Nobody has ever hired Mystery Demo because they wanted a video file. They hire it because of what the video file makes checkable weeks later, in a room where somebody disagrees.
Recording the call is the easy part, and it is lawful: no NDA is signed, no product is bought, and the operator on the call is a real person evaluating real software.
The reason companies pay for it is narrower. A sales call is the one place where a rival’s working price, their product as it demos rather than as it is described, and their answer to a hard question all show up together, in front of a buyer they are taking seriously.
Mystery Demo books those calls on your behalf, sits them as a genuine buyer, and records what happens. Then we turn the recordings into something a colleague can check, on a Notion board, for a flat 499 euros a competitor.
Record It, Because the Alternative Is Somebody’s Memory
The version of a sales call that survives without a recording is a set of notes, written by someone who was also trying to keep the conversation going.
Notes capture whatever struck the note-taker. They lose the sequence, the hesitation, the exact figure, and the question that produced the answer.
A recording keeps all of it, and does something notes cannot. It stays available to people who were never on the call.
That is what a recorded session looks like on Mystery Demo’s public example board, where every company is invented; a real project’s board is built from its own calls. The call, its transcript, and the meeting it came from sit on one page.
Your pricing lead, your head of product, and your VP of sales can each go through the same recording for three different reasons, months apart, without any of them having to trust a summary.
A Thin Story Gets a Thin Demo
There is a version of this that produces a useless file. Somebody books a demo with a thin story, cannot answer a qualifying question, and gets ten minutes and a follow-up email.
That recording is thirty megabytes of nothing.
So the operator is a real SaaS professional evaluating real software. They work from a fábula: a buying scenario fitted to the competitor’s ideal customer, with a believable use case and commercial details that hold together. The only invented part is which client the evaluation is for.
Reps tend to respond to that the way they respond to any serious buyer. They qualify properly, they dig, they bring in a solutions engineer, and they show the product instead of the deck.
What ends up on the recording is the process the rep ran for a buyer they took seriously, which is evidence. Most of what you would otherwise be working from is extrapolation.
Read the Whole Session Before You Trust One Line
A single line from a demo is easy to misread once it has been separated from the question that made the rep say it.
A price said out loud in minute forty means one thing on its own. With the discovery questions from minute six beside it, you can see what the rep had learned before putting a number on anything.
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The call is the evidence. The correspondence shows what they were willing to put in writing afterwards.
The proposal that follows, the deck they send unprompted, the second call they offer without being asked: each one changes how you read what happened on the first call.
Every Claim Sits One Click From Its Source
Recordings are only worth having if you can get back into them, which is what the database on the board is for.
Below is the Expert Analysis section of one vendor page on the same invented board. Its first line names the meetings and the collateral the analysis draws on.
The structure is dull, and it is what makes the analysis checkable. Every conclusion has a route back to the moment that produced it.
A colleague who doubts a finding can go and check it, which tends to end the discussion faster than arguing about it does.
The recordings are handed over with the board, and they are yours to keep.
A search box finds the word. The person who watched writes on the vendor page whether the rep ran the workflow on screen or talked around it.
The per-vendor pages are where somebody who sat the call writes down what they think it meant, keeping what was demonstrated separate from what was merely asserted.
Comparison matrices then put the same questions to every vendor, keeping three grades of evidence in separate boxes:
| Grade | What counts | How the board marks it |
|---|---|---|
| Demonstrated | Run on screen, in the session | The timestamp of the moment it ran |
| Claimed | Said out loud or written in the follow-up, but never shown | The quote, and the call or email it came from |
| Inferred | Our read of what the first two add up to | Labelled as ours, beside the evidence it rests on |
Once those three stop sharing a cell, a vendor that only described a feature stops looking like one that showed it. Every row in the database points at one vendor and the meeting or email it came from, so finding a claim takes a search rather than an afternoon.
Once the evidence is organized that way it stops being a research project and starts being battlecards where every line cites the moment it came from.
If one competitor’s claims are the ones your team keeps arguing about, tell us which one on a short intro call. We will sit its demo and bring back the recording.
What a Project Costs, and How Long It Takes
All of it runs on a fixed fee: 499 euros per competitor, covering the fábula, the meetings, the recordings, the transcripts, and the analysis. One competitor takes one to two weeks, and a landscape of six to fifteen takes four to eight.
If the legality of the wider method is the part you still want argued properly, the case for mystery shopping a competitor’s demo is set out on its own.
If you already know which competitor you would want watched, that is enough to price the work on a scoping call, and kickoff takes it from there. If you do not, the shortlist usually names itself once somebody asks which rival nobody in the building can describe.
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