Remember staying late at the office for three consecutive nights, running on endless cups of coffee and sheer resolution, just to deliver a POC (Proof of Concept) for a client demo the next day? The pain is real for so many presales engineers.

From conveying a product’s value and customization to ensuring its appeal and feasibility, especially during client meetings, the pressure is relentless. Converting an idea into a production reality is fraught with challenges—limited time, tight deadlines, and high expectations.

A 2024 Forbes study highlights that around 90% of POC pilots do not see the light of the production stage from ideation. Evoke’s OutSystems team, for instance, has seen first-hand the challenge organizations experience in delivering effective POCs. This is where OutSystems Mentor comes to solve your problem.

OutSystems Mentor is a first-of-its-kind AI digital assistant designed to streamline and reimagine the entire SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) process. It empowers developers and presales engineers to create, design, deploy, and manage software quickly. This helps a company to accelerate development and streamline the presales POC process, ensuring its effective demonstration to clients.

Read on to explore how OutSystems Mentor tackles these challenges through resource optimization, efficiency, and a streamlined SDLC—ultimately fueling the sales rate and business growth.

The Woes of Presales POCs Process

Tight Deadline: Time crunch is one of the key challenges for presales POCs. Clients expect quick, tangible results, often pressuring the presales teams to urge developers to take shortcuts and quick fixes. Additionally, the need to customize POCs as per client requirements further necessitates complex tailoring and integrations, incurring more time.

Resource Constraints: Many companies’ presales teams are expected to ‘do more with less.’ Skilled developers often get entangled in various POC tasks, especially when the complexity level of the concerned product/service technology is high. This not only leads to delays but also limits their bandwidth to work on other projects effectively.

Quality and Consistency Maintenance: Maintaining the quality and consistency of POCs while adhering to best practices is a challenge, especially when the client expects prompt delivery. Issues such as code quality inconsistencies, poor presentation, and use problems are apparent without a standardized approach—negatively impacting the client’s attitude towards the solution.

Technical Debt Aggregation: A 2023 Gartner study states that the rush to develop POCs often leads to technical debt by 50%. It leads to issues such as code duplication, incomplete documentation, poor testing, coding inconsistencies, and outdated infrastructure incompatible with the evolving needs. This restricts a solution’s scalability and also compromises the POCs credibility in front of the clients.

How Mentor Solves POC Challenges

The presales POCs bottlenecks impede the entire SDLC process and developers’ productivity—but not with OutSystems Mentor.

It is designed to streamline and significantly facilitate app development. The ongoing rapid transformation empowers businesses to provide new products and solutions as per business demands. It solves the POC challenges with:

Fast Development: The online digital assistant revolutionizes the entire SDLP lifecycle with its advanced application generation capabilities. It enables you to use prompts and requirements documents to create apps quickly. Equipped with predictive texts, codes, and structured suggestions, it significantly reduces the time needed for manual coding. For example, our OutSystems experts at Evoke helped a client accelerate application generation, enabling more effective volunteer team management.

Improved Efficiency: OutSystems Mentor empowers you to achieve optimum efficiency with its suggestions of best practices and designs, which in turn helps to kickstart your development process without delay. For instance, our team at Evoke enabled a client to streamline its app compilation process. This helped the business to reduce its development costs with minimal rework, optimizing resource usage and leading to quality apps.

From providing security best practices and addressing performance bottlenecks to ensuring adherence to development standards, Mentor contributes to overall SDLC efficiency.

Ensures Quality Maintenance and Consistency: Performance consistency and quality maintenance are difficult tasks that require repeated checks. OutSystems Mentor streamlines it by performing application code analysis. This helps to address potential issues, security vulnerabilities, and performance challenges. Solving these issues gives presales teams the chance to offer scalable and durable POCs to clients.

Rapid Iteration Based on Feedback: Unlike the conventional pain of fixing issues, OutSystems Mentor helps developers to quickly address and fix the issues based on feedback, enabling faster iteration. This quick incorporation of client input into POCs helps presales teams to demonstrate the products’ efficiency and credibility to customers in real-time.

Application Standardization and Consistency Across POCs: It simplifies the process of POC consistency and application standardization with preset guidelines and regulations. For instance, data model designs tend to vary based on developers’ different approaches, even for similar data structures. OutSystems Mentor can recommend standardized and pre-approved best practices to developers, ensuring efficient and standardized data models across POCs. Another scenario is external systems integration with POCs via APIs. The Mentor can help you identify possible security vulnerabilities and provide best practices for managing API errors. This results in improved POC management and reliability.

Benefits of Mentor

Efficient implementation of Mentor provides several benefits that include:

• Enhanced productivity and less workload
• Efficient management of multiple POCs parallelly
• Higher win rates
• Accelerated time-to-value for customers
• Better Client Experience
• Enhanced customer confidence and engagement
• Saves Costs and Minimizes Risks

Conclusion
Developing and demonstrating effective POCs is essential for attracting both new and existing business opportunities. OutSystems Mentor helps you to fulfill the purpose effectively. However, with the right partnership and expertise you can further leverage it for optimum outcomes.

Evoke’s expertise and detailed knowledge of OutSystems provide you with a streamlined development workflow, ensuring efficiency and minimal rework across POCs. do not let inefficient POCs hold your business back. As one of the fastest growing OutSystems Mentor solutions providers, we convert your presales process into a strategic pathway to further drive profitability and business success.