If you have never been responsible for sourcing a techprovider to help improve your CRM Marketing relevance, then you may be forgiven for thinking it is just about product and price.  Here we explore what factors should be considered when choosing a partner and an outline approach to the selection process for delivering successful upgrades to your tech stack. 

Success Factors

Any company can listen to your requirements and tick all the boxes with regards to the principles of how easy it will be to integrate with your existing mar-tech, delivering more customer insights, better segmentation and targeting tools for personalisation.  However, there will be 2 things which will determine whether what they promise can in fact be delivered to your expectations:

1)  Being uber clear on your detailed requirements, it is important here not just give a topline list of what you want - but to make sure that these are backed up with clear use cases, so you can make sure that you have expressed not just what functions you need but how you will use it and what systems it needs to integrate with (you may need the support of your data and it team to create these use cases) but they will be invaluable in making the right decision.

2) The provider should pitch a team of people that are specialists in the areas that you are developing - make sure their pitch team includes a day to day contact who you can interact with and who can interpret your requirements to their technical team, and a technical person who has worked with the systems you are integrating with.  Ideally they will already have a list of vendors who they have established standard integration tools for and this will make your process much quicker and cheaper to deliver - so make sure that yours is on this list. 

3)  In the 2nd round of selection - make sure that you include a 'chemistry' session with the vendors account team. This will make sure that you not only have clarity around some of the key use cases that you have created, but that you actually feel that the team bonds - make sure that you put a bit of pressure on to explore the limitations of the vendors capability to deliver - to assess their competence, but also how comfortable they are to explore options if an off the shelf solution isn't available.  Finding a vendor who is flexible enough to work around problems effectively and efficiently will be worth the time invested at this stage...

The Selection Process

As with any techdevelopment, there will always be teething problems, but to stop these littlehiccups becoming longer term headaches, follow our 5 step guide to supplierselection:

1)   Scope out your requirements, socialise then developa “cross functional working group” to encourage co-ownership and prevent silo’dthinking. Ensure that you understand theknock on implications to the tech infrastructure and possibilities for enhancedcapabilities across other business areas.

2)   Do your desk research. Take advantage of reports such as Forresterand Gartner, who have created a business around producing league tables of thebest providers in specific areas.

3)   Through your working group - develop a short andsuccinct brief which explains both the strategic and technical needs of theproposed development.

4)   Run an open and fair process. If you are part of a large organisation youmay have a 3 step process for awarding such contracts – this will include:

a. A pre-qualification questionnaire to understandthe credentials, financial and legal compatibilities of the organisations. This helps to create a short list for initialpresentation.

b.   An initial 1 hr presentation to overview theproduct capabilities and check cultural fit. Make sure you have at least 2 goodopen questions to explore how the business approaches problems/prefer to workso you can establish fit.

c.   A ½ day workshop or detailed presentation on theproposed solution, staged implementation, support structure and costs.

You could condense these down, but having agap between general approach vs detailed solution allows you to see morecompanies in the first instance. Investing more time with fewer companies for the 2ndpresentation means you are not wasting time on organisations without therelevant capabilities or cultural fit.

5)   Have a consistent team from your crossfunctional working group – who can attend all presentations. Create a score-card that explores the varyingcapabilities required within the core functions provided by the solution.

Further Reading

In order to develop a brief for this cross functional team, your CRM team will need to have a data strategy and crm plan in place - this will set out what data you will need to capture from your customers and how this will be used to segment and enhance their experience with relevant content and information.  You can read more about how to enhance customer data for better personalisation here.