Daily Prompt Pack: Vendor Evaluation – Cut the Demo Theater and Score Shortlists on Evidence

Every vendor demo looks the same at minute twelve: clean dashboard, happy customer logo, vague promise about onboarding. Here are three prompts I use to strip that out and force vendors onto paper before we sign anything.

[Claude]

You are helping me evaluate three HRIS vendors: Rippling, BambooHR, and HiBob. Build a weighted scorecard for a 140-person company. Criteria: implementation time, per-seat cost at year 1 and year 3, native payroll in our two states, and API access. Weight each 1 to 5. Output a markdown table with scores, a reasoning column per vendor, and a final ranked recommendation.

[ChatGPT]

I have 40 minutes of transcript from a vendor demo where the sales rep dodged questions about data migration. Scan it and produce an evidence table: every claim the vendor made, whether it was verified, demonstrated, or asserted, and quote them. Flag any promise with no number attached. End with the five questions I should email them before the next call.

[Cursor]

Write a Python script that reads our vendors.csv (name, quote_monthly, seats, setup_fee, contract_months) and outputs a 3-year total cost of ownership table, sorted by TCO per seat. Include a scenario column for 20 percent headcount growth at month 12. Use pandas, write results to tco.md, and add a docstring explaining the growth assumption.

Full archive at aicofounderstack.com/tag/prompt-pack.