This insightful case study from SageCircle talks about how a vendor almost missed out on a $35M deal because it was left off an RFP shortlist. Although the case study is geared toward software vendors—focusing on the importance of an active analyst relations team—it also illustrates important points applying to software selection projects. The case study is in some ways a cautionary tale for organizations engaging an analyst firm’s guidance in a software selection. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t reached the shortlist stage, you may want to consider doing additional research to uncover vendors and systems that aren’t on your radar. Try TEC’s Smart Shortlist Wizard (free registration required) to find out which enterprise systems match the profile of your business.

How do you figure out, from within a large range of software vendors, which vendors to start evaluating? I’m curious to see some feedback on what most people use to start researching and narrowing down their list of software vendors before going into an RFI process.

A few years ago we were thinking about this issue and came up with the idea of a preselection questionnaire that could narrow down the list of vendors you’d want to look at. It has evolved and works relatively well, but after a few years it’s good to reconsider how it works and see if we can improve based on what we’ve learned, and on what people suggest.

No matter the methods of identifying vendors, you can usually find some common ground underlying them, which might be used as high-level preselection criteria. The following three examples show that even if you don’t use a formal process to identify vendors for evaluation, you still have to come up with a few high-level criteria. Read the rest of this entry »