Product Managers often face the choice of build, buy, or partner. When you choose to buy, your company may have a standard procurement process. If you don't have one, it usually looks something like this:
Document your needs to justify the investment
Get stakeholder input
Develop a comprehensive RFI document and send to vendors in that market
Schedule demos and leverage a scorecard to rate the potential vendors
Negotiate the terms and conditions before making the purchase.
A commonly skipped step between 4 and 5 is the customer reference call. This is where you ask the potential vendor for 2-3 references of existing customers so that you can interview them (without the vendor on the call) and make sure that you get a customer's side of the story of using the vendor's solution or services.
Now - the vendor is only going to give you references to the customers that LOVE them. You should expect this going in. Here are 10 questions to try to get the truth:
How are you using this vendor’s platform?
Who else did you consider when going through your procurement process?
Why did you select this vendor over the others you considered?
How would you describe the relationship between you and the vendor? After the sale was completed? After 6 months? After 12 months? Now?
How did the implementation of your solution go? Were there any project delays, budget changes, scope creep, issues, or functionality that was missing?
How well did the vendor work with other vendors (such as other 3rd party solutions, integration partners, etc)?
Are there any features or capabilities that you wish the solution had?
How would you rate the easiness of administering the solution/making configuration changes/making system changes?
What is one piece of advice you wish you knew before you moved forward with this vendor?
Would you select this vendor again today knowing what you know now?
Need help selecting a vendor for your product? Want to outsource some of the diligence around customer reference calls? Shoot me an email at michael@product-bridge.com and I'd be happy to help.

Comments