Incentive Compensation and Sales Performance Management Survey

Tag Archive for 'Vendor Selection'

The Power of Trust

Published
by
Julien Dionne
on February 4, 2010
in Planning and Selection
. 0 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

This summer I was sitting on a dive boat off the coast of Cozumel chatting with the dive master and about to dive Palancar caves when two distinct thoughts occurred to me. First, I trust this dive master. He is an expert in his craft, and I know he has successfully and safely led people on this dive before and second, I’m fairly certain I could lead people on this dive myself.

What led to that point where I felt like I was self-sufficient enough to a lead a deep dive that requires somewhat complex navigation? One that can have unpredictable currents and no signs or markers on the surface to indicate a starting point? Experience – the fact that I have done hundreds of dives and in particular have done the Palancar cave dive numerous times in a wide variety of conditions.

If it had been my first time in the water, I might have been able to get down to a reef, swim around, and surface hopefully without doing harm to myself. There is little to no chance, even with a map, that I could have found the right reef, found the caves, utilized my air efficiently, controlled my buoyancy and understood my dive charts well enough to have a safe dive. And ultimately that’s why you pay for a dive master or a guide – experience, knowledge and to minimize risk.

When it comes to selecting a software vendor, this holds true as well. There are numerous methodologies or “maps” that can be found with Google to give you some idea of how to do it yourself. If anyone would like to see the selection methodology that I utilize for my clients, please send me an email and I would be happy to share it with you. However, even with your vendor selection map in hand, quite quickly as you start to do research on the vendors in the space you will realize that there are a large number of companies that appear to have solutions to your business problem. A little farther on in the process, you might realize that there are vast differences in the vendor’s solutions. As an example - they all have some form of reporting but some are partnered with best-in-class third parties, some are integrated, some are very good at pixel-perfect static reports, while other are good at ad-hoc reporting or perhaps executive dashboards. How to interpret the cost to implement and maintain, the improvement or value-gap to current state, the trades offs between solutions, the ease of use and how others have used that particular reporting solution to add economic value to their companies are all questions that beg to be answered. This same analysis should happen across multiple dimensions of functionality and once you find a good match of functionality to prioritized requirements, the process has just begun. To go back to the diving analogy, you have only “found the reef.” So far I have just scratched the surface of the complexity and nuances of successful vendor selection, but at the end of the road your company needs to make a costly decision between multiple complex solutions to meet your complex business needs –sound risky to do without a guide?

If you are thinking about embarking on a vendor selection process that can be fraught with pitfalls, the first question you might want to ask is – “Based on experience can I lead this myself?” Next summer, I would love to be on a boat off the coast of an island that I haven’t been to before (Truk anyone?), chatting with an experienced dive master about a dive I have never done, and feel comfortable in the success and safety of the dive.

Justin Lane is a Sales Performance Management veteran and a colleague of mine at OpenSymmetry. He helps clients develop best in class Compensation Management Program processes and implement the underlying technology to support those processes.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Related Posts:
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Salary Equality Sucks and Goodbye Marx

Pricing Expectations for SPM Solutions; When ‘Expensive Solutions’ End Up Being ‘Cheap’

Published
by
Julien Dionne
on January 13, 2010
in Planning and Selection
. 0 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (6 votes, average: 4.17 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

As my position offers a unique opportunity to work with companies at the early stages of an SPM selection process, I always amazed at the perceptions companies have as it relates to what the various systems will cost them from a ‘licensing’ standpoint all the way through and including implementation. Although vendors vary in the way they approach how they want to charge for their solutions (perpetual vs. Lease vs. on-demand…), it is always intriguing to our team when people include or exclude vendors based on what they feel the costs they might expect from a specific solution provider.

As an example, one of our clients had initially dropped 2 of the larger SPM solution providers from their selection effort (prior to our engaging) solely based on what their competition had said about them. Following a more formal evaluation where these two providers were brought back in against their (lower costing) peers, these two late entries happened to come in as the 2nd and 3rd cheapest solutions in the evaluation.

In the last year we have seen the SPM space recalibrate on a number of different levels from functional offerings all the way through how the providers sell and price their software. We have seen some providers flip back and forth on their pricing model a number of times in a 12 month period to the point a customer simply has to wait a few months and the deal they are looking for may come their way.

To keep anyone from making a mistake that could cost them the solution that would actually be the right fit at the right price… I would urge anyone looking at systems to have a direct discussion with the SPM provider about their pricing before you chose to drop them or keep them as part of your selection process (based on that set of criteria).

Rob Blohm is a partner at OpenSymmetry, a consulting firm specializing in sales performance management, and can be reached at rob.blohm@opensymmetry.com.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Related Posts:
When do you need Compensation Management Software?
Napoleon Bonaparte on Motivation and Recognition

Pizza and Chopsticks

Published
by
admin
on July 2, 2009
in Miscellaneous
. 0 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

Yesterday, a friend was laughing at me because I was eating my pizza with a fork and a knife.  For the record, I usually only use them when my pizza is too hot to hold with my bare hands.  We started to talk about pizza eating habits, and she started talking about a person she knows who eats pizza with chopsticks.

The points I want to make today is that there are usually many tools to perform the same job, and that the choice of ’solution’ is often a matter of opinion and personal preference, as long as the solution (chopsticks) can meet the requirements (eating the pizza). It is also for this reason that it is important to identify who is the person who will make the final decision, because various team members might have a different idea about what the ideal solution is.

Tags: , , ,

Related Posts:
No related posts

Which SPM Vendor “Sucks” the Most?

Published
by
admin
on February 12, 2009
in Miscellaneous
. 2 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (5 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

Every day some people are landing on LeapComp by searching for “[vendor name] sucks”, “which SPM vendor sucks”, etc. I thought I would share my perspective on this matter. I think I probably got some attention?

I don’t think that any sales performance compensation vendor can claim that 100% of their customers are very satisfied with their solution. There is often at least a few people who have had a bad experience and like to believe that it’s all the vendor’s fault.  So what else can cause an SPM project to fail?

Look in your own yard
Did you nail down the requirements properly? Was the scope well defined and communicated? Did the scope slowly creep up until the project was an entirely different beast? Did new requirements enter the picture? Did you support the implementation team adequately by providing them with all the documentation, information, access to subject matter experts, etc, in a timely manner? Did your team provide the required help when necessary and actively helped out with the implementation efforts? Was the schedule reasonable or did you have try to cut corners by skipping over some planning or testing efforts?

Not the right solution?
So maybe from your implementation-support perspective, everything was flawless. So could the problem be that the solution you selected didn’t meet your needs? If you do a poor job at defining the project scope and high level requirements before selection a commercial solution, how will you know if it really meet your needs. Ahh, but that’s the Catch 22! How are you supposed to really know all your needs without knowing more about the solutions? Maybe you KNOW that you want to do analytics, but you don’t really know what the application can do for you exactly… So you end up selecting a solution claiming to have best-of-breed analytics only to realize that it can’t do what you want. Read my vendor selection posts for more ideas on how to select the vendor who will best meet your needs. Hint: I think it’s a good idea to get help from someone who knows what they are talking about and who have worked with many SPM solutions… but I could be biased, that’s one of the things I do for a living.

Maybe it was your implementation partner that was not so great?
Could you do all this and still have a failed project? Yes! You spent all this time selecting a vendor, but how much time did you spent selecting an implementation partner? Maybe you just assumed that a big system integrator like Accenture and Deloitte were the best because they are already working with your company on other projects. Or maybe you selected the cheapest company on the block. Maybe you just selected the vendor’s implementation team thinking they must be those who know their products the best. I would assert that even more important than selecting the right solution, you must ensure that there is a good fit with the implementation partner you select. After you choose a solution, you won’t need many interactions with the vendor; but with the system integrator, you will need to work with them for some time! Do your homework, check their references, find out other companies who have used their services and ask them about the outcome of the project. I wrote another short piece about choosing an implementation partner where I discuss some pros and cons of large companies, versus vendors, versus boutique consulting firms.

In conclusion, before deciding to exclude a vendor from your search based on some horror story, consider that any failure to an enterprise system integration can be caused by many factors, and that the vendor is [usually] never fully responsible for the failure.  Also make sure that you select the best implementation partner.  Finally, support them well during the implementation.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related Posts:
Resource Center
SPM Vendor Selection Part 5: Reference Calls

SPM Vendor Selection Part 6: Getting Help!

Published
by
admin
on November 25, 2008
in Miscellaneous and Planning and Selection
. 0 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

If you go shopping for a new car, and if you don’t know anything about cars, what do you do?  Trust the dealer?  Talk with a few dealers?   Read books and reviews about the cars being considered?  Bring a friend who DOES know something about cars to avoid getting ripped off?  In this last post about vendor selection, I will discuss a few ideas of where it is possible to get some help with the sales performance management vendor selection process.

Get help from a company experienced with vendor selection efforts
Getting help from an unbiased, experienced third party is the most obvious course of action.  This third party will be able to assist you with every step of the process we have discussed so far, from shortlisting the “best” vendors for your requirements, to writing an RFP doing a good job at describing your specific requirements, to helping out with the RFP evaluation and demo evaluation.  I’ll just add a note that I’m regularly involved on vendor selection projects with OpenSymmetry.

Pros: A consulting company with a lot of vendor selection experience will be able to guide you through the process and help you in making the best decision for your specific situation.  They will bring a lot of value by being able to answer your questions, create or review the vendor selection deliverable, provide additional insight about the various vendors/solutions considered and provide expert advice early on in the process.

Cons: Hiring a consultant / consulting company to help out with vendor selection will cost something; sometimes too much for a small budget implementation.  Not all consulting companies are as experienced or as unbiased as they claim they are, so it is important to verify the experience and the company’s reputation.  Checking references and ensuring that a company is not getting any “referral fee” from the vendor selected is also important to ensure there is no bias towards a specific vendor.

Get help from an SPM Vendors
Dean Thomas from Merced Systems discussed earlier this month how valuable it is to involve SPM vendors early in the RFP / requirement gathering process to get a good RFP.  Indeed, most vendors will usually be helpful in providing information and ideas when creating an RFP.

Pros: Vendors usually want to appear to be “good guys” and be on your side during the selection process.  There is much to be said about the importance of developing a good relationship between vendor and client, and helping you here is planting the first seed to what the vendors hope to be a long lasting relationship.

Cons: As I pointed out earlier in a blog comment, getting help from a vendor is a bit of a grey area.  When involving one vendor, other vendors should also be involved to be fair, and this can be complicated.  Involving vendors may also create a notion that some are favored more than others.  Finally, some vendors may also use this opportunity to recommend requirements which may give them an advantage over their competitors.  SPM vendors are familiar with their application, but sometimes they lack the knowledge of other solutions which makes it hard to think out of the box…  even with the best intention they may give an advantage to their solution.

Get help from the Internet
Just stating the obvious, but there is a LOT of information on the Internet about vendor selection, RFP writing, etc.  Good places to start looking for SPM specific information are the vendor’s websites and sales performance management blogs.  Looking at vendor selection deliverable for other software solutions more commonly used than SPM could also be valuable; CRM and ERP solutions are other applications which will share common requirements with a sales performance management solution including security, data, etc.

Pros: The information is free…

Cons: The quality and accuracy of the information can be biased.  For example, many vendors provide pros and cons of on-premise versus on-demand solutions; usually these studies are heavily biased towards influencing customers to select an on-demand solution which is usually more lucrative for the vendor.  Be wary of vendors who require you to share contact and project information before sharing white papers, templates, studies, etc with you.  This is only a sales stunt and you may have a hard time to get rid of their sales team.

Get help from me
If you have any questions or if you would like to brainstorm a few ideas, I would be pleased to talk with you and help out… for free.  The only catch is that I hope you will share this blog around in exchange for the help, and keep me in mind if you ever need help with “real” work.  I promise you won’t be constantly harassed after contacting me :-)  You can reach me by e-mail at julien.dionne@opensymmetry.com or by phone at 613-482-2556.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Related Posts:
Resource Center
SPM Vendor Selection Part 5: Reference Calls

SPM Vendor Selection Part 5: Reference Calls

Published
by
admin
on November 20, 2008
in Sales Performance Management and Vendor / SPM Solution Review and Info
. 0 Comments
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, the vendor selection process can be very similar to hiring someone.  After the screening interview (RFP), and the in-person interview (demo), it’s now time for the reference check of our top two candidates.

SPM Vendors are usually quick to provide the required references.  I think that in general they are pretty honest, but be concerned if they tell you that the entire implementation was very smooth and if they have nothing bad to say about the solution at all.   When applying for a job, I never provided a reference who would say anything bad about me, and I’d usually prep them about what they should say.  I’m sure these arranged references could be scripted as well.

To avoid the potential for a biased reference, many choose to talk with other companies who implemented the solutions being considered.  Whether you are looking at the vendor’s press releases, or if they provided a client list in the RFP, figuring out who is leading the implementation, or who is responsible for compensation at a certain company is usually not such a hard task.  Conferences are also a good way to meet people who have been through the implementation process, with all the pains involved.

Some reference call questions…
The goal of the reference call is to find out if the experience of others is as rosy as what the vendors may have described it.

This is your chance to find out more about the product, if they are happy with the functionality and usability, some of the pros and cons, upgrades, etc.  It is also a great opportunity to find out more about the actual implementation of the solution; how long did it take (and how long was it supposed to take), any lessons learned, etc.  Finally, a very important piece if to find out how well the vendor is supporting the application post implementation; can they resolve issues and answer questions in a timely manner, where there many issues, how was the experience in general?  Finally, after the RFP and demos, there are probably some areas in which you would like to confirm or validate what the vendors mentioned; is the plan communication tool really worth while?  Are the upgrades really THAT easy?

Evaluation
Some people like to factor in the reference calls in the total evaluation score.  Others use it to validate that a vendor/solution is as good as they think it is.  I don’t think there is a good or a bad way, but there is a risk to think “the reference check will be worth 5% of the overall score and the highest score wins”.  Why?  Because if every person you are calling complain about a horrible product and a horrible experience, it could be a deal breaker!

Next Steps…
The next step is to negotiate pricing with the two vendors.  Usually, the top two vendors are still in the process, because obviously pricing can be a major decision factor, but also because a vendor might be more willing to negotiate pricing and other factors knowing that they still have a competitor.

That’s it!  Smile!  At the end of the negotiations, you should be ready to draft a contract with that vendor to provide the incentive compensation solution!

In my next post I will talk about how to get ready for the implementation of the solution, and where to get help for the entire vendor selection process.

Tags: , , ,

Related Posts:
Resource Center
SPM Vendor Selection Process