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One of the challenges that businesses often face in the software selection process is defining, summarizing and communicating their specific requirements.
In documenting your business software requirements, you need to have a clear understanding of the important issues: What type of system are you looking for? Why do you need it? What should it do in terms of capabilities? Who will use it? How will it interact with other parts of your business? How will you evaluate which option suits you best? …and so on
Given our focus on the software selection process, Software Shortlist has developed some useful templates that may assist. The first one that we’re making available is a Requirements Summary Template. Other resources will be made available soon, including a set of questions to guide you in defining your requirements, and a guide to an effective software selection process.
How do you use it?
The requirements summary template is designed to help you encapsulate your requirements into a simple summary document. This can be used for several purposes
- Internal use: Use the requirements summary to make sure everyone agrees on what the software requirements are. There’s nothing like putting your needs down on paper to help you find out if everyone is on the same page or not! If they are, great. If not, you’ll quickly identify the areas where people have different views.
- External use: Use it to engage more effectively with vendors about your software needs. It will save both you and them time if you come to initial discussions with a clear understanding of what you want, and which requirements are most important vs less important.
How do we know it works?
Software Shortlist developed the template during our independent consulting work on software selection. It has been successfully applied on numerous occasions, and has proven to help accelerate the process of agreeing on requirements and engaging with vendors.
For instance, When we were assisting a consulting firm in their search for an online database system, a completed version of this requirements summary template was provided to numerous vendors at the early stages of the selection process. The sales representative at one major vendor commented that it was the “best requirements summary they’d seen” and that having a clear view of requirements like this made their job so much easier.
How to download the template
The requirements summary template is available as a free download in Word format on our website. So, if you’re looking for software for your business, make sure you download this free template to summarize your software requirements.
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We live in a buyer-centric world.
Research into B2B purchase decisions suggests that power is increasingly shifting to buyers.
Today, buyers are more often driving the process on their own terms and timetable.
For example, here’s an interesting statistic on how businesses buy things:
“9 out of 10 buyers say that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you”
– DemandGen Report
How the buying process has changed
Traditionally, buyers of software and other major business purchases sought input early in the process from vendors to help them define and clarify their requirements. But today, buyers are often conducting extensive research on their own first.
As a result, when buyers do engage with vendors, they’ve often made up their mind and are just looking for confirmation and reference checking! In a nutshell, the traditional process for creating a shortlist has fundamentally changed.
What this means for software vendors
For software vendors, this new behaviour has both positive and negative implications. On the plus side, when buyers choose to engage with you they are often much closer to purchase. More educated buyers can mean shorter sales cycles and lower selling costs.
However, the flip side is that vendors now have much less influence over the purchase process … sometimes to the extent of being ruled out even before you even knew there was an opportunity. The key challenge for vendors is to make sure you’re in the consideration set when buyers are ready to buy.
Challenges for software buyers
This change is mostly good for software buyers — i.e. you have more power in the purchasing process! However, it does also present important challenges. In particular, you now have to sift through vast quantities of information, trying to make sense of what’s available and which options are most relevant.
As B2B consulting firm Greenhat puts it, there is “an over-supply of unfiltered content” on the web, so smart buyers are looking for ways to cut through the clutter.
Common techniques used by buyers to get closer to a decision include (i) asking trusted advisors and colleagues for advice, (ii) reading content from respected authorities and thought-leaders, and (iii) making use of shortlisting and comparison services, such as our Get A Shortlist offering.
Share your experience
Are you part of this trend? Think about the last time you were involved in a business purchase decision and share your experience in the comments below…
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I’m a firm believer that business priorities should drive your IT decisions, not the other way around. This ensures that you are achieving real business impact, not just following the latest IT trend or getting distracted by low value activities.
As Peter Drucker once said:
The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions”
In the context of choosing software, asking the wrong question is jumping to “which CRM should I get?” before first asking questions like “what does my business need to meet its objectives?” and “how can software help me do this?”. It may indeed be the case that a CRM system is required… but before you try to find the right one, find out in detail what it is that you most need for your business to succeed!
Even big enterprises sometimes need reminding about this. A recent article in strategy+business magazine called “Road Map to Relevance” emphasises the importance of thinking about the capabilities that your business needs to succeed, and ensuring that your IT strategy is aligned with this. The authors suggest the journey to achieve this has four steps:
“First, what are your company’s distinctive capabilities – those that support your strategic priorities – and how can they be improved with information technology? Second how should you prioritize your IT projects accordingly? Third, what sequence of investment and activity will allow you to reach the goals you’ve set and close the gaps you need to close. And fourth, what kinds of cultural and governance support do you need to put this IT strategy into practice?”
Although the article above has a much broader scope than our focus on software selection, it certainly resonates well with the simple, five-step methodology that Software Shortlist developed to help SMBs choose software more effectively:
- Understand your business needs
- Define your software requirements
- Identify available software
- Shortlist the best options
- Evaluate and decide
The benefits of taking a more strategic approach to IT – i.e. aligning your IT and software decisions with what drives your business success – are compelling.
On the one hand, you reduce your costs by not investing in things that don’t make a difference to your business. Plus, the right IT investments can provide a seriously positive boost to your sales, productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. In fact, a McKinsey study from 2006 found that “investments in technology-enabled business processes can deliver up to ten times the impact of traditional IT cost reduction efforts”.
If you’d like a free copy of our ebook on effective software selection, simply email us at info@softwareshortlist.com. And once you’re ready to consider particular solutions, why not try our free Get A Shortlist service?
