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It may actually be a warning sign.
When a buyer asks for a proof of concept, most sales teams celebrate. Pipeline milestone reached. Deal moving forward.
Chad Wilson sees it differently. A POC request, he argues, is a trust tax: proof that something earlier in the process broke down.
It's worth sitting with that for a second.
Why Buyers Actually Ask for POCs
There are three reasons, and none of them have anything to do with technology.
The first is scar tissue. A previous vendor made promises and didn't keep them, so now the buyer needs to see it work in their environment before they'll commit. The second is a relevance gap. The demo showed what the product does, but it never clearly connected to their specific workflows, their specific pain, their specific outcomes. The third is a feeling. The discovery was shallow, the demo was generic, and now they're hedging because they're not sure you actually understand their problem.
All three are trust problems.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Tracks
The moment a POC kicks off, the stakeholder count multiplies. Procurement, IT security, legal — each new party is another opportunity for the deal to stall or for a competitor to reenter the room. Three months pass. Your SE is buried in configuration work instead of running new demos. Revenue that felt imminent starts to slip.
Chad's seen teams where 60% of SE capacity is consumed by POCs. That's not a sales motion. That's a services engagement wearing a sales costume.
Three Shifts That Make POCs Unnecessary
The fix isn't running better POCs. It's building the kind of trust that makes them irrelevant in the first place.
The first shift is clarity. When a demo draws a straight line from what a team does every day to the business outcomes their executives care about — operational, departmental, strategic — buyers arrive at confidence on their own. They don't need proof because they already see fit.
The second shift is conversation over feature tour. A demo structured as a business conversation at all three levels makes buyers feel understood, not just evaluated. That feeling is what separates a demo that closes from one that triggers a POC request.
The third shift is consistency across the team. Most presales leaders can name their star performers. The challenge is that top performers don't scale. The organizations that actually move the needle are the ones that raise the floor for everyone, not just celebrate the ceiling.
Food for Thought
A POC often feels like a buying signal. But if it's actually a trust deficit, that changes how you should respond to the request and, more importantly, what you should do differently upstream to prevent it.
Discussion Questions
- When you receive a POC request, do you treat it as momentum or as a diagnostic signal? How might that shift change your response?
- Which of the three root causes — scar tissue, relevance gap, or feeling misunderstood — shows up most often in your deals?
- How consistent is your team's ability to connect a demo to business impact? Is it a skill a few people have, or something everyone can execute?
