How do you evaluate PLM software when a demo is not enough?

When food and beverage, cosmetics, and personal care, and specialty chemicals companies evaluate PLM software today, their first question is rarely about features. Jobi Varghese, who leads presales at Trace One, explains why buyers now expect consulting before a demo, and how Trace One solution experts answer that need. For a long time, presales at Trace One meant one thing. A prospect asked to see the software and the team showed it. Around 2021, the question started to change.

Prospects stopped asking whether the platform could do a specific task. They started asking how other companies in their position handle the same problem.

Behind those questions sit three simple ones.

What should we optimize? What are we doing wrong? What would you recommend? Two forces drive this pressure.

Customers keep setting new trends that brands must follow, and regulation keeps adding obligations that brands must meet. So buyers want answers faster at lower cost with more covered in a single conversation. A demo shows what a product does. It rarely tells a buyer whether their own practices match industry best practice.

Buyers want outside references and proof of where they stand. They want to know where they fall short against the industry standard before anyone points it out. That is why in a typical conversation, Jobi Varghese spends about half the time on Trace One software and the other half on how similar teams solve the same problem. Neither half works without the other.

Outside the software industry, the word presales means little.

For people who have spent their careers in product development, retail, or manufacturing, Solution Expert is clearer.

Buyers today want to partner on two fronts, the software and a person who brings subject matter expertise into the room instead of a script. At Trace One, that expertise is built into the team.

The people behind Trace One sales conversations come from regulatory, quality, and manufacturing backgrounds.

When enterprise organizations ask how other global brands handle a process, they often want to escape heavy software customization. A global nutritional health company working with Trace One found that more than half of its existing systems were heavily customized, which created unnecessary complexity. Trace One took a consultative approach built on one principle, people and process before the tool. The company moved to standard industry baselines. The software became simpler, manual data transcription across global teams stopped, and the company gained a single source of truth for compliance.

Domain expertise also means understanding how manufacturing works across several plants.

A major food and beverage manufacturer producing more than 2,500 SKUs needed to standardize its formulas without removing the flexibility each local plant depends on.

Because the Trace One team understands how multilayer recipe structures interact with regional sourcing, it worked alongside the manufacturers' plant leaders. Together, they built regulatory gated approvals directly in the daily formulation workflow. A consultative approach plays out over time, not in a single sales pitch. When a global confectionery leader with multiple iconic brands needed to modernize its legacy PLM platform, Trace One guided the company through blueprinting, structured change management, and internal subject matter expert testing to upgrade its global footprint.

When the vendor acts as a trusted advisor, a product evaluation becomes a shared roadmap for continuous improvement. A career in regulatory affairs or on a plant floor cannot be adopted in a quarter or brought in for a single deal. Buyers can tell the difference between expertise that is real and expertise that is performed.

By the time a discussion with Trace One reaches commercial terms, the buyer no longer wonders whether Trace One understands their business.

That trust is built early in conversations that look like they are only about software.

Jobi Varghese leads presales at Trace One and has more than twenty five years of experience working with professionals in the food and beverage, cosmetics and personal care, and specialty chemical industries.

Trace One is a global provider of AI native product lifecycle management and regulatory compliance software for the food and beverage, cosmetics and personal care and specialty chemical industries. With more than thirty years of industry expertise, company helps over 9,000 brands worldwide develop, launch, and manage remarkable products faster. Purpose built for formula based product development, its platform connects the entire product lifecycle from ideation to launch with integrated regulatory intelligence spanning 170 plus countries. Learn more at traceone.com.