Use Buying Committee alignment to increase the chances of project success
By Joe Rice, CEO CXponent
It can be lonely as the lead sponsor for large purchases and implementations, especially before the buying committee stakeholders are identified or aware of the context of the project. Digital projects are plentiful, sometimes noisy, and usually require some level of organizational change to meet expectations. It’s difficult to get engagement and consensus across stakeholders and departments before plans and the range of outcomes start to materialize. When funding projects, many executives expect a level of certainty on the big drivers: Capital and Financial Impact, Project Risk relative to the Status Quo, and the Business Benefits. If you wait until there’s certainty on these outcomes, you’re likely at a point where architecture, configuration, and near final pricing is ready to purchase from a vendor. On the other hand, if contributing team members are brought in too late, you risk missing blind spots and context that won’t be seen again until after the purchase has been made.
Another reason alignment is hard is because individuals in a buying committee often have diverse strategic priorities and competing interests for time and resources. The core skills and expertise required across the different stages of the “buying journey” — Planning, Selection, Deployment, and Operating State — require a different mix of perspectives, skills, and stakeholders at each stage. Contributing team members who will be accountable for delivering the Deployment and Operating Model often aren’t influential in the purchase decision, but their perspective will inform your requirements and how to set expectations for risks and timeline.
Turn Shared Truths into Project Principles
The best place to initiate consensus is narrowing the range of Costs, Benefits and Risks with the buying committee as the intended audience. Going through the process should not only provide a range of cost outcomes and business benefits, but the variables and considerations that can reduce the risk of achieving those ranges. There will be further validation and certainty presented before a contract is signed, but these early conversations, however informal, serve as the shared foundation for stakeholders where project prioritization can live or die. When you can establish and document the “shared truths” (we call them Project Principles) internally early in the project, it makes navigating the non-linear work streams, issues, and hand-offs across your organization substantially easier.
Complex project success comes from the collective contribution of the entire project team’s engagement, opinions, experiences, and shared goals. Consolidating requirements from IT, Business, Security, Finance, Compliance, and Procurement into project and vendor priorities takes time and domain expertise, but will enable a better decision making for the group. If Finance is demanding more cost savings, and the trade-off to get it means less vendor support for IT, it’s better to know early rather than right before an implementation. Alternatively, if a little capital delivers big risk reduction by beefing up implementation resources, the trade off is usually worth advocating for with finance. The hard work to get consensus early will cause tension, but it should be constructive and result in a better understanding of how to serve the entire company. A comprehensive list of “shared truths” and priorities (beyond product features) are the foundation for better judgement. With this foundation, it’s much easier to build consensus on the trade-offs worth taking.
The RFP as a tool for Neutrality, not Differentiation
When planning a purchase decision, an often-discussed guiding principle is the importance of “neutrality” or “objectivity” throughout the buying process. In the context of buying committees (4–10+people), some assume that the very existence of a multi-person buying committee will increase the likelihood of neutrality. The thinking goes that in a group decision, any individual’s subjectivity can be balanced out through discussion and collaboration. The dynamics of group purchasing swing between group indifference and one or two stakeholders dominating decisions if there aren’t clear roles and a shared purpose to guide decisions. Group dynamics can be adjusted after a corrective meeting or two, but the real time-stealer in the name of neutrality? The bloated and inefficient traditional RFP. Creating a long document with “quantifiable” questions to create a neutral scoring assessment in the name of transparency and fairness doesn’t automatically lead the team to a better decision. Formal RFPs have an appropriate function depending on the type of purpose, but they become resource vacuums when the majority of the 100+ questions are “table stakes” and won’t provide insight into vendor differentiation and what it means to your company. It rarely provides meaningful insights on what truly differentiates the core vendors you knew would be the best fits anyway.
In Cloud CX, SASE, and Collaboration, meaningful vendor differentiation usually lies beyond product features and the vendor’s sales team. When the market lacks clear differentiation and has a lot of product overlap, it’s normal to direct a buying committee’s focus to the easily quantifiable features, benefits, and differentiators in an RFP. But this misses the bigger picture. In a complex buying decision where the products, ‘marketecture’, and pricing are dynamic (yet increasingly commoditized), it’s easy to fall in the trap of the feature checklist to stack rank vendors for a “neutral” decision. Yes, RFPs should be useful tools to create competition, which in theory can lower pricing and force vendors to be more creative, leading to a sales campaign more focused on delivering value. However, when RFPs restrict collaboration with capable, solution oriented vendors, it restricts your learning and the vendors ability to bring their best foot forward.
Buying committees, and the decision process used to support them, should be the vessel to support objectivity and the best vendor decision. However, without alignment on the Project Principles, vendor marketplace expertise, and on-the ground experience of what it’s like to do business with the vendor, the traditional RFP won’t inherently deliver the best decision for your company. Or worse, they can take your resources and planning time away from risks and benefits that you can easily control with the right level of attention and resource.
Inspecting Vendor’s Ability to Execute
Increase your chances of choosing a great vendor relationship by assessing the vendors’ ability to execute, instead of assigning your team and the vendor resources’ attention on non-differentiated product features. How does your company value each vendor’s market position, stability, history of delivering on their development roadmap, and their reputation for implementation and post-sales support? Group decisions using a Project Principle of “neutrality” avoid defining “ability to execute” until they absolutely need them, because they are often intangible and difficult to measure in a “neutral” way. These questions answer what it will “feel” like to do business with the vendor, and that feeling is informed by the sales rep assigned to your account.
As a buyer, how your customer experience “feels” is highly dependent on the quality, experience, and selflessness of your sales rep. The best sales professionals deliver progress and value, and their effectiveness should be a variable to consider, but not the only one. What else is built into your decision-making process to evaluate and validate there is a quality organization behind the sales team?
Extra time spent with finalist vendors communicating your company’s Project Principles is a means to gauge vendor’s ability to execute. This starts with the sales rep early and should extend beyond sales, into executives and leaders in Solution Engineering, Customer Success, Implementation, and sometimes Product and Finance as well. Once you’re close to a decision between 2–3 vendors, engaging beyond the sales team when you’re close to a decision delivers clarity in a vendor’s ability to execute based on how they listen and respond. How does your decision-making process account or consider the following questions?
- Are the vendor sales teams listening and adjusting their plan in a way that demonstrates they are advocating for you behind the scenes? Do you expect the same after the deal is closed?
- Are the specialists, SMEs, architects and deployment resources prepared during the sales process?
- Is it easy to get a straight answer on your new Operating Model responsibilities?
- Are the implementation resources flexible or really strained with capacity, and is it easy to tell what resources you’ll be paying for and what resources you’ll need to reduce risk?
Are your finalists retaining the important issues and risks you’ve outlined throughout the process and applying them in action? It’s rare that a vendor hits on everything, and it’s time-consuming to structure and schedule communication with vendors, but evaluating your vendor’s ability to execute will pay off when it’s time to Deploy and Operate.
The Value of being a Prospect before being a Customer
An often unspoken reality is that the moment after you sign your contract, you don’t have the same leverage you had throughout the buying process — even though the all-important implementation is where you’ll meet or exceed the expectations from your executives. Inevitability, the team that sold to you won’t be responsible for the day-to-day delivery of what you purchased. If there is a gap in expectations between what you thought you bought and what the vendor is delivering, it’s harder to rectify after you’ve signed a significant, monthly recurring, multi-year contract. Buyer’s remorse, second guessing, and even hopelessness can set in at this point, especially if the buying experience didn’t include enough consensus and validation both internally and externally with the vendor.
Have you ever had a critically important project requirement — such as a go-live deadline — that was treated differently before and after a signature? Before you might have heard “We’ll bring all the resources needed to hit your date that drives the outcomes you need.” Post-sale, you might get “That deadline is not in our standard interval, but we might be able to hit that date if YOU can turn around this [enter very long list of manual data entry activities that require interdepartmental collaboration] by tomorrow.”
Great decisions come from keeping focus on the Project Principles driving the project, and filtering through all of the marketing, technical, and sales information to make the most relevant decision for your company. The pay-off occurs in throughout the Selection, Deployment and future vendor relationships, which should be at least 6–10 years. It will illuminate what’s important for your decision, help others on your team to spot risks, and empower your vendors ability to be proactive in solving problems before they happen. The Cost, Benefits, and Risks of this extra effort are difficult to see and often not considered.
Here’s how we see the trade-off of creating Project Principles to spur alignment:
- Cost — Small increase resource hours for the project lead while Planning your Selection and Deployment
- Benefits — Reduce Project Risk, save resource time and energy throughout Selection and Deployment by focusing on the items that matter, and more confidence in choosing the right vendor relationships
- Risks (of not doing this) — Missing expectations for the project outcomes, project delays, and increased likelihood of regretting the vendor decision
CXponent approaches solution development with the knowledge that every organization has unique strengths and gaps that need to be filled. The gaps are usually a mix of resources (skills, time, or capital), technical validation, and vendor negotiation expertise. To meet the unique needs of your organization and situation, CXponent has developed modular service packages and a flexible engagement model that will meet you where you are in your buying journey. Our goal is to streamline your buying process and deployment so you and your organization can focus on what’s most important. Let’s talk to see if we can help!
Contact us at info@cxponent.com
