read free online, and an interview with Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test, on customer conversations. Both sources speak to the seller or the founder. Turning their advice around for buyers is our own reading, and in each section we keep what the source says apart from what we make of it.

1. Do they ask you questions before the demo?

According to Kazanjy, a pitch should include discovery: a section where the seller asks questions to qualify the prospect, that is, to find out whether they are a real potential customer, and to set up a more productive pitch. About this section he also says:

It's also the thing that first-time salespeople screw up the worst.

As Kazanjy describes it, these sellers are eager to hop into their pitch, start without learning the prospect's business, and miss the chance to tailor the conversation to the prospect's pains. He advises sellers to give this section the first five or ten minutes of the presentation.

On the buyer's side, our reading is this: a demo that starts showing screens without asking you anything is most likely the demo every factory sees. Some of the seller's questions are there to find out how good a fit you are as a customer; that is natural. The easiest way to get a demo built around you is to send the information yourself before the demo:

Your product range and the size of a typical order,
Your number of lines, machines and operators,
Where you think you lose the most time,
The systems you use today: ERP, Excel sheets, paper forms.

During the demo, check whether that information is used. If it isn't, ask: “Based on what we sent you, what did you choose to show us?”

2. Whose data is in the demo?

Kazanjy advises sellers to run the demo on the prospect's own real data where possible. When that can't be done, he describes the next best thing as:

…data that supports all the use cases and proofs you want to demonstrate.

His reasoning: demos where the data makes it nigh impossible to get the point across are, in his view, both a huge lost opportunity and a turnoff for the prospect.

The lesson we draw for buyers: when your data isn't used, the flow you see on screen was most likely built on data prepared around the points the seller wants to make. You only see how the system works with your data by running your own scenario. Send the vendor two or three scenarios before the demo and ask for the demo to use them. For example:

An order's journey: One of your real orders, from the ERP to shipment. Where does each step's data come from: a barcode, a terminal, the machine?
A stoppage: At 10:00 a machine stops for 20 minutes. When, by whom and how is the reason entered? Where does it show up in the shift report?
A change: An order's due date is pulled forward, or material arrives two days late. What does the plan do?

One factory we spoke with told us that the software they had seen only assigned jobs to machines. So ask: does software sold as scheduling actually sequence the jobs by setup time and due date, or does it only show which job goes to which machine?

One of Kazanjy's warnings to sellers is, in our reading, useful to buyers too. He tells sellers what it means when they catch themselves saying certain things in a demo:

…“Well, ignore that” or “Imagine if XYZ,” you probably have a data problem.

According to Kazanjy, this doesn't necessarily mean the product needs investment or engineering help. The seller does still have to put in the work to set the demo up properly. Our reading: note the moments you hear these phrases. Those points were not shown in the demo; ask to see how the system handles them with your own data at the next meeting.

3. Turn “Can it do that?” into the past tense

In an interview on the Bootstrapped Stories podcast, Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test, gives two reasons why founders get misleading feedback from customers. First, when you describe a product idea, people see your excitement and want to support you. Second:

People are really bad at predicting their future behavior.

Fitzpatrick knows this from experience: at an earlier company, brands told him they loved the product idea and would love to use it, and then, once his team built it, the brands backed out. He describes the best workaround he found as follows:

…ask them what they're already doing about that issue in their life…

And then to ask why they do it that way. Fitzpatrick describes this for founders trying to understand their customers. Applying it to buying is our extension: “Can your system do that?” in a demo also asks for a prediction about the future, and the seller across the table wants to please you. Turn the same question into the past tense:

Which customer did you set this up for, and when?
At a factory of our size, how many months did the first module take to go live?
What went wrong during the rollout, and how did you fix it?
Who uses this feature on the shop floor today, and how often?

The answers to these questions tell you more than the screens do. If the answer is “Nobody uses this yet, but we can do it,” that is useful too: the feature would be set up for the first time in your project. You decide knowing that.

4. Know what you want when you ask for a trial or a reference

Kazanjy gives a separate heading to a request buyers often make: “I need a trial/I need a reference.” In his view, a demo tailored to the prospect, ideally including their own data, is already close to a trial, and a customer reference is a powerful piece of proof. Still, he tells sellers to be careful: the prospect may be using the request to avoid saying no or to put off a decision. In Kazanjy's reading, a prospect who asks for a trial is really saying:

I'm not sure I believe this, and I need more proof points…

He advises sellers to ask what sort of further proof the prospect would be looking for. The answer, he says, turns out surprisingly often to be as simple as “I'd like to see some proof of prior success,” which can mean customer success stories, ROI studies or customer references.

On the buyer's side, our reading: prepare your answer before you are asked. If you know what you want, the proof you get will be useful to you. There are two options.

A reference call

Ask for a factory in your sector, of similar size, that has used the system for a few years. On the call, ask about the past as well: how long the rollout took, where they struggled in the first months, who uses it on the shop floor today.

A pilot

Kazanjy writes that buyers with more mature processes may ask for a formal pilot, and defines it as:

…a time-bounded experiment, where they go through certain key actions in the product…

He advises sellers to frame the pilot so that it is clear from the start how success will be defined, and to hold the prospect accountable for taking part in training sessions and check-in meetings. In his account, an unstructured trial where the prospect just gets a set of credentials invites the answer, at the end of the week, “I didn't get to this. Can I have another week?”

Our suggestion is that you write the definition of success: which line, which measure (for example downtime or daily output), how long, and what the value is today. Decide up front who on your team will give the pilot how many hours a week. We covered how starting with a single module works in We already have SAP. Why would we need MES?

5. Score after the meeting, from your notes

In the same interview, Fitzpatrick says that while he was learning to run customer interviews, he couldn't tell during an interview how it was going. He took people who were nice to him for customers, and often it was the opposite: the nice people didn't become customers, while the mean ones ended up buying, because they were really trying to figure out whether the product was right for them. His conclusion:

I learned to not trust my emotional interpretation of the meeting.

His fix was to take good notes and review them afterwards. Applying it to buyers is again ours: the vendor who presents best and the vendor who understands your business best may not be the same. Right after each demo, fill in the same sheet for every vendor:

Did they ask about our business before the demo? How many questions?
Was the demo run on the scenarios we sent?
How many times did we hear “Ignore that” or “Imagine if”, and on which topics?
How many times did they answer “Can it do that?” with an example from the past?
Is the reference they offered from our sector and of our size?
Is the definition of success for the pilot written down, with a measure and a time frame?

Read the notes the day after the meeting, as a team, with the vendors side by side. Next to this table, the feeling of which demo went better carries less weight.

Ask us the same questions

If you are evaluating argemas, you can ask us the same questions. We have more than 200 customers in 7 countries, and some of them describe their argemas deployments in their own managers' words on our References page. You can also use our Comparison page, where we compare the argemas approach with other ERP/MES approaches across 58 dimensions in 10 topics, as a list of questions.

Knowing your own factory before the demo also makes choosing scenarios easier. Our 58-Question Factory Analysis, which lays out your factory's current state, is carried out on the shop floor. We covered the cost of putting the decision off in The cost of delaying digitalisation.

Sources

Pete Kazanjy: Founding Sales, Chapter 7: Pitching: Preparation, Presentation, Demos, & Objections.
Rob Fitzpatrick: How to do customer interviews? (Bootstrapped Stories, YouTube, 1 June 2022).
Rob Fitzpatrick: The Mom Test (book).

What to ask in an MES software demo