Bring a real task to a software demo. Give the vendor an anonymised athlete profile, an enquiry and a brief. Can your team turn them into a partnership and later review it for renewal? That exercise reveals more than a feature checklist.
Seven criteria to test
- Sport context. Can you record discipline, region and race plans? Staff should be able to find the details that drive selection.
- Intake. Follow an enquiry from the website through to review. Check how the decision and its reasoning are recorded.
- Existing partnerships. Import a small sample of your roster. Check which fields and documents survive the transfer.
- Briefs and approval. Create a task, answer a question and approve a revision. Make sure everyone can identify the current version.
- Reporting. Ask where each number comes from. Distinguish connected data from information supplied by athletes or staff.
- Access and export. Check who can see contracts, contact details and internal notes. Establish what you can export when you leave.
- Total cost. Include migration, training and ongoing maintenance. Ask whether fees depend on seats, profiles or additional modules.
Use the same brief for every vendor
Run each demo with identical sample records. Note who completes every step, which information is missing and where staff need another tool. Agree on deal-breakers first. Teams focused on creator discovery will weight the criteria differently from teams managing an established roster of athletes.
Our programme setup guide helps define the workflow before you shop. See how athleteXhub approaches it on the sport brands page.
Cover photo: CHUTTERSNAP / Unsplash
