How Many Demos Are Too Many

A friend of mine recently had an opportunity to provide a local church with a proposal and was asked to do a demo. Of course he was glad that he had been asked
to bring in a demo as this is usually a good sign that he'd made it to the second round. After all, the church had received pricing from 8 different vendors and no one in their right mind would look at all eight copiers; Right? Well, guess again.
Over the next few weeks each vendor brought it their wares to demo and try in some way to set themselves apart.
Needless to say, my friend didn't get the order. As a matter of fact, the incumbant, who by the way the local church said would never get the order, won the deal. So when are too many demos, too many. And why would a vendor allow itself to be put through ringer like these eight vendors? I guess hope springs eternal in the heart of a salesperson and it seems to me that there are at least eight sales managers who were just happy to fill their sales pipelines also.
The bottom line to this is that there will always be businesses and organizations who care little of the value a company can bring to the table or who actually believe that getting eight different quotes and having those eight vendors continuously rebid their copiers to get the business is the way to the best value for their dollar. But is it?
As long as there are those who do not fully understand just how the right "copier" vendor can provide a value beyond the lowest price, just treating a copier as just a commodity. They will never get just how office technologies can dramatically impact their office productivity, reduce overall costs and reduce corporate risk, and that's too bad. But you just can't blame the customer, of those eight "copier" vendors, not one asked the church to stop, step back and look at this differently. And not one said, sorry, but no thanks and instead ended up wasting both their and the customers time.