Get your own house in order before you go on the road to demonstrate the product or write the press kit. Make sure you can articulate a product's uniqueness and understand how to present its competitive position to the reviewer . Some reviewers make a policy of not asking ahead of time, others want to know before they start the review. I've seen plenty of vendor demos that didn't do this and turned off the reviewers pretty quickly. Make sure your developers have the right setups to expose the product's weaknesses .
Nothing fixes product deficiencies faster.
When I was at PC Week, we found that Novell's drivers for token ring cards were slower than for Ethernet. Our reviews made a big deal out of this. Novell replaced the Ethernet boards in their developer's machines with token ring products and got the developers to write better drivers. Don't turn away any interested reviewer . When a publication wants to do a comparative review or when someone from outside your targeted list calls, consider this a positive sign and support it wholeheartedly.