Preparation for an evaluation

So you’ve determined that your company could benefit from a DAP (or you’re looking to switch tooling providers). Now, we’ll help you navigate the evaluation and buying journey to ensure you make the best decision for your needs and organization smoothly and efficiently! 

Whether you prefer never to speak to sales reps, want to be hand-held throughout, or want some combination of those, this section will help you run an effective evaluation. 

Common pitfalls when evaluating a DAP

When evaluating a DAP, don’t just take it at face value—test it with real data and scenarios that match your needs. Involve your team early to ensure everyone’s on board, and focus on proven design patterns instead of getting stuck on overly custom solutions.

And be sure to ask vendors for their best tips—you might pick up some valuable insights along the way!

To book a demo or to sign up for free? That is the question...

The two common CTAs (“calls-to-action”, i.e., buttons) on most SaaS websites are variations of “Get a demo” and “Sign-up,” with the former involving more hand-holding and human assistance throughout the buying journey. These represent the two main buying motions: 

Self-service: No salespeople, contracts, or customer success. Buy online (often with a credit card) and go at your own pace, albeit within any trial period limits. Typically available for smaller companies with plans offering fewer features or lower limits than sales-assisted plans. 

Sales-assisted (or sales-led): Get a demo and a point of contact to answer questions provide advice throughout the process, and ultimately sign an annual contract. Engagement with sales may happen as a first step or a subsequent step after you start trialing the product. 

Most DAPs also offer both of these paths (notable exceptions include WalkMe requiring you to book a demo indicating their enterprise nature and engagement process, and Userflow not offering any demos or human-assisted support). 

If you’re heading down the self-service path, you’ll never need to “book a demo,” although there may be great demo-esque resources on the marketing site (e.g., interactive demos, like those we have at Chameleon). You can also look into the help documentation for a deeper understanding of the product before creating an account or trying it directly. 

If you’re comfortable with a sales-assisted approach (and paying $10k+ per year via an annual contract), you can choose when to best engage with the sales team. Many people lean towards trying the product first and getting a basic understanding of features before engaging with any sales reps. 

This is in no small part because the sales “playbook” for engaging prospects has historically and typically been a terrible user experience: asking repetitive scripted questions, not having sufficient technical knowledge to answer questions, requiring multiple calls before being transparent about pricing, etc. 

We at Chameleon recognize this awful buyer experience and are trying to flip the script (pun intended) with knowledgeable sales reps, digging into the product on the first call (not another dull deck), advising on best practices, considering your overall stack, etc. 💚

Whether you’re proceeding via a self-service path or planning to engage sales teams, here are some things you should do to help prepare. 

Form your "evaluation committee"

While you might be the primary stakeholder or decision-maker on the choice of DAP solution, it’s almost sure that others will have to be involved:

If you have never purchased software directly at your current company, it’ll be valuable to include someone with experience in this as part of your core group, or at least get perspectives of key sticking points or tips to ensure smooth sailing through the procurement process.

Even if there isn’t a formal decision-making committee or process, keeping relevant stakeholders updated will be helpful as you progress through the evaluation. 

Start drafting your business case

We referenced this “business case” earlier in our guide to help you decide whether it was even worth evaluating DAPs. If you didn’t create one then, this is the next best time to do so! 

You can start with a simple doc (or use our template) and include whatever you already know. You’ll iterate on this and will be an excellent way to synthesize your learnings and present them to other stakeholders. Feel free to leave placeholder sections or open questions in this doc to ensure you and the team can get the answers throughout the eval. 

Once you’ve drafted this socialize it with the buying group to ensure that everyone has had a chance to contribute and feels ownership of this decision. 

Become familiar with the category

You’re already doing this by reading this guide, but we recommend you dive into this section of the guide to better understand what vendors exist and form an early opinion. 

Beyond this, some other avenues to learn about the category and the vendors include:

🙋‍♀️ Your wider team—maybe they have experience with a DAP platform

🎤 Review platforms (such as G2.com)

🤝 Communities you are a part of (e.g., Slack groups, etc.)

💻 LinkedIn (try searching or asking a question for others to respond with)

🎪 At conferences/events you might attend (could be a good conversation starter and it can help speed up your research)

A word of caution: we’ve found online articles by vendors about their competitors to be generally highly biased and sometimes untruthful, so we recommend not placing much weight on these. (And yes, we still do them—we're revisiting them right now actually to make them as fair as they can be 😇)

Deeply assessing each DAP product can be time-consuming, so most companies will form a shortlist after research and then trial those shortlisted products. 

Create an evaluation matrix and question guide

To improve the chances that your team is fully aligned (and reduce the risk of slowdown later in the process) we recommend you create an evaluation matrix that lays out the key aspects you want to measure and score vendors against in an evaluation. 

Broadly, you’ll want to evaluate at least the following five points:

You may even want to weigh each evaluation criterion separately. The most straightforward way to do this is to characterize it as a “must-have” or “nice-to-have”. 

One proxy you can use for a quick assessment is to trust the decisions of other companies and teams like yours. As you review the customers and case studies on the websites of prospective vendors, which have customers you aspire towards or’d trust to make a good decision. 

In addition to this matrix, you should keep a running list of key questions that you want to research or obtain answers to, for example: 

• What are the unique and differentiating features?

• What are common issues customers encounter?

• What does support and customer success look like?

• How does pricing scale over time (e.g., at renewal or as you grow)?

A longer list and example evaluation matrix can be downloaded as part of our Buyers Pack. Get it here.

Remember, you may be embarking on the start of a multi-year journey with a vendor, and it will be expensive and tedious to switch later, so it’s worth taking a multi-year horizon on the right team and product to partner with. 

Agree on a timeline

This is crucial to ensuring you run an efficient process. Work backward from any external deadlines or milestones, e.g., a product launch, the end of the quarter, etc. 

For a sales-assisted process, here's how you should structure your timeline, starting from when you'd like to go live:

🏆 Target go-live date: when you’d like to launch your first in-app experiences live to your end users. 

✍️ Signature to Go live (~1 month): budget about a month between signing an agreement and going live to factor in QA and last-minute hiccups

🤝 Agreement to Signature (~2 weeks): budget a couple of weeks between finalizing your vendor of choice and pricing for legal redlines and signatures

🤩 Product of choice to Agreement (~2 weeks): once you know which product you’d like to proceed with, it might take a couple of weeks to agree on pricing and negotiate any specific terms

👾 Product evaluation > product of choice (~2-6 weeks): depending on how many vendors you like to evaluate and how quickly you can test and assess during a trial/POC this period can vary in length. Evaluating will require you to install code so you may want to consider your engineering sprints and the timeline required to introduce new code to your software. 

🔬 Research > Product eval (~2-4 weeks): from the beginning of your research until you’re comfortable taking a shortlist of products to evaluation

In aggregate, this evaluation and buying process (when sales-assisted) can take 3-4 months to complete, so we encourage you to set your expectations accordingly. 

If you need to operate faster or already have a preferred product, this can become much reduced; we’ve seen customers take a week between engaging us and signing a contract. 

For a self-service process, this can be much faster (we’ve seen in-app experiences deployed the same day someone signs up for a product) because fewer people are involved and no terms are customized.