Top 20 Reasons to Hire a Vendor Selection Consultant

Use this list to make your business case for professional help!

Buying tech for your company is never easy, and the stakes are high, so use these tips to secure the funding needed to hire a vendor selection consultant.

1. Do it right. Just like engaging a Real Estate pro to help you select and buy your dream home, then hiring a vendor selection consultant to assist in selecting HR Tech will ensure a great business outcome.
2. Save money (ROI). With a buyer’s rep on the team vendors will sharpen their pencils and negotiate in your favor – their next deal may depend on it!
3. Get your project funded. Building a valid business case that your executives will approve and support is never easy, your consultant can help map your project’s goals to business drivers that will show results. Besides, execs often will listen to a consultant before their own staff, agreed?
4. Lighten your load. Your plate is probably already overflowing, without help something else will suffer greatly. Have your vendor selection consultant do the heavy lifting so you can focus on being strategic and keeping up with your normal job duties.
5. Avoid costly mistakes. Historically 50% of IT projects “fail” – lower your risk and improve your chances for success greatly by bringing in an expert.
6. Protect your job/career – buy insurance. If the project goes awry, have the consultant fall on the sword and save yourself!
7. Vendor Hype. How do you distinguish between truth and embellishment? Your vendor selection consultant is on contract to be impartial and objective with your best interests top of mind.
8. Leverage best practices. The vendor can guide you some, but when adding/changing software that’s the best time to re-engineer your processes then select software that will fit your new processes to ensure usability and adoption.
9. Delivery support. Who do you trust to implement the solution you just bought? Your vendor selection consultant will know your business and can recommend the best fit implementation consultants for your company.
10. No more RFPs. Nobody likes writing them, answering them, or reading them so why do we do them? Considering 70% of most bells & whistles in tech are not used, knowing what really needs to be evaluated to ensure your business objectives are served is all that matters. A consultant can help build your requirements list and keep it as short as possible – less is more!
11. If I knew then what I know now. Avoid saying “we forgot about that” – a good consultant will guide you around the potholes and help set the stage for an easier implementation and configuration.
12. Leverage awesome tools. Technology can help, a consultant can help you go beyond spreadsheets and RFPs with tools for “live” scoring, ranking and weighting by your evaluation team. Milestone reports for your executives, project reports for you.
13. Become an HR Tech Expert. Well, indirectly. With thousands of HR tech vendors adding new features every day and new ones coming online every week, your only hope of keeping up is by leveraging a consultant’s market knowledge to help you arrive at a better decision, faster.
14. Smooth the bumps. The vendor selection process has a lot of steps – requirements gathering, arranging demos, pricing, contract negotiations, etc. which could get bumpy without an experienced guide.
15. We need it yesterday. If the ROI is solid, then every day without the new software costs your company money. Speed the process up with a consultant’s streamlined methodology, pre-formulated requirements, and possibly jump to semi-finalist stage instead of a giant RFP process that drags on forever!
16. Avoid distractions. Let your people focus on more pressing matters.
17. Avoid additional overhead. Taking on vendor selection in house would require FT effort to do it even close to right.
18. Avoid impediments to growth. Selecting the wrong system could easily set your company back years… no pressure.
19. Avoid the risk of doing nothing.  If the project doesn’t start or complete (all too common) due to lack of (human) “resources” your ROI will never be realized.
20. Your reason. Working with a consultant is about partnering and often the client has reasons that are outside the box – what’s your reason for working with a consultant?