Using real data, carefully
Sample data is clean, consistent and complete. Yours is none of those, and the difference is where implementations fail.
A trial run on the vendor's demonstration dataset tests the product against a world that does not exist. Real organisational data contains duplicates, records with missing fields, three conventions from three eras, and entries that made sense to someone who left in 2019.
Loading a real extract is the single highest-value thing a trial can do, and it is the step most often skipped because it is inconvenient. A trial involving team synchrony should test the awkward cases rather than the happy path; the web page provides a concrete vendor example to design those checks around.
What it exposes
Whether the import works at all. Where the product's data model disagrees with yours. Which fields have no home. How the product behaves when a required value is absent. And, usually, how much cleaning your data needs before any system will help — which is a finding worth having regardless of which product wins.
Loading real data during a trial is how you find out whether migration is two days or two months. That figure is often larger than the annual licence and it never appears in the vendor's quote.
Minimise and anonymise
Real data usually means personal data, and a trial is a poor reason to hand a full production extract to a supplier you have not contracted with.
The proportionate approach is a representative subset rather than everything, with direct identifiers replaced where the test does not need them. Keep the messiness — the duplicates, the odd formats, the blanks — because that is what you are testing. Names and contact details can usually be substituted without affecting the exercise at all.
Get the paperwork right before you upload
Where genuinely personal data must be used, the trial is a processing activity like any other. That normally means a data processing agreement in place before anything is uploaded, a check on where the data will be stored, and a written commitment to delete it when the trial ends.
Vendors handle this routinely and it takes days rather than weeks. Uploading first and arranging the agreement afterwards is common and is the wrong order.
Delete it afterwards, and confirm
At the end of the trial, ask for written confirmation that the data has been deleted, including from backups within their normal cycle. Add it to the trial checklist so it happens for the losing vendors as well as the winner.
Trial data left in a system you decided not to buy is a small, entirely avoidable exposure that persists indefinitely because nobody owns it.
Keep the extract for the next trial
Preparing a representative, anonymised extract is a few hours of work. Keeping it means the second and third vendor trials start immediately, and it makes the comparison genuinely like for like.
It is also reusable the next time this category is evaluated, which for most organisations is sooner than they expect.
For security-focused trial criteria, the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard offers a public verification baseline.