5 steps to innovate your vendor selection process #innovationbaby

Why does an average ERP implementation take over 18months? Why do 70% of IT implementations end in failure? These questions plagued me for years. I don't claim to have solved it, but I've got some ideas.

After living and breathing vendor selection for years now, I believe that there are a few steps that organisations can take to innovate faster, improve implementation success rate, and ultimately kick their competitions arse.

1. It's not them, it's you

When looking to introduce some new technology to your company everyone looks outwards first. How can we help our company innovate faster? What technology should we use to solve their problems? Have you ever thought about innovating your innovation process itself? Why don't we start there? The rapid growth in SaaS sales over the last few years has been hand in hand with an equally aggressive growth in sales enablement tools and improved sales processes. Starting in the late 90s, sales orgs have been using technology and innovation like CRMs to maximize their effectiveness. Not for the fun of it, but to solve a business challenge of growing ARR. If the goal is driving innovation for your company, follow them, focus on your innovation process, first and the company will reap the rewards.

2. It's about people, not tech

This is a little trite in 2022 but if you're still still putting tech before people, you're really putting the cart before the horse. People run companies, people need solutions. When you are about to embark on any innovation for your company, google and G2 should be step 3 or 4. Step one, speak to the people. Find out what they have issues with, what they need, and in what order these problems should be solved. Once you truly understand what impact this will have, and what the ideal state is for people, then you can go and start looking for solutions and not before. Super simple, but so often ignored.

3. Realise when the odds are stacked against you

?I have been a sales person for most of my professional life, most of that in SaaS. I promise you buyers, you're very rarely in the driving seat. As a sales person, I was always trained that as soon as you are not controlling the deal, you're going to lose the deal. If we as buyers want to avoid being sold, and falling into that 70% of failed implementations, we have to realise where we stand. Many SaaS companies spend 80% to 120% of their annual revenue on Sales & Marketing efforts. This money is being spent to convince you that you should buy their product. Do you honestly think they are going to spend that money and just say, "you know what, we're a bad fit, you should go with our competitor"? But as buyers we have 1 huge lever, they need us more than we need them.

4. Take control of the innovation process

So how do we lean on that vital lever to take back control of our innovation? Firstly, own it. If vendors tell you, "that's not our process" you tell them, "I know. It's my process, and if you want me to buy your product you'll follow it". In order to say this, we need a process, and a good one. So let's start innovating on our own process. Understand the company needs in and out before speaking with vendors, this way it will be harder for them to convince you that some problem that you don't have, but they solve is an absolute must have. If you can, work anonymously with vendors, find out what discovery questions they will ask so you can be the one asking your team, free of vendor bias. Try to find successful evaluation data from your peers. What requirements did they use that were effective? What similar problems did they solve that relate to my business? There is an abundance of HCM evaluations going on around the world, no need to reinvent the wheel.

5. Tool up

A great process is only as effective as the tools that enable it. You may have the best innovation process in the world, but if you're managing that on spreadsheets and word docs, it's not going to be that effective. PM tools like Jira and Asana are definitely a step in the right direction but they are not built for this purpose and never will be. Shameless plug but Olive is literally built for this purpose. We have taken the best practices of successful transformation and innovation projects and created a purpose built application to help companies drive more successful innovation initiatives, faster. We're not the only tool available and you should build an arsenal of tools to truly achieve this. The point being, there is help coming, and early adopters will be the biggest winners.

Conclusion / TLDR

Vendor selection is a crucial part of digital transformation. Done well, it can be one of the fastest ways to innovate, done poorly, it can have significant negative impacts. The current process of vendor evaluation and selection is biased and inefficient. Companies should take a hard look at their current process of vendor selection and ask, "just how innovative is our innovation process?" By taking a few small steps, you can get faster, more effective decisions and drive down that time to value quickly. Own up to not really having that innovative of a process (if spreadsheets are involved, I'm talking to you). Get as wide as you can with your stakeholder research and do that first. Once you know what you need, make sure vendors play by your rules, not the other way around. Finally, arm yourself with the best software to get the job done.

Now just sit back and wait for all the thank you gifs to come rolling into your work DMs on your next implementation.