A proof of value is one of the most expensive things an SE team does. It demands real hours from your team, real access from the customer's IT and security organizations, and real attention from people on both sides who have many other things competing for their time. That investment deserves a better outcome than the industry currently delivers.
Estimates vary, but most practitioners put POV conversion rates somewhere between 30 and 50 percent. That means for every two POVs your team runs, at least one produces no revenue. The uncomfortable truth is that many of those failures were predictable — and preventable — well before the evaluation started.
Here are five signs that a POV is already in trouble, and what to do about each.
1. There's no champion
A champion isn't just someone who's interested in the product. A champion is someone with internal influence who wants you to win — and is willing to do something about it. They'll fight for budget, schedule time with the right stakeholders, and advocate internally when you're not in the room.
Without one, a POV is a technical exercise with no internal owner. It may complete on time and produce impressive results, and still go nowhere. The champion is what converts technical success into purchase decision.
The fix: don't start a POV until you can name the champion and describe what they stand to gain if the evaluation succeeds. If you can't, that's a qualification conversation to have before any technical work begins.
2. The success criteria were written by the vendor
This one is counterintuitive. Writing the success criteria yourself feels efficient — you know the product, you know what it can demonstrate, and you want to set up a scenario where it performs well. The problem is that criteria you write don't belong to the customer.
When a customer signs off on criteria they helped define, they own the evaluation. When they sign off on criteria you handed them, they're a passive observer. Passive observers don't go to the mat internally when a deal gets complicated.
The fix: run a structured success criteria workshop before the POV begins. Ask the customer what success looks like in their terms — what metrics move, what problems disappear, what their leadership will want to see. Then translate that into measurable checkpoints together. It takes longer. It's worth it.
3. Nobody defined what "done" looks like
POVs don't usually fail dramatically. They fade. The evaluation runs its course, the results are positive, and then... the timeline extends. The next step keeps getting pushed. The champion goes quiet. Months pass.
This almost always traces back to a missing definition of done — a specific moment when both sides agree the POV has concluded and a decision is warranted. Without it, there's no natural forcing function, and deals drift into the purgatory of "still evaluating."
The fix: before the POV starts, align on a concrete end point. Not just a date — a decision. Something like: "By day 30, we'll have demonstrated X and Y to the satisfaction of [names], at which point they'll present a recommendation to their VP." Specific. Named. Time-bound. That's a definition of done.
4. The POV is solving a technical problem, not a business problem
Enterprise buyers don't purchase technology. They purchase outcomes. If your POV is structured to prove that the product works — that it integrates, that it scales, that it has the features on the checklist — you've framed it as a technical exercise. Technical exercises get handed to a committee for review, then stall.
The POVs that move fast are the ones that demonstrate a clear connection to a business problem someone senior cares about. That might be reducing mean time to resolution, eliminating a compliance gap, or enabling a migration their board has been watching. When the POV result maps directly to something an executive is measured on, the path from technical win to purchase decision is much shorter.
The fix: before any technical scoping, ask the customer: "What does success look like for your business — not for this evaluation?" Let that answer shape what you demonstrate and how you frame the results.
5. There's no internal urgency
Even well-run POVs fail when nobody on the customer's side is under any pressure to decide. Budget cycles, organizational change, competing priorities — any of these can stall a deal indefinitely if there's no internal reason to move. A technically successful POV with no urgency behind it sits in a queue and waits.
The fix: understand the customer's timeline before you invest. What's driving them to evaluate now? What happens if they don't decide by quarter end? Is there an event — a contract renewal, a migration deadline, a leadership commitment — creating genuine pressure? If the answer is "not really," that's important information about how much energy to invest and how to structure the engagement.
None of these patterns are inevitable. They're all addressable with better qualification and better upfront conversations. The investment in doing that well — before a POV starts — pays off in higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and less wasted time for everyone involved.
The best POVs we've run aren't the ones with the most impressive technical demonstrations. They're the ones where both sides understood what they were trying to accomplish before the first technical call ever happened.