Preparing for Customer Reference Calls and Site Visits
Congratulations, you and your team are coming down the home stretch. By now your team has already completed your final onsite scripted demonstrations and your team has a rank order of the finalists starting with the one you feel most comfortable doing business with. Now, as part of a final due diligence process, you need to check customer references.
It should be recognized that everyone’s work life is busy – both yours and potential vendor’s customers who would be willing to take reference calls. It is highly recommended that you only do reference checks with the vendor’s customers whom you’ve selected as your top preference.
It is highly unlikely that a customer reference check will reveal something negative enough to make your project team uncomfortable with moving forward with the given preferred vendor. That being said, on a rare occasion where something surprisingly goes awry with your preferred vendor’s references, you can always move on to your second choice.
In some cases, companies trying to finalize a selection process will be unable to reach a consensus as to which vendor is their preference. However, using customer references as a tie-breaker almost never works and wastes peoples’ time – both yours and the potential vendor’s customers (see everyone’s work life is busy above). To prevent your team from falling into this situation, it is best to try to avoid this entirely by defining a tie-breaking process up front.
Download the 
Preparing for Customer Reference Calls and Site Visits white paper.
The Preparing for Customer Reference Calls and Site Visits white paper is part of TGI’s Software Selection Tool Kit. To download the complete Sofware Selection Tool Kit, please click here.
Click for important legal information or if you are an independent consultant.
Request for Proposal Preparation
Are you currently engaged in a software selection search? If so, we encourage you to consider TGI and our Enterprise 21 ERP software. Enterprise 21 is an ideal solution for small to mid-market manufacturers and wholesale distributors.
As part of our free Software Selection Tool Kit, TGI offers an instructional white paper on RFP preparation, a sample RFP, and a template for supplier responses to the proposal request.
White Paper Excerpt
As you prepare material to send to potential software suppliers, you need to remember that the parties involved in the RFP process (your organization and the potential software supplier) have very different objectives relative to this process. Your objective is to get meaningful information about various potential software suppliers that will help you to “narrow the field” down to some manageable level. The objective of the software supplier, on the other hand, is to “make it to the next step” in your software selection process. As a result, most software suppliers will respond to an RFP with a (generally) voluminous “boiler plate” RFP response document filled with largely useless information and embellishments. You will find yourself digging through this information in order to extract the information in which you are interested.
As a result, the key elements of an RFP, from the perspective of an organization looking to obtain new business software, should be three-fold:
- Provide an easy “apples to apples” comparison of potential suppliers
- Provide ready access to key decision information
- Eliminate any superfluous information which is not germane to the decision process
The Request for Proposal documents are part of TGI’s Software Selection Tool Kit. To download the complete Software Selection Tool Kit, please click here.
Download the White Papers and Templates
Preparing a Request for Proposal
Request for Proposal (RFP) Sample
Request for Proposal_Vendor Responses
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Onsite Software Demonstration Script & Instructions
Are you within a software selection search and are you about to review software demonstrations from prospective suppliers?
If so, you have undoubtedly spent a great deal of time and effort in defining your requirements for new software, developing an RFP and a list of potential vendors, doing initial remote software demonstrations, and getting the potential vendor list down to some manageable number.
The onsite software demo is the single most important opportunity you will have to see the software in action and determine if it is really a good fit with your business operations. To that end, TGI has created a number of documents tailored to help you get the most out of the demonstration process.
These demonstration scripts and resources are part of TGI’s Software Selection Tool Kit. To download the complete Software Selection Tool Kit, please click here.
White Paper Excerpt
In order to maximize your benefit from this opportunity, it is absolutely imperative that you have an extremely well thought-out and organized demonstration script prepared for the potential software suppliers.
Utilizing a script for supplier demonstrations provides an avenue to both maintain control of the process and to ensure commonality throughout the demonstration process. This methodology is, in practice, the easiest way to compare potential suppliers in an objective, informative, apples-to-apples manner. This suggested template is intended to provide you with a starting point for your own script and can be added to and/or deleted from as needed to meet the needs of your specific organization.
Download the Onsite Software Demonstration Script Resources
Software Demonstration Script Instructions
Onsite Software Demonstration Script_Data Input Template
Onsite Software Demonstration Script_Vendor Copy
Onsite Software Demonstration Script_Evaluator Copy
Onsite Software Demonstration Script_Vendor Comparison_Sample
Onsite Software Demonstration Script_Vendor Comparison_Blank
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Preparing for Remote Software Demonstrations
Once your project team has received responses from your long list of vendors and your team has made an initial cut, you are now ready to go through an initial series of remote demonstrations. The intent of the remote demonstration phase is to obtain a sense of the overall look and feel, ease of use, and functional highlights of the various software packages in consideration. This step in your project will allow your team to acquire additional details regarding the depth and breadth of the software’s functionality, and to get a sense of the potential cultural fit between your company and that of the software vendor. The remote demonstration process is intended to help whittle down the list of potential providers to seven to ten vendors with whom you will send a request for proposal to in the next phase of the evaluation process.
Download the Preparing for Remote Software Demonstrations white paper.
The Preparing for Remote Software Demonstrations white paper is part of TGI’s Software Selection Tool Kit. To download the complete Software Selection Tool Kit, please click here.
Click for important legal information or if you are an independent consultant.