It seems sometimes that organizations are very quick to forget about the 2nd and 3rd place finishers in those lengthy RFP’s. This is somewhat understandable given they’ve selected a solution and are now busy implementing it, getting trained, and making it work for their business needs. These are all good and very necessary things. But keep in mind, there’s value in understanding what the other RFP respondents are up to. The solution you selected today may end up falling behind tomorrow. Conditions such as account management, corporate ownership, price, features, internal leadership, and a host of others may change, resulting in your needing to pivot from your current provider. This is simply the nature of business.
The reason this is so important, is because by keeping abreast of your solution providers competitors; when it comes to negotiating the renewal, you’ll be in a better position to talk about if/how they hold up against others and what they are doing to stay on top. Stagnation in the technology realm is death. Just because you signed a three year contract initially, doesn’t mean you have to sign another one. Spend time not only keeping on top of the competitive solutions, but maintaining relationships with those that you met during the RFP process. It’s not that hard and only puts you in a better position when it comes to those organizational pivots mentioned above.
The last key consideration is that by understanding how the competition has changed, should you decide that you need to make a shift, you’ll be in a better position to migrate your data from one platform to the other and have a sound understanding of how you will adopt that new solution in the future. There’s power in knowledge, and having the flexibility to make quick changes to the tools that are meant to drive the most value for your organization.
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