A two-week trial plan for professional services marketing software selection

What to take away

Give two suppliers the same two-week trial on a sanitised copy of your own contacts.
Run one real campaign through each tool and have three fee earners do the same task unaided.
Agree the scoring sheet before anyone logs in, so the criteria cannot drift after a demo.
Name one decider and a decision date before the trials start.
Treat price, exit and contract terms as separate checks that a trial cannot answer.

Set the trial rules before anyone logs in

Fix the rules in writing first: two suppliers, the same two weeks, the same data and the same tasks. A trial that differs between suppliers measures the sales team's enthusiasm, not the software. Only tools that already passed a fit assessment deserve the effort.

These steps keep the trial comparable:

Load a sanitised copy of your contact list into each tool.
Run one real campaign through each, such as a briefing invitation to a single practice area.
Ask three fee earners to complete the same task unaided, without the supplier on the call.
Write down what happened on the day, not afterwards from memory.

Even in a trial, a contact list is personal data. The ICO has fined a Glasgow-based energy company over unsolicited marketing calls, a reminder that marketing without a valid basis carries real penalties.

Score each task on a sheet agreed in advance

Use one scoring sheet for both suppliers, built from the one-sentence job and the five must-haves. Agree it with the people who use the tool daily before the trial begins. Then score each line from what you observed, not from what the supplier promised.

Must-haves vs preferences

Must-haves stop the purchase if missing
Law firmconflict checks
Law firmmatter-level permissions
Law firmSRA retention rules
Preferences go in a second column
Keep must-haves to five items

A missed must-have ends the contest for that supplier, while a missed preference only costs points. The sheet below turns the trial tasks into evidence you can keep.

Trial task	What to observe	Evidence to keep
Enquiry arrives from a web form	Does the source label arrive with the record?	Screenshot of the record
Campaign sent to the sanitised list	Does consent status filter the recipients?	Send log showing who was excluded
Fee earner works unaided	Can they finish without the supplier's help?	Where they stopped, in their words
Contact export	Is the file in a documented format with consent history intact?	The export file itself
Enquiry source report	Does it join website forms and referral sources?	The saved report

If the tool includes paid advertising, check that leads reach your system with a source label attached. Then score what happened against the sheet, line by line, and keep the evidence beside each score.

Put the same five questions to both suppliers

Ask both suppliers identical questions while the trial runs, and write the answers on the same sheet. The five that decide the contract are data location, consent handling, exit format, integration method and total first-year cost. Identical questions make the answers comparable.

Contract questions to ask

Where is personal data stored?
Which sub-processors touch the data?
How is consent recorded and proven?
What contact export do you get on exit?
How does it connect to practice management?
Who maintains the integration?
Total first-year cost in writing

A supplier that cannot describe its exit in plain terms has answered the question, just not well. Where the shortlist is still long, compare suppliers first and send only two into a trial.

Decide once, with one owner and a date

Give the decision to one accountable person, such as a partner or the operations lead, and set the date before trials start. Marketing advises. Shared sign-off without a named owner is how committees deadlock, and a fixed date is what ends the meetings.

For a firm under 50 people, four to six weeks is realistic: one week to define the job, two for supplier questions and two for trials. A longer timeline is a sign the requirement is still unclear.

Write down the requirements, the scores and the reason for the choice. That record protects you at audit and makes the next renewal easier. Public sector buyers can also compare routes through the Digital Marketplace, which lists digital services under pre-agreed terms.

What a trial cannot tell you

A two-week trial shows how the tool behaves, not what it will cost. Get the first-year price in writing, including onboarding, data migration, training and any per-seat uplift at renewal. The licence is rarely the whole bill.

For example, a five-partner firm paying £600 a month in licence fees might face a £4,000 migration and a £1,500 training day, with a renewal uplift of £1,200 across the year. Put those lines into the commercial contract terms before signing.

Trials also say little about the supplier itself. Check ownership, sub-processors and references through vendor due diligence. Once you have chosen, the implementation checklist covers migration, permissions, training and who owns the data after go-live.

Common questions

How many suppliers should go to trial?

Two. Give both the same two-week trial and the same tasks. More than two makes the scores harder to compare and takes more of the fee earners' time. If you have more candidates than that, narrow the list on written answers first.

What if both suppliers fail a must-have?

Go back to the one-sentence job. Either the must-have list asked for more than the job needs, or neither tool fits. Do not lower the bar quietly, because the failed line is exactly what the trial was designed to find.

Can the trial use live client data?

Use a sanitised list instead. A trial account is outside your normal controls, and the trial only needs realistic records, not real client details. Load only what the campaign and the unaided task require, and delete it when the trial ends.

Who should score the trial?

The fee earners who ran the tasks score what they did, and the decision owner reads the evidence. Marketing advises on the sheet. Scores written during the trial are more reliable than scores written after a final supplier presentation.