Software Selection vs. Vendor Selection

Whether it’s ERP or a niche vertical application, or anything in between, what ultimately dominates your search? Is it a set of features that matches a set of requirements, or a vendor whose business style is compatible with yours?

The software selection process starts with a business need, a set of requirements, and a comparison of vendor offerings against those requirements. As the analysis continues, we shorten the list down to the few that execute our most frequently repeated tasks in a manner that enhances our productivity, and sequence those tasks in a manner that synergizes with our business processes. We consider a solution that does both a good match. That’s straight-forward software selection.

We have numerous conversations with the vendor throughout this process. Well before a deep dive into the vendor’s performance history and financial stability, we’re assessing their professionalism, timeliness, interest, respectfulness and more. Whether we think about it consciously or not, we are concurrently selecting the vendor too. And the more strategic the solution is to our business success, the more essential this vendor due diligence becomes.

So what happens if the vendor is a real pain to deal with? If we’re not very familiar with their solution, it’s easy to walk. Seriously, if the service is this bad before the sale, can you imagine what it would be like afterwards?

But what if the solution is a really good match? Does the ability to form a decent relationship with the vendor take precedence over all other requirements? In the end, is our task ultimately vendor selection over software selection?

Twice in my career, I resolved bad sales behavior with a call to the CEO or VP, Sales of the vendor company. Their solutions were terrific matches for my clients, and I had to know whether I had met the bad apple, or if this was a preview of what our future business partnership would look like. In both cases, the executives were appropriately horrified, hooked us up with their best sales rep, cleaned up the mess, and through their appropriate response, won the sale.

But my job isn’t to police vendor sales teams. It took exceptional matches between their products and my clients’ needs to get me to make those calls.

So, in the end, is it software selection or vendor selection?

In every search, there is a compelling business reason to endure the cost and disruption of an enterprise software implementation, and there’s typically a short list of 3-5 show-stopping requirements that support the business justification. Just as remote teams need a web-based solution and project-oriented teams need a solution that handles multiple concurrent projects, the business stakeholders need a vendor who makes it apparent in every interaction that they’ve made the right vendor choice.

I propose it’s software selection, with vendor selection in that list of 3-5 show-stopping requirements that support the business justification. What do you think?