Remember to meet the implementation team

When you are selecting a vendor for your web project, would you prefer to meet the sales team or the team which will actually be doing the implementation? I’m convinced most buyers would prefer a conversation with the implementation team, but still many vendors, in particular the larger ones, send their sales crew.

It would seem such an obvious detail and therefore that buyers don’t explicitly ask for this when inviting vendors to a meeting. Some vendors, e.g. EPiServer, might propose to use another vendor, e.g. LBi, to do the implementation. In that case, make sure to include LBi early on in the process.

I’ve talked to many buyers, including members in our community of practice, who compare selecting a new vendor to hiring a new colleague. I am fairly certain nobody has experienced that a job applicant has not turned up in person. So when it comes to vendor selection, why are you not meeting with the implementation team themselves?

Don’t be tricked into thinking that the fact the vendor turned up with their management team makes you a key account. The vendor is probably just eager to win your business. So how do you ensure that you can actually work with the implementation team? You’ll be spending quite some time with the winning team, so beyond experience, chemistry is crucial.

Let’s imagine you invited 3 vendors, say competing digital agencies, to pitch on your project:

• Vendor 1 send their friendly and experienced head of development together with a more smartly dressed head of sales
• Vendor 2 turned up with a project manager, a sales executive and a young newly hired techie to do a demo
• Vendor 3 has decided to send an account manager, and a project manager together with 2 consultants and started the meeting by saying that this is your implementation team.

From the perspective of the buyer, I would hope that the meeting with vendor 3 goes well; if vendor 1 or vendor 2 comes out as winner, you should probably do yet another meeting to meet their implementation team, challenge their experiences and find out whether they would be a good fit for your project. Yet another meeting you could have saved yourself.

NB: Thanks to the CMS selection team at home, a Danish chain of real estate agents for this improvement to our list of best practices for selecting a CMS.