What a CRM consultant would tell you about buying CRM software – part 2

Following on from ‘What a CRM consultant would tell you about buying CRM software’ – part one:

The second aspect of good vendor selection is to start off with a good initial short list of potential suppliers. Pretty obviously you are much more likely to make a better choice and negotiate a better deal if you are choosing from a group of top-flight suppliers. Conversely if you start off with a list of suppliers that is largely inappropriate for your business or what you are looking to achieve, then you simply end up selecting the best of a bad bunch. Therefore it’s worth taking the time therefore to research the market carefully before rushing out to tender. A CRM consultant will generally be able to put you on the money in this respect, but as this isn’t a shameless plug for our services, we’ll skip this as an option in this scenario. There are clearly many sources of information about potential CRM suppliers, such as trade shows, forums, analyst reports etc, however one of the most effective ways to find suitable options is simply to ask around similar businesses to your own to find what they are using and how well it meets their needs.

One of the things to be aware of here is that many technologies such as Microsoft CRM are sold through a network of resellers. As a rule of thumb here the selection of the reseller is more important to success than the choice of technology. While there’s a fair amount of information available on the CRM technologies themselves, information about the strength of the reseller community is much harder to find. I’m probably being kind by saying the standard of the average reseller is mediocre at best, so it’s very important to put the research in here. On a related point I’d be wary about recommendations from the software vendors about which resellers they think you should use. A lot of companies will treat these recommendations as gospel, however they are invariably based on factors that suit the software vendor rather than the supplier, for example who is likely to make a quick sale (rather than implement the software well), or which resellers territory you to happen to sit in.

We generally look to get six to eight suppliers lined up to respond to a request for proposal (RFP). This gives a little lee-way in case a few fail to respond. We also work hard to reassure the vendors that it’s an open contest (which it always is). If vendors harbour any suspicions that the decision might already be made and that the purchaser is just going through the motions, then they are unlikely to bid. Good vendors are generally very busy vendors, and responses to RFP’s are time consuming, so it’s worthwhile making the effort to promote the opportunity to them. This may sound a little counter intuitive after all surely they should be doing the selling, but the value of working with a great vendor over a mediocre one, massively outweighs the effort.

The third aspect of an effective vendor selection process, will be published in a forthcoming post…