Most of what decides a B2B software deal happens after somebody fills in a demo form, and almost none of it is published anywhere.
The useful evidence only appears once the call starts: the price a rep quotes a qualified buyer, the product they can run live rather than describe, the questions they use to qualify, and what they say when your company comes up.
All of it sits behind Request a Demo, and none of it ever has to be written down.
We fill in that form for you. Real SaaS operators book the demos, sit the calls as genuine buyers on your behalf, ask what someone who has already bought this category knows to ask, and record everything that happens. That is mystery shopping, built only for B2B SaaS.
Public Research Stops at the Demo Gate
Competitive intelligence software is good at the job it was built for, which is watching what becomes public: websites, funding news, review grids, job boards, filings. Those are useful traces, and mostly ones a rival has had time to prepare.
B2B software is unusual in how much it holds back. A product manager in a gated category described it on a public forum without much drama: no competitor offers a free demo or a walkthrough, and even the knowledge base carries no screenshots or videos.
Pricing behaves the same way. Buyers describe leaning on their own sales team to chase a rival’s numbers, then finding the answers unreliable by the time anyone acts on them.
Nobody publishes what a rep will quote, so the next move is to go and ask. Booking the demo yourself does not work. Your domain is already in their CRM, your team has met their reps at three conferences, and a founder asking a direct rival for a walkthrough tends to be memorable.
Even where nobody recognizes you, the call goes differently. Reps qualify hard, and a buyer who cannot describe a budget, a timeline, and a real use case gets the short version and a polite follow-up.
Send a Buyer Who Has Bought This Software Before
Mystery shopping is not a technique somebody invented for software. It has measured business performance at the point of customer contact for decades across retail, hospitality, and financial services, and the research codes describe it the same way every time: a prospective customer, a set of predetermined tasks, an assessment against stated criteria.
What changes in B2B SaaS is where the useful evidence lives. The shop floor is a sales conversation, and the conversation is gated.
So the person on the call is a real SaaS professional who evaluates software for a living, working from a fábula: an invented but truthful narrative with a coherent company profile, a believable use case, and commercial details that hold together.
Nobody pretends to be another person. The only thing the vendor does not know is who asked us to look.
A call that stops feeling like a live opportunity still records perfectly well. It just records a different sales process from the one you came for.
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What the recording keeps is the pause before the answer, and the follow-up that arrives with a deck instead of a link. A founder reading that back does not conclude the feature is missing. They conclude it was not demonstrated in that session, which is a narrower thing to know and enough to change a sentence on a battlecard.
We have run these evaluations for some of the best-known names in B2B SaaS, across hundreds of live competitor demos. The questions that open a call up are almost never clever. They are the ones a person who has bought and run this category already knows to ask.
What Lands on the Board, and What It Costs
The demos get run and recorded, and what you open afterwards is a single Notion board organized around the decision you are making, with the calls sitting underneath it as evidence.
The recordings are the source. Everything else on the board is the read built on top of them:
That board is the deliverable, and it is what you are buying. The fee is 499 euros per competitor, fixed, covering the fábula, the meetings, the recordings, the transcripts, and the analysis. Five competitors run to 2,495 and ten to 4,990.
A single competitor takes one to two weeks. A landscape of ten to fifteen takes four to eight, because the demos run in parallel and the board fills up as each one lands.
The evidence grades on those vendor pages matter more than they sound like they should. A workflow demonstrated live on screen and a workflow described confidently in an answer are different facts, and a feature grid flattens them into the same tick.
Why Put Five Vendors Through the Same Questions?
A single vendor page is a record of one company. Five pages built from the same questions show which answers recur, which vendor is the exception, and where two of them flatly contradict each other.
That is the page a leadership team opens first, and every callout on it names the vendor evidence underneath it.
The Findings and Analysis page connects that evidence to the things a leadership team changes on the strength of it: a pricing rule, a demo path, a battlecard field, a position on a roadmap. It is where a product comparison built from recordings stops being a slide and becomes something a product leader can check.
None of it predicts what a competitor earns. Direct observation gets you what they said, showed, quoted, and sent, and it is honest about stopping there.
Monitoring Tools and Mystery Demos Answer Different Questions
Each source answers a different question, and the gap between them is where a team ends up confidently wrong.
| Where you look | What it shows you | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Public monitoring | Site changes, launches, reviews, hiring, filings | The live product, the quoted price, the pitch |
| Your own pipeline | What your prospects and your reps say inside your deals | What the rival says when you are not in the room |
| Win-loss interviews | How a buyer remembers and explains a decision | What was demonstrated, in what order, with what caveats |
| A recorded demo | Qualification, demonstration, pricing, objections, follow-up | Anything internal: their win rate, retention, or pipeline |
Competitive intelligence draws on both primary and secondary research, and for a lot of B2B software teams the primary half is the one missing from the routine. The failures that follow are common enough that we set out the mistakes teams make comparing competitors on their own.
Whether that primary layer earns what it costs is a fair question, and the case for and against the fee is worth reading before you commit to a full landscape.
The board, the recordings, and the read on what they mean are what we hand over at the end of a project, for every competitor on your list. A first conversation is mostly us asking which questions your own research keeps failing to answer.
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