On this episode I had the pleasure of talking with Jerry Helou, Digital Experience Architect at Softcrylic, and Jose Bergiste, Principle Analytics Consultant at Cognetik about martech vendor evaluations. If you recall from the last episode, Jose and I touched on the importance of evaluations when developing a 360 degree view of your customer. This part of the process, as you will hear in this episode, is so critical for the longevity of your investment. Unfortunately, if you haven’t been part of a POC or experienced in leading this process, selecting a new martech vendor can introduce a lot of anxiety and create uncertainty.

In this episode, we hope to answer some questions that cause uncertainty by providing you with some pointers that you can use in your next evaluation. The three of us discuss some of the more important and often overlooked steps during this process. We share our experiences and provide tips that won’t be found in a blog post or an online checklist. Listen in, take a few notes and leave a comment if you have tips not discussed in this episode.

We start off by discussing some of the often overlooked pre-planning and team oriented details that are critical for an effective evaluation. Then we move into the actual evaluation process, conducting a POC, the importance of scorecards, and how to think about scalability after implementation. (See show highlights section below for more detail)

Whether you’re part of the martech evaluation team or a marketing leader sponsoring the investment, this episode has some good tips on how to perform an effective martech vendor evaluation that will provide a greater return on your investment.

If you’re looking for more depth on the topics discussed in this episode don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast. I’ll be digging into more marketing topics in future episodes with my guest of the day.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS AND WHAT YOU'LL LEARN...
• Business and technology considerations before engaging martech vendors for evaluation
• The ideal make up of a core evaluation team (indirect and direct) and types of represented experience needed to be effective and yield long-term results
• When to engage vendors for evaluation and how many to include
• Business and vendor benefits of having a well defined evaluation scorecard
• Additional evaluation techniques such as RFIs, demos, and gaining insights from current clients of vendor prospects
• Post POC considerations: resources needed, expected run time, training and maintenance, vendor and internal support to drive adoption, scalability, and reasons why tool usage starts to decline after on-boarding new vendor

To view the rest of the show notes please visit https://brianlpoe.com/blog/012-the-art-of-martech-vendor-evaluations