Conversations from the Tech Front: How to Structure Your RFP’s with Tom Flynn of Lavante
Stephanie Dula 25 Sep 2015At INNOVATE 2015 earlier this month, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Tom Flynn, Chief Marketing Officer at Lavante, winner of our Innovator of the Year Award for Excellence in Purchase-to-Pay. We asked him how companies should structure their RFPs when evaluating a service provider. Below is a video and full transcript of his enlightening answer. Enjoy!
How To Stucture Your RFPs – Tom Flynn – PayStream Advisors
Tom Flynn: Companies really need to take a three pronged approach. Use the best of what’s available to you external, and then you need to look internally at all your business users, stakeholders and constituents, and then finally have a heart-to-heart and really drill down with your potential service provider. When you are looking at the marketplace, you do want to enlist the services of the consultants that are available to you. In the P2P space, PayStream is one of the elite consultants that you could bring in during that consideration. That’s an important step to take, to bring in a group that can really see your environment and processes.
In terms of the second prong, you really need to look internally at all the business users. You may also want to look outside that group at groups like I.T., that may not have a vested interest in the use case or business application, but they will obviously be directly on the periphery of how the technology works. You have to look at what groups radiate outside of the departments that will be using the software and process improvements, and solicit them for feedback.
Finally, you have to have that heart-to-heart with the provider, you really do. You have to ask them “if you were going to put together a proposal for me, or if you have a primer of questions that should be asked for this project, what are they and walk me through those.” It’s obvious that service providers are going to put in a series of questions that differentiate them from competitors in the space. But you really have to get to the root of that and you have to understand, “why are we asking these questions?”
You also have to have a heart-to-heart with your service providers about, “what are these products and services that you are promising, that maybe you cannot quite deliver today?” And that’s just the truth. There is an ambitional aspect to software, a lot of companies sell on future as they sell on roadmap. The biggest piece of advice I have is to talk to multiple people at the service provider. You may want to talk to product management, sales and engineering and make sure that you get a triangulation of what products, what services, what tools, are truly available and which ones are ambitional.
By doing that, by looking at all three prongs where you’re looking externally, you’re looking internally and you’re speaking to your service providers, you really get a circumspect look at how you should be approaching your RFP process and how you should be selecting your next piece of software or your next strategy or your next services solution that you bring in house.
