Selecting a Customer Success Vendor/Platform is hard. Here’s a free RFP template to make it quicker and easier.
If you’re finding this, you’re likely at a stage where you know what a Customer Success platform is, and are considering buying one. So I’ll skip the basics in explaining that here.
If you’ve stalked my LinkedIn or spoken to me, you’ll know I have a preferred vendor, who I selected and worked with to achieve excellent results in my most recent global role as VP of Customer Programs and Experience for a SAAS company. But as your own situation, business systems and challenges may differ, I’ve created some free Customer Success Platform Selection RFP templates to help you select and procure a Success Vendor that best fits your own needs and business systems.
If you are feeling impatient, you can View and Download both Templates here — but I’d suggest reading on, for a little accompanying advice and notes!
Things to consider when selecting a vendor
Ambiguity at this stage is a great way to fail.
A huge factor in which vendor will be right for you is how (and if!) they will integrate with any business systems such as you already have. So as you'll see in the Vendor brief tab, I’m an advocate of beingly completely transparent up front about which platforms you use, such as CRM, support desk, platform analytics or marketing automation, and the maturity of Customer Success within the organization. If your natural instinct here to be cagey, with the goal of having a better negotiation… I promise you, you’ll waste more time and goodwill than you’ll save $$$. Be upfront, clear — and of course Sign a mutual NDA if there’s any sensitivity in what you are sharing.
Getting the most out of platform demos.
Demo’s (and trial periods) are undoubtedly a vital part of the vendor selection process. AThe speed, quality and ease of use of the UI will be amplified once you roll out to your team/s, so always try and consider the needs and motivations of whoever (be that CSM/Manager or C-suite) will be using or consuming the area of the platform being demoed.
Whilst a good sales person will relate features back to your business problems, consider it a given that every vendor will tailor their standard demos to showcase their best features, with narratives that downplay any shortcomings.
As a full implementation of a Customer Success platform would involve uploading or syncing your customer database, you should expect demos that use dummy data, and your CRM configuration and dataset may not line up with what can be achieved with this dummy dataset.
That said, with a well structured RFP that specifies areas you want to see, you should be able to get enough parity in demo narratives to identify and compare holes or benefits in vendors offerings for your use case/s.
How many demos, when — and who to invite?
You may get straight to a shortlist from recommendations, industry reports or Vendor materials online, or prefer to see a number of platforms in action before inviting those that give the best impression.
My own favorite approach is to get a quick, early demo per vendor pre-RFP (providing a basic, verbal brief) and have a few key stakeholders sit in as extra eyes, and to help later with any internal sell-in. Then, your first impressions can be used to inform, edit and update the questions in the RFP that you’d like to see demoed in a second, full demo — to follow or accompany the written RFP responses. I’d strongly advise having your CRM admin sit in on this, as there’s a strong chance that some capabilities will be dependent on actions you need to take within your CRM configuration.
A third, focussed demo can be useful where you need to bring in a specialist stakeholder, such as a product/engineering lead or head of support, to understand the context and payoff for any integration work you’ll be asking them to help with!
Some Expectation Management…
What these templates are NOT:
- A Government or Fortune 50 spec RFP
- An off the shelf approach that will include every potential business problem, or feature need, for every industry.
What these templates ARE:
A pair of Google doc/excel RFP templates you can download and edit, which are designed to be used together as described below. These should provide some structure, format and starting points for the questions you want to ask.
They are designed to be used as follows:
- Use the Vendor RFP Form template to supply to each of the Vendors on your shortlist
- Use the Buyer RFP Master template internally to score, compare and add feedback around Vendors when they provide responses and provide demos to progress through your RFP
The Buyer Master has step by step instructions on the first tab on how, specifically, to edit and complete them.
Assumptions and Scoring
I’ve made an assumption that you use Salesforce CRM and offer a SAAS product. If either of these are not the case, you’ll need to do a little more editing of questions, but should still save time and get value vs starting from scratch.
The 1–10 scoring is, of course, completely subjective, and as you don’t know what you don't know in terms of how well a feature set can work until you’ve seen it, you may wish to revisit the scores after you’ve seen all of the demos. Alternatively, if for instance you know the space well, you could opt for adding a more defined/structured scoring criteria.
Once more, you can View and Download both free Templates here.
You can learn more about my background on LinkedIn. If you’d like to discuss roles in which I can help build/develop your organization’s customer success practice, feel free to reach out.
