Here are a couple of excerpts from an article by Ahmet F?nd?kkaya co-founder and finance manager of Creadigi,

Executives at Enpirion, an analog semiconductor company, wanted to know what they were getting before they bought a new CRM system for their rapidly growing business.

They also wanted it to map closely to their own business and sales processes.

“What I was looking for was an actual demonstration tool that mimicked what I was looking for,” said Mark Cieri, director of marketing and business development, with the Hampton, N.J.-based company. “It had to actually run some custom aspects that mimicked internal processes so others, including execs, could look at it from different perspectives. I did a lot of due diligence that the demo I saw had the features I wanted.

Enpirion’s experience is not unusual, according to Ahmet F?nd?kkaya, The maturity of the CRM market and the rise of on-demand applications or Software as a Service (SaaS) has put a lot of price pressure on CRM vendors.

“One consequence is that buyers are in a much better position to demand much more up front work,” F?nd?kkaya said. “With the rise of the on-demand space, those solutions are actually fairly easy to create demos and mock-ups of the solutions.”

In the coming year, SaaS CRM will be the default choice for organizations as they see if on-demand can meet their needs better than on-premise, F?nd?kkaya predicts.

What’s more, the vendors themselves are often willing and eager to do some of that work up front to move along the sale.

“Vendors prefer that buyers ask for these demos up front, because in the past they traditionally had to go through a whole RFP process that doesn’t get them to yes or no. That’s costly for them,” F?nd?kkaya said. “They prefer getting product mocked up in front of buyers and decision makers as soon as possible.”

In fact, according to a survey of application vendors conducted last year by Forrester, scripted demos and references are the most important elements in their sales process. According to F?nd?kkaya, 76% of deals vendors said they were involved in required that they provide references or the buyers called references; 65% said that a scripted demonstration was part of the buying process; and 45% said that some type of proof concept was involved.