Scoping calls converge on two questions, and everything else is a version of one of them: what exactly am I buying, and is any of it going to come back on me?
The first has a one-line answer. Mystery Demo books your competitors’ sales demos, takes every call as a genuine buyer, records what the rep says, shows, and quotes, and hands it all back on a Notion board your sales enablement, product marketing and sales teams can work from. One competitor costs a flat 499 euros and takes one to two weeks.
The second question is the one most teams worry about, so it comes next.
No NDA, and Nothing Bought
It is legal, and the boundaries are two lines long.
We never sign an NDA, and we never pay for the product. Nothing is signed and nothing is bought, so all that changes hands is a rep’s time.
What is left is an ordinary sales process, run by real operators evaluating real software, and nobody impersonates a real person. The only thing a vendor never learns is who asked us to look, and the full legal and ethical case is argued properly in its own piece.
What the Vendor Sees
The next thing a cautious team asks is what the vendor sees, and the honest answer is dull. The vendor sees an ordinary evaluation, and apart from the name of the company it is for, that is what it is. An operator books a demo, asks informed questions, evaluates what the rep shows, and follows up like a buyer whose calendar was already full before this vendor appeared, until the evaluation ends with an answer, the way a real one does.
What holds it together is the fábula, the buying scenario we bring to each vendor: a company profile fitted to the competitor’s ideal customer, a real use case, and commercial details that are consistent. We really do evaluate software on behalf of companies, so the evaluation and the buyer are genuine. The only invented part is the company we say the evaluation is for, and we never tell a vendor who commissioned the work.
Below is the methodology page of Mystery Demo’s public example board, where every company is invented; a real project’s board is built from its own calls. The buying scenario is stage two of five, between the kickoff and the outreach, and the operational details stay with us.
.png)
Send Someone Who Buys This Software for a Living
A pricing page and a feature page say what a competitor wants buyers to believe. The call is where its rep says what the company will quote and show.
The whole thing fails when the person asking cannot hold a technical B2B sales conversation. A thin story gets a thin demo, and a thin demo records very little worth having.
So Mystery Demo only does software. The people on these calls have sold and bought SaaS themselves, which is why the questions that open a call up arrive early, while the rep is still deciding how serious the buyer is.
Not every competitor says a number on the first call. When the price is custom, we take the evaluation through discovery, a technical deep dive, and a follow-up until the number comes out, and every one of those meetings is inside the fee.
A competitor that will not run a full demo for a non-customer is rare in B2B software. When it happens, we strengthen the buying signals, spread the technical questions across more touchpoints, and use a trial where the product has one, so the board still carries evidence instead of a blank cell. If a vendor still will not show the product, the board says so, and that refusal is a finding in itself.
What It Costs, and What You Bring
Those are the whole commercial terms. The tenth competitor costs the same as the first because each one gets the full evaluation: its own adapted scenario, every meeting, and its own analysis. How many to include depends on the decision.
| How many competitors | Fee | What it suits |
|---|---|---|
| One | 499 euros | The one rival your team keeps meeting in deals |
| Three to five | 1,497 to 2,495 euros | A focused pricing or positioning call |
| Six to ten | 2,994 to 4,990 euros | A map of the category |
| Eleven to fifteen | 5,489 to 7,485 euros | The wider landscape |
What you bring is small: a kickoff where we agree the objectives and the competitor list, the questions you want settled, and a live demo of your own product. Seeing your product is what lets us ask the right comparative questions on somebody else’s call.
After that it runs without you until the board starts filling. One competitor takes one to two weeks, and a landscape of ten to fifteen takes four to eight, because the demos run in parallel and each vendor page lands as it finishes.
What Lands on the Board
You get both the recordings and the timestamped transcripts, filed by competitor with every email, deck, and pricing document the vendor sent. Before the analysis is written, every claim a rep made is checked against the vendor’s website, LinkedIn, and public news. Each competitor then gets its own page with an analysis written by the operator who took the calls, and the comparison pages grade every capability by what the demo showed: shipped and working, partial, or a stub that exists in name only.
The board is yours to keep and to share inside the company.
| On the board | What it holds | Who reads it, and for what |
|---|---|---|
| Per-competitor pages | Each rival’s calls and correspondence, with its own analysis | Sales enablement and sales, for how each rep pitched and handled objections |
| The comparison pages | Every rival compared on the same questions, side by side | Product and product marketing, for what each competitor showed working in its demo |
| The database | Every recording and transcript in one place | Anyone who wants to check a claim against the call |
| The Executive Summary | Where each competitor wins, the sales scorecard, the key findings | Leadership, in five minutes |
For an enablement team the path from board to field is short: a claim a rival made on a call goes into the battlecard with its timestamp, and the recording of how its rep handled an objection becomes the practice run for your own reps.
If your list is ready and the questions are clear, put them in front of us on a short intro call. We will tell you which demos we would run and what each would bring back.
We Close Every Thread We Open
Every thread closes the way a real evaluation closes, with an answer to the last follow-up rather than silence. Clients re-run a project one to three years later to see what has moved.
That is also the argument for running a set rather than a single evaluation. One vendor page tells you about one company, and the comparison pages are where five of them turn into a read on the whole landscape built on primary sources rather than on marketing copy. If the method itself is new to you, what mystery shopping for B2B SaaS involves covers the ground underneath all of this in more detail.
Write down the three questions your public research cannot answer. Send us that list on an intro call, and we will run the demos that answer it, in your competitors’ own words, on the record.
.png)
