Ever had to go through procurement just for a demo?

I just got an inbound request from a prospect I was targeting a few months ago to schedule a demo of my product.

He replied to let me know that their processes require procurement to reach out and coordinate the demo.

I've never had procurement involved so early in a cycle before. Seems odd. Anyone else have a similar experience?

📣 Demos

4 comments

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CoorsKing

WR Officer

Retired King of the Coors Knights

Yes, some larger companies do but not necessarily for price reasons. The procurement team sometimes has to make sure we are an approved vendor before they can evaluate, so we have to fill out a boat-load of vendor onboarding forms, then get passed to legal, THEN can do demos.

Tech Security sales is fun.

Rallier

Politicker

SDR Manager and Consultant

that's the most bizarre thing I've ever heard. Not normal

MMMGood

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

No that's not the typical process...so there's pros and cons. Con, obviously, is that procurement teams suck at coordinating anything. Pro, is that you're able to establish the right contacts in procurement really early on, which will help down the road. Many times your technical buys also act as gatekeepers for the procurement team. This helps bypass that.

So procurement is coordinating the demo...but are they also involving the technical or business team? You're not showing a demo to ONLY procurement right?

Salespreuner

Big Shot

Regional Sales Director

Def seems odd. Could be that they need to show 2-3 vendors getting validated for closing on one. Make sure to ask impact driven questions - "If you could let me know like you have any product improvment you'd love to see compared to industry competition, pls let me know"

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Jgre12

Ever had to go through procurement just for a demo?

4 comments

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