Armed with Katie’s checklist (see previous post), we’re ready for our second demo! The whole office is excited about our quest for Marketing Automation, and several people have asked us how it’s going.

“How’d you like the first one you looked at?” (one of our sales guys)

“When are you going to pick something so we can get this thing rolling?” (business development dude)

“Can I see your demo scorecard?” (buyer advisor and office know-it-all—just kidding… sort of)

Doh! We forgot our demo scorecard!

Then, Smart Aleck sent me the link to his blog post on getting the most out of a software demo. But he’s right—how could we forget the thing we tell all software buyers to do when demoing software?!

The demo scorecard helps you evaluate software based on what truly matters to you, instead of getting swept in by all the cool things the sales person shows you or their charming personality. The scorecard also helps you keep everything straight because after you watch a couple of demos they tend to blend together, and you can’t remember which software did what.

What should a scorecard include? And what do the scores look like?

Your scorecard should be a list of what is important to you. Ours (the one we just now created) includes:

• Intuitiveness of the interface
• Ease of landing page creation
• Simplicity of the lead scoring
• Work needed to link to their API
• Fit with our existing workflow.

We will grade each of these items on a scale of 1 to 5 and find the average to help us narrow down our list of options.

Luckily, we’re grading ourselves and our marketing automation demos on an average, so even though we get an “F” for forgetting our demo scorecard we’re still hoping for an “A” when it comes to our overall selection.