Construction / Trades · Demo Call
Construction / Trades Product Demo Script: Running the Demo for a VP of Operations Who's Already Been Burned Once
The person on this demo has already sat through a rollout that died. They bought something, sent out logins, held one training, and by week five the daily reports stopped and the change tickets went back to a spiral notebook in a truck. So when a VP of Operations or a General Superintendent takes a second demo, they are not evaluating features. They are looking for the place where this one falls apart the same way the last one did — usually the foreman with gloves on in the rain at 4:40pm, or the GC who mandates their own platform on the biggest job in the backlog.
That means the standard tour kills you. If you open with a dashboard, they go quiet, you hear typing, and the Project Executive who dialed in from a truck drops off "for another call." The demo that works is three workflows shown completely — the T&M tag, the daily manpower log, the COR packet that gets attached to the pay app — narrated as the foreman and the PM, not as the software. Everything else is optional and everything optional is something they now have to evaluate and pay for in their head.
This playbook gives you the pre-call prep, the opening contract, the core loop, the four pressure lines (integration into Sage or Vista, who owns it after you leave, what happens when there's no signal in a parking structure, and when it's actually useful), plus the interruptions this industry throws — Procore already in the building, single-digit margins, backlog booked through next year — and how to answer them without saying "we can build that."
The demo call script
Say it in your own words. The structure is the part that matters.
- 1
Pre-call 1: Confirm the stack in writing before you build anything
Send this in the confirmation email, 48 hours out: "So I don't burn your time showing you screens that don't apply — three quick ones: (1) What are you running for accounting and job cost — Sage 300 CRE, Vista, Spectrum, Foundation, something else — and is it hosted or on a server in your office? (2) Do your GCs make you work inside their system on any of your current jobs — Procore, Autodesk Build, Kahua? (3) Who's on the call besides you? And one more: give me two or three live job names and your cost code structure. I'll build the demo on your jobs. If you'd rather not send job names, tell me the job types and I'll use your language." "NetSuite out of the box" and "Vista with eight years of custom crystal reports and a controller who owns every one of them" are two different demos. Find out which one you're walking into.
- 2
Pre-call 2: Know who's on and what each of them needs
Three people, three demos, one hour. Sort them before you dial: - **VP of Operations / Director of Field Operations** — invited you. Wants fade to stop. Cares about days from field work performed to COR submitted, and whether his supers will actually be held to it. - **General Superintendent** — will decide whether this lives or dies. Cares about one thing: does the foreman touch it, and how long does it take. - **CFO / Controller** — dragged in. Cares about whether it writes to the GL (it shouldn't), what the backup looks like when a pay app comes back, and DSO. - **Senior Project Manager / Project Executive** — cares about the COR log and whether they get one more system to babysit. Open by naming who you built which part for: "Rick, the middle twenty minutes is yours — that's the tag and the manpower log. Dana, the last ten is the export file and what your pay app backup looks like. Nobody has to sit through the other guy's part pretending to care."
- 3
Pre-call 3: Load their jobs, their cost codes, their crew names
Never show ACME CORP and Test Customer 1 to a contractor. Build the demo with: - Two of their real job names and job numbers - Their cost code structure (03-3000 place concrete, not "Task 1") - Their crafts and crew sizes - A real GC name if you know it - A T&M tag that reads like one of theirs: "Extra work per Mike, GC super — cut and patch 14 penetrations, 3rd floor east, 2 men 6 hrs, plus core bit" If they wouldn't share data, use the vocabulary anyway. The first screen they see should make them think "who told you about that job."
- 4
Pre-call 4: Pick three screens. Write down what you will not show.
Build to whatever they named on the pitch call. If they said the tags sit on the dash until Friday, the tag capture screen IS the demo. Show: (1) foreman captures the T&M tag with a signature and photos, (2) manpower actual vs. planned on the daily, (3) the COR packet that comes out the other end and attaches to the pay app. Do not show unless asked: equipment tracking, safety modules, toolbox talks, the admin console, user provisioning, the org-wide analytics dashboard, anything with the word "AI" on it. Every extra screen is one more thing a Project Executive has to evaluate, question, and argue about internally after you hang up.
- 5
Opening: 60–90 seconds, set the contract not the agenda
"Before I share anything — last time you told me the foreman does the extra work Tuesday, the tag rides on the dash, and by the time the PM writes the COR the owner's rep says first I'm hearing of it. And you said you're finding out about fade at the WIP meeting, six weeks after it happened. That still the picture?" [let them answer] "Anything changed since we talked? Budget, a job that went sideways, anybody new?" "Two things about how I'd like to run this. First — interrupt me. If you're sitting there thinking 'Ruben will never do that,' say it out loud in the moment. That's the useful part of this call, not the part where I talk. Second — tell me now: what's the one thing where, if this can't do it, we're done? I'd rather demo in that order."
- 6
Core loop 1: The tag that never leaves the truck
**Problem:** "Tuesday, 2:40. GC super walks up to your foreman and says cut and patch these fourteen penetrations. He does it. Right now that's a paper tag in the door pocket." **Screen — narrated as the foreman, not as the software:** "He's standing there with gloves on. Opens the phone, job's already on his screen because he's assigned to it. Taps extra work. Picks the cost code — these are your codes. Two men, six hours, that's two taps. Photo of the penetrations, photo of the wall before. Hands the phone to the GC super, he signs with his finger. Done. Nine seconds of typing." **Consequence:** "Your PM has that in the office Tuesday at 2:52 instead of Friday at 4. Days from field work performed to COR submitted goes from six or seven to same-day, and you're negotiating with a signature and two photos instead of a memory." **Check:** "Is that how it actually happens on your jobs, or does your foreman not get a signature at all because the GC super's never around?"
- 7
Core loop 2: Manpower planned vs. actual, so the schedule claim has teeth
**Problem:** "Drywall says eight guys Monday. Four show. Your super finds out at 7:15 walking the floor, ceiling grid slides, inspector's already booked." **Screen:** "Super's daily takes twenty seconds — he sets the planned headcount off the look-ahead once, and each morning he taps actual. Four against eight. One line of note: 'AWP short 4, ceiling grid slipped, notified GC 7:40.'" **Consequence:** "Nine months later when the GC comes with a delay backcharge, you're not scrolling a text thread with 22 people in it. You've got a dated manpower record with a note and a photo, per day, for the whole job." **Check:** "When you had the last schedule fight — what did you actually hand your attorney?"
- 8
Core loop 3: The COR packet and the pay app backup
**Problem:** "Pay app comes back because the backup on the change work isn't attached. Now you're 30 days later on money you already spent payroll on." **Screen:** "Here's the change log for this job. Six tickets, four signed in the field, two not. Your PM picks these three, they roll into one COR — labor hours priced off your rates, material, the photos and the signed tags attached as one PDF. That PDF is what goes with the G702/G703 backup." **Consequence:** "Unapproved change orders as a percent of contract value stops being a number you discover at the WIP review. It's on the screen while the job's running, and the CFO can see which jobs are carrying it." **Check:** "Who assembles that packet today — the PM or the project coordinator? And how long does it take them?"
- 9
Handling 'will it handle X?' — slow down before you answer
Never answer the general version. Get the actual case: - "Will it do change orders?" → "Which part — the T&M tag in the field, the COR you send the owner's rep, or a construction change directive where you're told to proceed with no price yet? Those are three different screens." - "Does it do prevailing wage?" → "Are you certifying to a state portal, or do you just need the classification on the hours so the tag prices right?" Then answer one of three ways: **Yes, and here it is.** Go show it live. Strongest thing that happens on a demo. **Yes, but not how you'd expect.** "You don't do it in this screen. You do it here, and it's two extra clicks and your coordinator has to touch it once a week. Ugly, but it works." Buyers forgive ugly. They do not forgive finding ugly in month three. **No.** "No. We don't do that today, and it's not on the roadmap this year." Then: "How often does that come up — every job, or was that one owner on one job?" Half the deal-breakers turn out to be a thing that happened once in 2022. Never say "we can build that." To a Project Executive who's been through a failed implementation, that is word-for-word the promise the last vendor broke.
- 10
Pressure line 1: Integration — what actually touches accounting
"You're on Sage 300 CRE, hosted. Here's exactly what happens and what doesn't. We do not write to your GL. Ever. Nothing we do posts a journal entry. What we hand your controller is a coded cost transaction file — job, cost code, cost type, hours, labor class — and she imports it the same way she imports whatever she imports today. If she doesn't like what's in it, she doesn't import it and nothing has happened. Direction and frequency: we pull job list, cost codes and the schedule of values from Sage nightly so your foreman's picking from real codes, not a list somebody typed. We push labor and change cost on demand — your PM hits export, not a robot at 2am. If your Sage lives on a server in your office rather than hosted, you'd need a small connector installed inside your network. That's an afternoon with whoever administers Sage for you, and I'll send you the port list before you commit to anything. On Procore or Autodesk Build — if a GC mandates their platform on a job, we don't fight it. Your guys capture once here, and the PM copies the COR into the GC's system. That's the double entry you already have, except now your side of it is documented for the backcharge fight at closeout."
- 11
Pressure line 2: Who owns this after I leave
"Ongoing, this is about two hours a month and it is not IT work. It's adding a foreman when you hire one, taking one off when he goes, and changing who approves a tag over a dollar threshold. Your project coordinator or whoever manages your job setup in Sage does it. The one job that isn't two hours a month is job setup — if a new job doesn't get set up, the foreman opens the app and his job isn't there, and that's the day he quits using it. So we tie job creation to the nightly pull from Sage. New job in Sage tonight, it's on his phone tomorrow. Nobody has to remember. On my side: I run the first job with you, and the same person stays on after — you don't get handed to a queue. If your coordinator leaves, the handover is a one-page doc and about ninety minutes with the replacement."
- 12
Pressure line 3: What happens when it breaks — or when there's no signal
Do not say 99.9%. Say what happens on the job: "Two different failures and you should know both. No signal — which is most of the time, in a parking structure, in a basement, in a mechanical room. The app is offline first. Your foreman fills the tag out with no bars, it saves on the phone, and it uploads when he hits the street or the gang box wifi. He doesn't know the difference. Signature and photos included. We go down — you lose the office view. The field keeps capturing, everything queues locally, and it lands when we're back. You lose real-time, you do not lose the tag. When something's wrong: it's a phone number, someone answers, and if it's your foremen can't log in on a Monday morning that's a P1 and you get a human. Non-urgent stuff is email and next business day — I'm not going to pretend it's twenty minutes."
- 13
Pressure line 4: Time-to-value — three dates, not one
"Three dates, and I'll tell you what you have to do for each. **Live** — one job, two foremen, about ten days out. What I need from you: your job list export, your cost codes, and forty-five minutes with your General Superintendent to pick the two foremen. One of them should be the loudest holdout, not two easy guys. **Useful** — three weeks after that. That's when every T&M tag on that job is in the office same day and your PM can pull the COR packet without chasing anybody. That's your first real number: days from field work performed to COR submitted, on that job, before and after. **Rolled out** — all your supers, roughly at the end of the quarter, and I'd stage it by job, not by the calendar. And I wouldn't go live the week of your WIP review or the last week of the month when your controller is closing. Your people's workload total: about six hours from your coordinator up front, twenty minutes of training per foreman, and one hour a week from your General Superintendent for the first three weeks — that hour is not optional and it's the whole thing. Rollouts don't fail on software, they fail because nobody in the field is held to it."
- 14
Reading disengagement — stop the tour
Signals in this industry: the General Superintendent stops interrupting. Short answers. "Yeah, no, makes sense" said flat. Someone joins from a truck and then goes silent. Typing. Stop. In this order: - "I've been talking a while. Is this the part you care about, or should I jump to something else?" - "Let me get off the tour. Rick, what's the thing you're sitting there worried about that I haven't touched?" - "Do you want to drive? Tell me what to click and I'll click it." Almost nobody does this. It works. - "I think I'm showing you the wrong things. Can I stop, take ten minutes to understand what actually matters on your jobs, and come back Thursday with a demo built for that?" What does not work: going faster, opening another module, "one more thing I want to show you."
- 15
Closing the demo — gaps out loud, next date on the call
"Let me say back what I think happened. Three things landed: the tag with a signature in under a minute, the manpower log, and the COR packet as pay app backup. Two open: whether your on-prem Sage takes the connector without your IT guy hating me, and the certified payroll question Dana raised — I don't have a straight answer on that one today and I'm not going to make one up. Both by Thursday. Where does this sit for you now — worth keeping going, or is there something that's already ruled it out?" [Let them say no. A clean no beats four weeks of chasing.] "Who else needs to see it? If your controller wants it, I'd do twenty minutes that's just the export file and the pay app backup — nothing else. And if you want your General Superintendent to sit with a foreman and try the tag on a real job, I'll set that up rather than demo it again. Calendar's open — Thursday 7am or Friday 7am, before you're on jobs?" Send within 24 hours: the two open answers, the three screens that mattered (not a 45-minute recording), the port list if IT was on, and a one-line list of what you need from them.
How the call actually sounds
Prospect on the left, the rep on the right.
Rep
Before I share my screen — last time you said the tags ride on the dash till Friday and you find out about fade at the WIP meeting. Still the picture, or has something changed?
Buyer
Nothing's changed except we're busier. And I'll tell you up front, we bought Procore two years ago. My PMs use it because the GCs make them. My foremen have never opened it. So if this is another login, I'm going to be short with you.
Rep
Good, then let's start there instead of me touring. What did your foremen stop doing first — the daily report or the change tickets?
Buyer
They never started. Ruben's fifty-eight, runs the best crew I've got, and he does not touch a phone for work. He writes on a tag. That's it. So walk me through how your thing survives Ruben.
Rep
Then I'll build the whole demo around Ruben. Tuesday, GC super tells him to cut and patch fourteen penetrations, third floor east. Watch what he touches — job's already on his screen, extra work, cost code 09-2000, two men six hours, two photos, hand the phone to the GC super, he signs with his finger. That's it. Under a minute with gloves on. Is that fewer steps than the tag he writes now, or more?
Buyer
About the same, honestly. Except third floor east of that building has no service. None. We can't get a text out of that stairwell.
Rep
Then that's the important part of this demo, not the screen. It's offline first — he fills it out with zero bars, it saves on the phone, uploads when he's in the parking lot or on gang box wifi. Signature and photos included. He never knows the difference. Would you want me to have your General Superintendent test that in the actual stairwell before you sign anything?
Buyer
Maybe. But you're not answering the real question. Say Ruben does it. It lands where? Because my controller lives in Vista and I'm not paying somebody to rekey the same tag a third time.
Rep
We don't write to your GL — ever, no journal entries. We pull your job list, cost codes and schedule of values out of Vista nightly, so what Ruben picks from is real codes not typed ones. Coming back, your PM exports a coded cost file and your controller imports it the way she imports today. If she doesn't like what's in it, she doesn't import it and nothing happened. Is your Vista hosted or on a box in your office?
Buyer
On our server. And I'll tell you now, my IT is a guy who comes in Wednesdays.
Rep
Then that changes the plan and I'd rather say it now than in week three. On-prem, there's a small connector that installs inside your network — that's one Wednesday afternoon with your guy, and I'll send you the port list before you commit to anything. If he can't get to it for a month, we run the first job with the job list loaded manually and turn the sync on later. Slower, but it doesn't block the pilot.
Buyer
Fine. Here's my actual problem though. Margins are seven points on a good year. You're asking me to add a line item so my foremen can do paperwork faster. Sell me on that.
Rep
I don't want to sell you the subscription, I want to sell you the number. On the job you told me about — the $4M one — what's your guess on change work last year that got billed late, negotiated down, or eaten because the paperwork was cold? And separately: how many days, honestly, from the extra work happening to a COR in front of the owner's rep?
Buyer
Ten days. Sometimes three weeks if the PM's buried. And I don't know the dollar number, which is half of why I'm annoyed about it.
Rep
That's the thing worth measuring, then — not whether Ruben likes the app. Run it on one job with two foremen for three weeks. Ruben and one guy who's fine with a phone. If at the end of it the tags aren't in the office same day and unapproved change orders on that job aren't visible to you while the job's running, you cancel and we've learned something cheap. What I need from you is your job export, your cost codes, and one hour a week from your General Superintendent for those three weeks. That hour's not optional — that's what killed Procore.
Buyer
He'll give me the hour if I tell him to. Send me the port list and I'll ask my Wednesday guy. Don't call my PMs behind me.
Rep
I won't. Port list and the offline test plan by Thursday. Can we put fifteen minutes on Friday at 7am, before you're on jobs, so I hear what your IT guy said rather than guessing?
Objections you will hear
What they say, and what you say back.
| Objection | How to answer it |
|---|---|
| “My foremen won't use another app. Half of them hate smartphones.” | Then don't roll it out to all of them. Pick two — one who's fine with a phone and your loudest holdout — and run it on one job for three weeks. If the holdout can't do a T&M tag in under a minute with gloves on, we've learned something cheap and you've spent almost nothing finding out. And the test isn't whether he likes it. It's whether the tag gets to the office the same day. |
| “We already bought a platform. Nobody uses it. I'm not doing that again.” | Fair, and I'd bet the rollout was 'here's your login, here's a training deck, good luck.' Tell me which thing they stopped doing first — the daily report or the change tickets? I'm asking because if the answer is 'both, in about five weeks,' then part of this isn't a software problem, it's that nobody held the supers to it. I'd rather we design around that now than pretend the app fixes it. |
| “Margins are single digit. Software is a luxury line item.” | Agreed, which is why I'd rather talk about unbilled work than the subscription. What's your best guess on change work last year that never got billed or got negotiated down because the paperwork was late? Most owners I ask don't know — that's the tell. If the real number turns out to be small, cancel. If it's not, this pays for itself before the second pay app on one job. |
| “The GC makes us use their system on that job. I'm not running two.” | You're running two either way — their platform is for their record, not yours. Your foreman is already double-entering into a spiral notebook, so the second system exists, it's just not searchable. The version I care about is the one that has your labor hours and your dated photos when the backcharge shows up at closeout, because their system will not be on your side that day. |
| “We do all this in the accounting system already. It's in there.” | It's in there eventually — the question is when. If the tag hits accounting Friday instead of Tuesday you're billing three days late and arguing from memory. Give me the honest number: how many days from the extra work happening in the field to a COR sitting in front of the owner's rep? If it's more than a week, you're negotiating from a weak position every single time, and the accounting system isn't the thing that fixes that — the truck is. |
| “Backlog's booked through next year. We're too busy to implement anything right now.” | Busy is exactly when the tags stay in the truck — nobody loses change orders in a slow spring. I'm not asking for an implementation. One job, two foremen, three weeks, and an hour a week from your General Superintendent. If you're too busy for that, then you're genuinely too busy, and I'll call you when the fall jobs close out and you're doing postmortems. |
| “Talk to my PMs, they handle the field paperwork.” | Happy to, and I will. But your PMs will each optimize for their own job, and you're the one looking at fade across the whole book. Before you hand me off, the question I'd want answered is whether unbilled change work is a two-job problem or an every-job problem. Your PMs won't tell you that. The WIP will, and so will three weeks of same-day tags. |
| “How do I know my guys aren't just going to fake the hours on their phone?” | You don't, any more than you do on a paper tag — except now there's a timestamp, a GPS point, photos of the actual work and a GC super's signature attached to it. If somebody's padding, it's more visible than it was, not less. And frankly if your concern is that the field is padding hours, that's a different conversation than this one and I'd rather have it straight than sell you software as the answer. |
Questions reps ask about this call
- How is a construction product demo different from a normal software demo?
The buyer is judging one thing: whether a fifty-eight-year-old foreman with gloves on will touch it at 4:40pm in the rain. So the demo has to be narrated from the truck, not from the admin console. Show the T&M tag capture, the manpower log and the COR packet — three workflows completely, with their job names and their cost codes on screen. A VP of Operations who sees ACME CORP and Test Customer 1 has already concluded you didn't prepare, and a General Superintendent who sees a dashboard before he sees the field screen stops interrupting, which is the sound of the deal ending.
- What should the demo script cover before I show anything at all?
Sixty to ninety seconds: recap their pain in their words (the tag on the dash till Friday, fade showing up at the WIP review), ask what's changed since the pitch call, explicitly authorise interruptions — 'if you're thinking Ruben will never do that, say it out loud' — and ask them to name the deal-breaker. That last question tells you what order to demo in. Everything after that is built on what they said, not on your rehearsed path.
- How do I handle 'we already bought Procore and nobody uses it' on a demo call?
Don't defend and don't differentiate. Ask which thing they stopped doing first — the daily report or the change tickets — and how many weeks in. That question does two things: it shows you've seen a dead rollout before, and it surfaces whether the real failure was the software or the fact that no supervisor was ever held to it. Then design the pilot around that answer, including the hour a week from the General Superintendent that made the difference last time.
- What integration questions will a CFO or Controller ask during the demo?
They'll want to know what touches the accounting system. Answer before they ask: name the ERP by instance (Sage 300 CRE hosted, Vista on-prem, Foundation, Spectrum), say the direction and frequency out loud — job list, cost codes and schedule of values pulled nightly, labor and change cost exported on demand by the PM — and say clearly that you do not write to the GL. 'We hand your controller a coded cost file and she imports it, and if she doesn't like it she doesn't import it' calms a Controller faster than any capability claim. If they're on-prem with a part-time IT person, say what that means for the timeline right there.
- Which metrics should I put inside the demo so the buyer can measure it?
Two that a field ops buyer can actually verify in a month: days from field work performed to COR submitted, and unapproved change orders as a percentage of contract value on the pilot job. Both move within three weeks and both are things a Project Executive can show a CFO. Gross margin fade in points and DSO matter more but they lag — mention them as the reason, not as the pilot scorecard, because nobody signs a renewal on a number they can't see until the next WIP review.
- How do I close a construction demo without losing the deal to 'let me talk to my PMs'?
Summarise fit and gaps out loud, including the gaps — the open question on their on-prem connector, the certified payroll thing you don't have an answer for yet. Then ask the temperature question and let them say no. If they want to loop in Senior Project Managers or the Controller, offer a shorter tailored session rather than repeating this one: twenty minutes on the export file and pay app backup for the Controller, a real foreman testing the tag on a real job for the General Superintendent. Then book the next date while the calendar is open — contractors are on jobs at 7am and unreachable by 9, so pick early and get the invite out before you hang up.