Do you take any fee or commission from vendors?

No, in any form, and it is written into the engagement letter. The only thing you are buying here is independence, and a referral arrangement destroys it entirely. It also does not stay hidden — someone inside your organisation talks to vendors, and it surfaces within a couple of months.

Can we buy just the requirements phase?

Yes, and for smaller purchases it is often the sensible scope — requirements, weighting and a shortlist, with your team running the demos and the negotiation. The full engagement through scoring, references, cost modelling and contract support sits at the upper end of the range.

Half our team has already picked a vendor. Is this still worth running?

Often more so, but only if everyone accepts the process might not agree with them. We will run it honestly and the outcome may not be the favourite. What we will not do is produce a scoring exercise designed to arrive at a decision that has already been made — and experienced people inside your organisation recognise that document immediately.

How many vendors should be on the shortlist?

Four to six after the initial information request. Fewer and you have no real comparison. More and the scripted demos alone consume weeks of your subject-matter experts' time, which is the scarcest resource in the whole exercise.

What is source code escrow and why do you insist on it?

It is an arrangement where the vendor deposits their source code with an independent third party, released to you if they cease trading or breach the contract. For custom software your business will depend on, getting that single clause into the contract can be worth more than the entire fee for this engagement.

Does the scoring make the decision for us?

No. It narrows the field, exposes where the real differences are, and documents the reasoning so the decision can be defended later. The decision stays with you — what changes is that it is now made on comparable evidence rather than on who argued hardest in the meeting.

Consulting, Product & Talent

Vendor selection and RFP support

Requirements, a scored shortlist, demos scripted on your own data, and a written recommendation that stands up in front of a board or an auditor.

From: $1,500–$15,000
Typical time: 3–8 weeks
Usually bought by: Enterprises

What this actually solves

A large organisation needs to replace a core system. Four vendors have demonstrated, and all four demonstrations were excellent — because a vendor demo is a piece of theatre rehearsed over years, run on their data, avoiding everything the product does badly. Two internal camps have now formed, each behind a different vendor, each with genuine arguments. The commitment is substantial and it will run for the better part of a decade. And the loudest person in the meeting is quietly winning.

In an organisation of any size, though, the record of the decision matters nearly as much as the decision itself. Somebody will ask in two years why this was chosen, and the answer has to survive an internal auditor, a new finance director, or a board that has changed. What is being bought is a defensible method, not an opinion — requirements agreed before vendors were seen, weights fixed in advance, demos run on your own work, references checked with questions the vendor did not prepare, and a five-year cost model that includes the lines the first quote leaves out.

What we do, and in what order

Requirements workshops, department by department, separately. Forty to sixty requirements grouped into functional, technical, commercial, and support and service, each marked as a must or a should. Separately matters — departments moderate their real needs in front of each other. One to two weeks.
Weighting, agreed and signed off before any vendor is seen. Four group weights totalling one hundred, each with a one-line justification a finance director would accept. The sequence here is the entire integrity of the exercise. Two days.
Longlist, information request, shortlist, then the tender document. A longlist narrowed to four to six through a short written request, then a tender document precise enough that the responses can actually be compared. One to two weeks.
Scripted demos. We write the script, the tasks come from your real daily work, and the data is yours. It always includes at least two things vendors avoid showing - correcting a mistake after the fact, and exporting everything out of the system. Same script, same data, every vendor, same observers. About a week.
Scoring, references and total cost. Scores entered against the fixed weights, reference calls with the follow-up prepared for the polite non-answer, and a five-year ownership model covering implementation, data migration, training, integration, per-user growth and the annual increase. About a week.
Negotiation support, then the recommendation. Source code escrow, full data export in a usable format, exit terms, service levels and price — then the written recommendation and the board pack behind it. One to two weeks.

The deliverables people actually keep are two spreadsheets — the weighted scoring matrix and the five-year cost model — plus the tender document and the board pack. They are built so your team can rerun them without us at the next renewal.

What moves the price

The range is $1,500–$15,000 over 3–8 weeks, and three things decide where an engagement sits in it.

The size of the commitment being made. A departmental tool and a system the whole organisation will run on for seven years involve different depths of reference checking, different contract scrutiny, and a different level of exposure if the recommendation is wrong.

Where the engagement stops. Requirements and weighting alone is the lower end. Running the demos, the scoring, the reference checks, the cost model and sitting in the negotiation is the upper end — and the negotiation is frequently where the fee pays for itself several times over.

How many departments and vendors are involved. Each additional department is another workshop and another set of requirements to reconcile. Each additional shortlisted vendor is another scripted demo occupying a room full of your senior people for half a day.

What usually goes wrong

The weights are set after everyone has seen the demos. It feels harmless and it is fatal — the spreadsheet stops being a decision and becomes an argument dressed as arithmetic. People inside the organisation spot the difference instantly, the document loses its authority, and the process ends up back where it started with the loudest voice winning. Weights are agreed and signed off before any vendor is in the room, and they are not reopened afterwards.

The evaluation runs on the vendor's own demonstration. Every vendor's standard demo has been refined over years to avoid the awkward parts of the product. If you have not made them correct a mistake made yesterday, and export the whole dataset out in a form you could hand to a competitor, you have not seen the two behaviours that will matter most in year three.

Somebody in the process is being paid by a vendor. A referral fee offered to whoever is advising is common, and accepting it removes the only thing the organisation was actually buying. It also does not stay quiet — people inside talk to vendors, and it comes out. Our position is fixed and stated in writing at the start, and it is worth asking the same question of anyone else advising you on this decision.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Do you take any fee or commission from vendors?: No, in any form, and it is written into the engagement letter. The only thing you are buying here is independence, and a referral arrangement destroys it entirely. It also does not stay hidden — someone inside your organisation talks to vendors, and it surfaces within a couple of months.
Can we buy just the requirements phase?: Yes, and for smaller purchases it is often the sensible scope — requirements, weighting and a shortlist, with your team running the demos and the negotiation. The full engagement through scoring, references, cost modelling and contract support sits at the upper end of the range.
Half our team has already picked a vendor. Is this still worth running?: Often more so, but only if everyone accepts the process might not agree with them. We will run it honestly and the outcome may not be the favourite. What we will not do is produce a scoring exercise designed to arrive at a decision that has already been made — and experienced people inside your organisation recognise that document immediately.
How many vendors should be on the shortlist?: Four to six after the initial information request. Fewer and you have no real comparison. More and the scripted demos alone consume weeks of your subject-matter experts' time, which is the scarcest resource in the whole exercise.
What is source code escrow and why do you insist on it?: It is an arrangement where the vendor deposits their source code with an independent third party, released to you if they cease trading or breach the contract. For custom software your business will depend on, getting that single clause into the contract can be worth more than the entire fee for this engagement.
Does the scoring make the decision for us?: No. It narrows the field, exposes where the real differences are, and documents the reasoning so the decision can be defended later. The decision stays with you — what changes is that it is now made on comparable evidence rather than on who argued hardest in the meeting.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Vendor selection & RFP support All Consulting, Product & Talent services