Now that you’ve considered your business needs, created a project plan, and captured your specific requirements, you’re ready to start evaluating vendor solutions. Your team should focus on your needs and not necessarily the capabilities that each vendor may want to emphasize. It’s important not to get enamored with bells and whistles that don’t directly help your team and company meet the stated requirements.
More importantly, remember that you’re reviewing more than a software solution. You’re looking at each vendor’s complete set of services and approach to not only implement software but to help your company fuel adoption, gain optimal benefits, and continue to be successful for years.
This is worth repeating: There’s no perfect software solution. There’s no single system that will meet every one of your requirements in exactly the way you want. Your goal is to look for the best fit: the vendor solution and approach that comes closest to meeting your requirements.
The best vendors understand the power and benefits that come from having more transparent dealings and are not afraid to “just say no” when they can’t meet a particular need.
Warning: If any vendor says “yes” too often or to almost every question—consider it a red flag. They’re either misleading you, or they’re setting you up for a costly custom-coding project that may lead to a long implementation or, worse yet, failed deployment.
Before Software as a Solution (SaaS) became popular, it was more difficult to evaluate vendor software solutions. Buyers often had to check out long (and infrequently updated) analysts’ reports and weed out bias based on which vendors paid for good reviews. And, gone are the days when you must sit through multiple, long, and tedious sales engagements with onsite meetings and demos.
Not only are cloud-based SaaS solutions easy to use and deploy—they’re also easier to evaluate. For this guide, we assume you are looking at SaaS solutions but almost all outlined here applies to on-premises solutions as well.
Here are five simple steps you should take to evaluate software solutions.
To make the reviews easy and consistent, include additional high-level criteria for quicker assessment as well (see Vendor Customer Reviews template, also available in the software search project template).
Once you’ve narrowed the field to the top three or four solutions, you’re ready to do a deeper dive.
You might want to rush to demo. Our brains are wired more and more toward kinetic, multisensory learning. For many enterprise solutions though, it’s common practice for vendors to engage with you first in a live discovery meeting to ensure they understand your business needs. This is a good idea and in your best interest. Why?
If the vendor understands your specific needs before providing a demo, they can confirm they fit your needs and can provide a more tailored demo to address your specific requirements.
To make discovery and demo calls the most efficient and effective, you want to:
As you meet with vendors, work through your requirements to score each solution. Remember that you may need to update your requirements or the weighting as you learn about what is possible and how solutions meet needs. Go back to your business needs when it gets confusing to ensure your requirements support the business needs.
Find out the cost of the software: Is it based on users and, if so, are there different user roles that are priced accordingly?
Based on your demo and requirements, make sure you understand what software modules are included in the quote.
What are the options for payment? Most SaaS offerings provide monthly costs, but bill annually. See if there’s a discount for entering into a two- or three-year agreement. Most vendors will offer a compelling discount to do so and you’re not going to implement an enterprise system for only a year, so take advantage of a multiyear price agreement.
Are there any costs to upgrade to new versions or releases of the software? How are those deployed and at what frequency?
What resources are needed from the vendor and from your team? How much time is necessary to configure, test, and go live?
How are these services quoted—fixed-price packages, custom scoped statement of work, or time and materials?
What is the training approach? Is it a train-the-trainer? Is it live or recorded? How many people should go through training and at what cost? (You should also consider how much training is needed, which relates to overall usability of solutions.)
Ask each vendor whether they have a plan and process to help your company evolve and get the most from your application investment. As an example, check out how Arena looks at the entire customer lifecycle.
SaaS offerings normally include customer support in the cost of the software subscription itself, but you should confirm that is the case. Does the vendor have tiers of support or limitations to support provided as part of the SaaS subscription fee? Make sure you understand the normal business hours for engaging support whether this is done via email, online portals, and/or with live calls.
If the software is not SaaS, you may have additional annual maintenance fees and upgrade services to consider.
Once you’ve met with all the vendors and received quotes and service details, you can summarize this information to compare costs and implementation details. The next chapter offers some best practices to help you make a compelling case to senior leadership based on the value and benefits you expect to gain by using the software.
✓ Identify the top vendors through customer reviews and other online research
✓ Review top vendors’ websites and resources
✓ Meet with the vendors
✓ Collect full cost information