Vendor sales teams are skilled at demonstrating capability. Implementation teams are skilled at deploying within constraints. These are different skills, different teams, and different timelines.
What you see in a sales demo may not reflect what your implementation will look like. Custom integrations, data migration, training, and change management take time and expertise that sales presentations gloss over.
Before signing, understand who will implement, what their track record looks like, and what the realistic timeline is—not the sales timeline.
Build implementation requirements into your evaluation criteria. Ask for implementation references, not just product references.
The best technology decision can still fail if implementation planning is an afterthought.