SaaS Vendor Selection Process – Getting to the Finish line.

So, you’ve done your due diligence, with either the completion of an RFI or your internal research, and you’ve successfully narrowed down your SaaS vendor selection to no more than a few potentials. You are now at what I consider the most critical aspect of your selection process because once you’ve made your bed, you have to sleep in it.

So now what?

Three critical deliverables for this phase are:

• Reference checks

• Scoring matrixes

• Vendor demo presentation scripts

Some of the critical components of each of those include:

• Reference Checks:

  • Ask your vendors to provide at minimum two references for you and your team to talk to. These references should be as close to your RFP requirements as possible. Discuss these early in the process since there can be some lag time in scheduling the calls.

  • Be prepared so that you’re not taking any more time than is needed to get your questions answered.

    • Have a designated facilitator so only one person is asking questions.

    • Develop a questionnaire before the meeting and provide it to the reference. This will ensure that she can get answers to any questions outside her role or invite additional folks.

    • Stay on course with your questions; remember, she is volunteering her time, so keeping it within the targeted time is essential.

• Scoring Matrixes:

  • Your RFP requirements are your scorecard’s categories and can usually be broken down into two sections.

    • Those that are demonstrable and will be part of the vendor demos.

    • Those that are not but need to be weighted, which can include things such as:

      • Accurate and timely responses to the RFP

      • Scalability

      • Ability to enable Single Sign-on (SSO)

      • Cybersecurity

  • Weigh your requirements; while you may consider all these as “must haves,” some within a category are usually more critical than others. If not, weigh them equally within that section.

  • Once all scoring is combined, provide a dashboard summary page, a summary of each category's requirements, and tabs detailing each participant's scores.

• Vendor demo presentation scripts:

  • Work with the selected vendors for the demo phase to create a presentation script or discussion flow so that it is easy for the team to score the different sections.

    • As an example, in one vendor review for an eTMF, I took the requirements and broke them down into three second-tier sections that included:

      • Admin

      • Viewer

      • Archival

  • From there, I developed a flow for the discussion, aligning each category's contents within one of the above sections.

These are only a few of the steps and critical documents needed to ensure you’ve covered all your bases and feel comfortable with your selection. If you’d like to discuss this further or need assistance during your selection process, let’s connect.