After presenting our Vendor Selection Process at a few technology conferences, we were overwhelmed with questions and feedback and we thank all of you for your input and encouragement to summarize our process in text and place it online to benefit others. The following is a summary of our presentation:
The Truth About Vendor Selection
When our Clients task us with identifying the most appropriate vendor for their project, discussions are frequently oriented around the same 5 topics – The Outcome, The Audience, The Objectives, The Strategy, and The Technology Decision. This article was written to help outline our thoughts and give readers an indication of the process involved in successfully selecting a vendor for a technology implementation.
Today’s example comes from the world of social media, the latest, greatest must-have for your business. In most business engagements we start with the end in mind by figuring out what we want to accomplish. Social technologies are not mysterious black boxes. They can accomplish business oriented goals as well. Consider that it’s probably time to stop implementing ‘social’ because it’s cool. It’s time to get into it because it is effective if done right.
Our first step is to fully understand our Client’s desired business results (the Outcome) for creating a community online. When we have formulated the outcome into a clearly written, text based paragraph resembling a project statement and as soon as we receive our Client’s approval for this formulation, we proceed to step two.
Our next step is to Identify the Target Audience that will want to be members of this community. Before they become members of our community, these individuals are our prospects – out there somewhere on the internet sitting firmly within the parameters of what we define as our target audience. In this step we focus on access and conversions. How we are able to get in touch with our prospects is what we refer to as ‘access’ and getting a prospect to become a member is what we refer to as conversion. We usually initiate a profiling exercise in this step to reveal the needs of our target audience. This can be done in a variety of ways, our current favorite is by using sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to attract or pull the target audience toward us where we can present them with a relevant reward for answering a combination of multiple choice and open questions in our online surveys.
The next step is to determine the appropriate Objectives that align with and help to achieve our Client’s desired business result (the outcome). This list of objectives is critical to understanding what our Client’s expectations are and what limitations (if any) will be placed on this project. Are you launching a project to listen to your Customers or to enter into a dialog with them? To support them or to energize your best Customers so that they evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with your Customers? Decide on your core objectives long before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.
Most of our time at this stage will be spent scoping out the Strategy, which includes budgets, roles, internal processes, stakeholders, policies, empowerment, change management, legal, regulatory and compliance issues. This information needs to be collected, discussed, agreed with the Client and then documented. In addition to the above, the scoping document will need to include a plan for how relationships with Customers will change over time. Be sure that the strategy is in line with the Objectives. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best Customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Always imagine the outcome and you’ll have a good idea where you need to begin.
Once you’ve completed your scoping document and outlined the work breakdown structure, only then are you ready to select a technology and a vendor. Selecting the technology in this example has to do with a community, a blog, a wiki or even thousands of blogs. Once you know your desired outcome, your audience, the objectives, and the strategy then you can decide with confidence what the technology needs to deliver using a simple process called decision analysis which helps you to make the best possible selection when presented with alternatives.
Selecting a vendor is a Decision Making Process that begins with setting must and want objectives and ends with evaluating risks. This decision analysis is what presents the decision logic to anyone requiring your reasoning for making a particular decision and it follows the same process that NASA has used for the past 50+ years.
As a rule of thumb, successful brands focus about 80% of their efforts on the The Outcome, The Audience, The Objectives and The Strategy and about 20% of their effort on the Technology Decision – make sure that you get it right too.
Tags: Decision Analysis
Entries (RSS)