POC Best Practices: How to Avoid POC Scope Screep
Presales Leader: “POC scope creep is a major problem for us.”
Me: “Can you show me one of your Evaluation Plans?”
Presales Leader: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Oh boy… let’s chat!”
The Proof-of-Concept (POC) or Proof-of-Value (POV) is an essential and/or mandatory step in many B2B sales cycles.
If you are not careful, the POC/POV will drag out your sales cycle and cost your presales team A LOT of unnecessary time and effort.
The #1 cause of this: SCOPE CREEP.
The #1 way to avoid scope creep: EVALUATION PLANS.
At its core, a formal POC/POV Evaluation Plan aligns you and your prospect on:
✅ The use cases that will be shown/tested
✅ The success criteria for each one.
To get started, create a list of use cases based on:
(1) what your prospect wants to test, and
(2) what you know they should test.
These are not always the same. Remember, your prospect does not know the best way to evaluate your product. You do!
Be a trusted advisor. Offer up modifications and alternatives if you disagree with your prospect’s list of use cases and recommend new ones based on what you know about their business challenges and desired future state.
For each use case, define the success criteria. There should be no ambiguity here. Your use cases should be pass/fail.
Before kicking off the POC/POV, get your prospect’s explicit buy-in on the Evaluation Plan. 🤝
‘Explicit buy-in’ means you heard your prospect say, “If we test these use cases and satisfy the success criteria… you will be our vendor of choice.”
If you haven’t heard that yet, iterate on the Evaluation Plan until you do. 🔁
Once you kick-off the POC/POV, provide a way to digitally track the status of each use case (e.g. In Progress, Completed, or Blocked), highlight and alert on blockers, and document the results. 🖥
Immediately address any blockers and failing use cases. You can recover from these 🤒, but you cannot delay ⏰.
A well-designed Evaluation Plan with explicit buy-in avoids scope creep and brings your POC/POV to a logical conclusion as quickly as possible with demonstrated success.
Congratulations! 🙌
You are the vendor of choice (VOC)!
Do you want to avoid scope screep in your POCs and POVs? Talk to one of our presales experts about about how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
