Choosing the right vendor for your association's next major project will be one of the most important decisions you make. While many factors contribute to your project's overall success, choosing the wrong vendor can have devastating impact on you and your organization.

Where Do I Start?

At Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), we recently embarked on a major software replacement project that involved nearly every staff member in our organization. The new system replaces one purchased in the 1990s and heavily customized to make it work well for our association. Everyone realized it was time to replace it.

First, we assembled a group of people who understood the intricacies of our organization. We put together a list of requirements that we determined were highly important for the new system to do well, as well as some that were less critical but would be helpful for specific groups.

Next, we contacted software vendors who specialized in the space we were targeting and had a conversation with them to see if they would be interested in responding to a request for proposals. These initial conversations built immediate bridges to the vendors' sales teams and allowed them to understand more about what we were looking for in a new system. A few vendors actually said they were not a good fit for us, saving hours of their time and ours.

We then set up specific criteria by which to evaluate our potential vendors and got commitments from key people in each affected area within our organization to independently rank each vendor according to those criteria. One critical mistake many organizations make at this point is letting cost be the only factor. The reality is that, on large projects, none of the potential vendors have a full picture of the extent of customizations you will need to make the system work for you, so the initial cost estimates involve a lot of guesswork. They still can provide valuable information, but other factors will have much more impact in the long run.

One critical mistake many organizations make is letting cost be the only factor.

So, What is Most Important?

Besides meeting a good percentage of our basic needs with the stock product, two other categories were most critical to our selection.

First was that the chosen system be flexible enough to be customized for our needs. Like every other association on the planet, we have a unique way of doing a lot of things, so none of the packages were able to meet 100 percent of our needs. We needed a system that could accommodate most of our business processes but that was also flexible enough to allow us to customize it while maintaining full support from the vendor. Most vendors will tell you they can do that, but this can only be fully determined by talking with people using the systems. We spent several months talking on the phone with a lot of other organizations—some references provided by the vendors and some based on our own industry contacts. We then visited a few at their offices to sit with them and talk through how they used and customized that system for their purposes. These trips were crucial in our decision process and well worth the money.

Our second major criteria was that the company we chose had to have a clear vision of where it was headed. Once we narrowed our field to two finalists, we had face-to-face meetings with the CEOs and leadership of both organizations and talked to them about how their organization was evolving and where they saw themselves heading, from both a staffing and technology perspective. The organization we eventually chose was very clear on its vision both for the company and the association industry as a whole, and its team spent enough time with us to understand what was important to us and explain how they could work with us. At the end of the day, they were the clear winner.

Bottom Line

The question everyone asks is "How much time and money do I need to spend on this decision?" The real answer (and you're going to hate this) is that "it depends." For a smaller effort or for stock software, the same steps can be followed but in a much more streamlined manner. You should still spend some time writing down what is important, just so you don't forget those critical factors when you're in the middle of a sales demo. Likewise, the vendor evaluation may be short and, for commodity items, can be much more focused on lowest price, as long as you're not sacrificing anything on your list to get that price. And, always keep in mind that the vendor you choose will be an integral part of your organization—hopefully for many years—so make sure it has a clear vision for its future, as well as yours.