• Stress
• Confusion
• Frustration
• Directionless
• Exhaustion
• Uncertainty
• Disappointment

• Best value solutions
• Right-sized solutions
• Competitive Negotiations
• Better requirements that feed negotiations
• Internal alignment on requirements and solutions
• Vendor Management Governance Plan

• Risk
• Legal
• Support
• Security
• Technical
• Commercial
• Operational
• Vendor Management Governance

• RFP Template
• Your Contracts
• RFP Procedures
• Pricing Template
• Evaluation Guide
• Evaluation Matrix

• Scorecards
• Classification
• Business Review Meetings
• Key Performance Indicators
• Contract Management
• Satisfaction Survey

70 Days is the average duration of an IT RFP.

The average number of evaluators is 5-6

4 Is the average number of vendor submissions, each requiring an average of two to three hours to review. (Source: Bonfire, 2019. Note: The 2019 Bonfire report on the “State of the RFP” is the most recent published.)

44%

3-5%

23.8 hours

Stress, because roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly defined and communication is haphazard, resulting in strained relationships.

Confusion, because you don’t know what the expected or desired results are.

Directionless, because you don’t know where the team is going.

Uncertainty, with many questions of your own and many more from other team members.

Frustration, because of all the questions the vendors ask as a result of unclear or incomplete requirements.

Exhaustion, because reviewing RFP responses of insufficient quality is tedious.

Disappointment in the results your company realizes.

Info-Tech provides you with the tools you need to go to market in the most efficient manner possible, with guidance on how to achieve your goals.

• Side-by-side comparison of vendor capabilities
• Pricing alternatives
• No surprises
• Competitive solutions to deliver the best results

• Reduced time to implement
• Improved alignment between IT /Business
• Improved vendor performance
• Improved vendor relations

• Budget alignment, reduced cost
• Best value
• Risk mitigation
• Legal and risk protections

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Phase 5

Phase 6

Phase 7

Answer “What problem do we need to solve?”

1.1 Overview and level-setting

1.2 Identify needs and drivers

1.3 Define and prioritize requirements

1.4 Gain business authorization and ensure internal alignment

Define what success looks like?

2.1 Create and issue RFP

2.2 Evaluate responses/ proposals and negotiate the agreement.

2.3 Purchase goods and services

Configure Templates

3.1 Assess and measure

3.2 Review tools

1. Map your process with gap identification
2. RFP Requirements Worksheet

1. RFP Calendar and Key Date Tool
2. RFP Evaluation Guidebook
3. RFP Evaluation Tool

1. Long-form RFP Template
2. Short-form RFP Template
3. Excel-based RFP Tool
4. Lean RFP Template

1.1 Establish the need to either purchase goods/services (RFP) or acquire additional information from the market (RFI).

• An RFP is issued to the market when you are certain that you intend to purchase a product/service and have identified an adequate vendor base from which to choose as a result of:

  • IT Strategy
  • Changes in technology
  • Marketplace assessment
  • Contract expiration/renewal
  • Changes in regulatory requirements
  • Changes in the business’ requirements
• An RFI is issued to the market when you are uncertain as to available technologies or supplier capabilities and need budgetary costs for planning purposes.
• Be sure to choose the right RFx tool for your situation!

2.1 Define and classify the technical, business, financial, legal, and support and security requirements for your business.

3.1 Obtain business authorization from the business, technology, finance and Sourcing/Procurement

• Alignment of stakeholders
• Agreement on final requirements
• Financial authorization
• Commitment of resources
• Agreement on what constitutes vendor qualification
• Finalization of selection criteria and their prioritization

Obtaining cross-function alignment will clear the way for contract, SOW, and budget approvals and not waste any of your and your vendor’s resources in performing an RFP that your organization is not ready to implement or invest financial and human resources in.

4.1 Build your RFP

4.2 Decide RFI or not

4.3 Create your RFP

4.4 Receive & answer questions

4.5 Perform Pre-Proposal Conference

4.6 Evaluate responses

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

• Vendor responses are submitted with different and confusing nomenclature
• Inconsistent format in response
• Disparate order of sections in the vendors responses
• Different style of outlining their responses, e.g. 1.1 vs. I.(i)
• Pricing proposal included throughout their response
• Responses are comingled with marketing messages
• Vendor answers to requirements or objectives are not consolidated in a uniform manner
• Disparate descriptions for response subsections

• Provide specific instructions as to how the vendor is to organize their response:
  • How to format and outline the response
  • No marketing material
  • No pricing in the body of the response
• Provide templates for pricing, technical, operational, and legal aspects.

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

Input

• List of technical, operational, business, and legal requirements
• Budgetary pricing ask

Output

• A Lean RFP document that includes the primary components of an RFP
• Lean RFP vendors response evaluation

Materials

• Lean RFP Template
• RFP Evaluation Tool
• Contracting requirements
• Pricing

Participants

• IT
• Business
• Finance
• Sourcing/Procurement

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Pharmaceutical
SOURCE: Guided Implementation

• The vendor manager (VM) was experiencing pressure to shorten the expected five-month duration to perform an RFP for software that planned, coordinated, and submitted regulatory documents to the US Food and Drug Administration.
• The VM team was not completely familiar with the qualified vendors and their solutions.
• The organization wanted to capitalize on this opportunity to enhance its current processes with the intent of improving efficiencies in documentation submissions.

• Leveraging the Lean RFP process, the team reduced the 200+ RFP questionnaire into a more manageable list of 34 significant questions to evaluate vendor responses.
• The team issued the Lean RFP and requested the vendors’ responses in three weeks instead of the five weeks planned for the RFP process.
• The team modified the scoring process to utilize a simple weighted-scoring methodology, using a scale of 1-5.

• The Lean RFP scaled back the complexity of a large RFP.
• The customer received three vendor responses ranging from 19 to 43 pages and 60-80% shorter than expected if the RFP had been used. This allowed the team to reduce the evaluation period by three weeks.
• The duration of the RFx process was reduced by more than two months – from five months to just under three months.

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

• The ability for the vendors to ask clarifying questions (in writing, sent to the predetermined RFP contact)
• Pre-Proposal/Pre-Bid Conference schedule where vendors can receive the same answer to all clarifying written questions
• A calendar of events (block the time on stakeholder calendars – see template).
• Instructions to potential vendors on how they should construct and return their response to enable effective and timely evaluation of each offer.
• Requirements; for example: Functional, Operational, Technical, and Legal.
• Specification drawings as if applicable.
• Consider adding vendor management requirements – how do you want to manage the relationship after the deal is done?
• A pricing template for vendors to complete that facilitates comparison across multiple vendors.
• Contract terms required by your legal team (or your standard contract for vendors to redline as part of their response and rated/ranked accordingly).

• Create your RFP with the evaluation process and team in mind to ensure efficiency and timeliness in the process. Be clear, concise, and complete in the document.
• Consistency and completeness is the foundation for ease of evaluation.
• Give vendors detailed instruction on how to structure and organize their response.
• Limit the number of open-ended questions requiring a long narrative response.
• Be sure to leverage Info-Tech’s proven and field-tested Short-Form, Long-Form, and Lean RFP Templates provided in this blueprint.

Narrative Response:

Create either a Word or Excel document that provides the vendor with an easy vehicle for their response. This template should include the question identifier that ties the response back to the requirement in the RFP. Instruct vendors to include the question number on any ancillary materials they wish to include.

Pricing Response:

Create a separate Excel template that the vendors must use to provide their financial offer. This template should include pricing for hardware, software, training, implementation, and professional services, as well as placeholders for any additional fees.

Always be flexible in accepting alternative proposals after the vendor has responded with the information you requested in the format you require.

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

• Provide an adequate amount of time from the RFP issue date to the deadline for vendor questions. There may be multiple vendor staff/departments that need to read the RFP and then discuss their response approach and gather any clarifying questions, so we generally recommend three to five business days.
• There should be one point of contact for all Q&A, which should be submitted in writing via email only. Be sure to plan for enough time to get the answers back from the RFP stakeholders.
• After the deadline, collect all Q&A and begin the process of consolidating into one document.

• Be sure to anonymize both vendor questions and your responses, so as not to reveal who asked or answered the question.
• Send the document to all RFP respondents via your sourcing tool or BCC in an email to the point of contact, with read receipt requested. That way, you can track who has received and opened the correspondence.
• Provide the answers a few days prior to the Pre-Proposal Conference to allow all respondents time to review the document and prepare any additional questions.
• Begin the preparation for the Pre-Proposal Conference.

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

1. Opening Remarks & Welcome – RFP Manager
   1. Agenda review
   2. Purpose of the Pre-Proposal Conference
2. Review Agenda
   1. Introduction of your (customer) attendees
3. Participating Vendor Introduction (company name)
4. Executive or Sr. Leadership Comments (limit to five minutes)
   1. Importance of the RFP
   2. High-level business objective or definition of success
5. Review Key Dates in the RFP

6. Review of any Technical Drawings or Information
   1. Key technical requirements and constraints
   2. Key infrastructure requirements and constraints
7. Review of any complex RFP Issues
   1. Project scope/out of scope
8. Question &Answer
   1. Vendors’ questions in alphabetical order
9. Review of Any Specific Instructions for the Respondents
10. Conclusion/Closing
    1. Review how to submit additional questions
    2. Remind vendors of the single point of contact

Step 1

• Build your RFP with evaluation in mind.

Step 2

• RFI or no RFI
• Consider a Lean RFP

Step 3

• Create your RFP
• Establish your RFP dates
• Decide on RFP template
  • Short
  • Long
  • Excel
• Create a template for vendors’ response
• Create your Pricing Template

Step 4

• Receive RFP questions from vendors
• Review and prepare answers to questions for the Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 5

• Conduct a Pre-Proposal Conference

Step 6

• Receive vendors’ proposals
• Review for compliance and completion
• Team evaluates vendors’ proposals.
• Prepare TCO
• Draft executive recommendation report

• Consider separating the pricing component from the RFP responses before sending them to reviewers to maintain objectivity until after you have received all ratings on the proposals themselves.
• Each reviewer should set aside focused time to carefully read each vendor’s response
• Read the entire vendor proposal – they spent a lot time and money responding to your request, so please read everything.
• Remind reviewers that they should route any questions to the vendor through the RFP manager.
• Using the predetermined ranking system for each section, rate each section of the response, capturing any notes, questions, or concerns as you proceed through the document(s).

• Each response is thoroughly read all the way through.
• Response inconsistencies are easily noticed.
• Evaluators obtain a good feel for the vendor's response.

• Evaluators will lose interest as they move from one response to another.
• Evaluation will be biased if the beginning of response is subpar, influencing the rest of the evaluation.
• Deficiencies of the perceived favorite vendor are overlooked.

• Evaluators concentrate on how each objective is addressed.
• Evaluators better understand the responses, resulting in identifying the best response for the objective.
• Evaluators are less susceptible to supplier bias.

• Electronic format of the response hampers response review per objective.
• If a hard copy is necessary, converting electronic responses to hard copy is costly and cumbersome.
• Discipline is required to score each vendor's response as they go.

Vendor

• Evaluate the responses blind of vendor names, if possible.

Account Representatives

• Craft RFP objectives that are vendor neutral.

Technical

• Conduct fair and open solution demonstrations.

Price

• Evaluate proposals without awareness of price.

Define your ranking scale to ensure consistency in ratings

Within each section of your RFP are objectives, each of which should be given its own score. Our recommended approach is to award on a scale of 0 to 5. With such a scale, you need to define every level. Below are the recommended definitions for a 0 to 5 scoring scale.

• There are many ways to score responses, ranging from extremely simple to highly complicated. The most important thing is that everyone responsible for completing scorecards is in total agreement about how the scoring system should work. Otherwise, the scorecards will lose their value, since different weighting and scoring templates were used to arrive at their scores.
• You can start by weighting the scores by section, with all sections adding up to 100%.

• Unless you regularly have the evaluators on your evaluation team, always assume that the team members are not familiar nor experienced with your process and procedures.
• Do not underestimate the amount of preparations required to ensure that your evaluation team has everything they need to evaluate vendors’ responses without bias.
• Be very specific about the expectations and time commitment required for the evaluation team to evaluate the responses.
• Explain to the team members the importance of evaluating responses without conflicts of interest, including the fact that information contained within the responses and all discussions within the team are considered company owned and confidential.
• Include examples of the evaluation and scoring processes to help the evaluators understand what they should be doing.
• Finally – don’t forget to the thank the evaluation team and their managers for their time and commitment in contributing to this essential decision.

• Evaluation teams are always challenged by weighing the importance of price, budget, and value against the technical requirements of “must-haves” and super cool “nice-to-haves.”
• Encouraging the evaluation team not to inadvertently convert the nice-to-haves to must-haves will prevent scope creep and budget pressure. The evaluation team must concentrate on the vendors’ responses that drive the best value when balancing both commercial and technical requirements.

Input

• Consolidated RFP responses, with a focus on key RFP goals
• Consolidated pricing responses
• TCO Model completed, approved by Finance, stakeholders

Output

• Presentation deck summarizing the key findings of the RFP results, cost estimates and TCO and the recommendation for approval to move to contract negotiations with the finalists

Materials

• Consolidated RFP responses, including legal requirements
• Consolidated pricing
• TCO Model
• Evaluators scoring results

Participants

• IT
• Finance
• Business stakeholders
• Legal
• Sourcing/Procurement

• Leveraging templates and tools saves time and provides consistency to your vendors.
• Maintain a common repository of your templates and tools with different versions and variations. Include a few sentences with instructions on how to use the template and tools for team members who might not be familiar with them.

Templates/Tools

Sourcing

Review

Popular RFP templates include:

• RFP documents
• Pricing templates
• Evaluation and scoring templates
• RFP requirements
• Info-Tech research

5.1 Perform negotiation process

Then you should:

• Plan negotiation(s) with one or more vendors based on your questions and opportunities identified during evaluation.
• Select finalist(s).
• Apply selection criteria.
• Resolve vendors’ exceptions.

Info-Tech Insight

Be certain to include any commitments made in the RFP, presentations, and proposals in the agreement – dovetails to underperforming vendor.

Leverage Info-Tech's negotiation process research for additional information

• Negotiating with two or more vendors will maintain your competitive leverage while decreasing the time it takes to negotiate the deal.
• Perform legal reviews as necessary.
• Use sound competitive negotiations principles.

Info-Tech Insight

Providing contract terms in an RFP can dramatically reduce time for this step by understanding the vendor’s initial contractual position for negotiation.

6.1 Purchase Goods & Services

• Have the vendor complete applicable tax forms.
• Set up the vendor in accounts payable for electronic payment (ACH) set-up.

• Provide purchasing forecasts.
• Complete applicable purchase requisition and purchase orders. Be sure to reference the agreement in the PO.

7.1 Assess and measure performance against the agreement

DO

• Leverage your team’s knowledge
• Document and explain your RFP process to stakeholders and vendors
• Include contract terms in your RFP
• Consider vendor management requirements up front
• Plan to measure and manage performance after contract award leveraging RFP objectives
• Seek feedback from the RFP team for process improvements

DON'T

• Reveal your budget
• Do an RFP in a vacuum
• Send an RFP to a vendor your team is not willing to award the business to
• Hold separate conversations with candidate vendors during your RFP process
• Skimp on the requirements definition to speed the process
• Tell the vendor they are selected before negotiating

• Negotiations are about allocating risk and money – how much risk is a party willing to accept at what price point?
• Using a cross-functional/cross-insight team structure for negotiation preparation yields better results.
• Soft skills aren’t enough and theatrical negotiation tactics aren’t effective.

• Focus on the terms and conditions, not just the price. Too often, organizations focus on the price contained within their contracts, neglecting to address core terms and conditions that can end up costing multiples of the initial price.
• Lawyers can’t ensure you get the best business deal. Lawyers tend to look at general terms and conditions for legal risk and may not understand IT-specific components and business needs.

• Vendor management must be an IT strategy. Solid vendor management is an imperative – IT organizations must develop capabilities to ensure that services are delivered by vendors according to service-level objectives and that risks are mitigated according to the organization's risk tolerance.
• Visibility into your IT vendor community. Understand how much you spend with each vendor and rank their criticality and risk to focus on the vendors you should be concentrating on for innovative solutions.

• IT directors advising the business on how to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of social media campaigns through technology.
• IT professionals involved in evaluating, selecting, and deploying an SMMP.
• Business analysts tasked with collection and analysis of SMMP business requirements.

• Clearly link your business requirements to SMMP selection criteria.
• Select an SMMP vendor that meets your organization’s needs across marketing, sales, and customer service use cases.
• Adopt standard operating procedures for SMMP deployment that address issues such as platform security and CRM integration.

• Executive-level stakeholders in the following roles:
  • Vice-president of Sales, Marketing, or Customer Service.
  • Business unit managers tasked with ensuring strong end-user adoption of an SMMP.

• Understand what’s new in the SMMP market.
• Evaluate SMMP vendors and products for your enterprise needs.
• Determine which products are most appropriate for particular use cases and scenarios.

• SMMPs are solutions (typically cloud based) that offer a host of features for effectively monitoring the social cloud and managing your organization’s presence in the social cloud. SMMPs give businesses the tools they need to run social campaigns in a timely and cost-effective manner.
• The typical SMMP integrates with two or more social media services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) via the services’ API or a dedicated connector. SMMPs are not simply a revised “interface layer” for a single social media service. They provide layers for advanced management and analytics across multiple services.
• The unique value of SMMPs comes from their ability to manage and track multiple social media services. Aggregating and managing data from multiple services gives businesses a much more holistic view of their organization’s social initiatives and reputation in the social cloud.

• The growth of social media services has made manually updating pages and feeds an ineffective and time-consuming process. The challenge is magnified when multiple brands, product lines, or geographic subsidiaries are involved.
  • Use the advanced account management features of an SMMP to reduce the amount of time spent updating social media services.
• Engaging customers through social channels can be a delicate task – high volumes of social content can easily overwhelm marketing and service representatives, leading to missed selling opportunities and unacceptable service windows.
  • Use the in-band engagement capabilities of an SMMP to create an orderly queue for social interactions.
• Consumer activity in the social cloud has been increasing exponentially. As the volume of content grows, separating the signal from the noise becomes increasingly difficult.
  • Use the advanced social analytics of an SMMP to ensure critical consumer insights are not overlooked.

Ad Hoc Social Media Management

Social media initiatives are managed directly through the services themselves. For example, a marketing professional would log in to multiple corporate Twitter accounts to post the same content for a promotional campaign.

Social Media Management Platform

Social media initiatives are managed through a third-party software platform. For example, a marketing professional would update all social account simultaneously with just a couple clicks. SMMPs also provide cross-service social analytics – highly valuable for decision makers!

CASE STUDY

Industry: High-Tech | Source: Dell

The SMMP carries out the following activities:

• Tracking mentions of Dell in the social cloud
• Sentiment analysis
• Connecting customers who need assistance with experts who can help them
• Social media training
• Maintenance of standards for social media interactions
• Spreading best social media practices across the organization

Today the company claims impressive results, including:

• “Resolution rate” of 99% customer satisfaction
• Boosting its customer reach with the same number of employees
• One third of Dell’s former critics are now fans

• Salesforce Social Studio
• Three rows of monitors offering instant insights into customer sentiment, share of voice, and geography.

• The center started with five people; today it is staffed by a team of 15 interacting with customers in 11 languages.
• Dell values human interaction; the center is not running on autopilot, and any ambiguous activity is analyzed (and dealt with) manually on an individual basis.

The implementation and execution stage entails the following steps:

1. Define the business case.
2. Gather and analyze requirements.
3. Build the RFP.
4. Conduct detailed vendor evaluations.
5. Finalize vendor selection.
6. Review implementation considerations.

Determine where you are right now and where your organization needs to go with a social media strategy.

Identify the best-fit use-case scenario to determine requirements that best align with your strategy.

Approach vendor selection through a use-case centric lens to balance the need for different social capabilities.

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Best-Practice Toolkit

1.1 Determine if a dedicated SMMP is right for your organization

• Social Media Maturity Assessment Tool
• Social Media Opportunity Assessment Tool

1.2 Use an SMMP to enable marketing, sales, and service use cases

• SMMP Use-Case Fit Assessment Tool

2.1 SMMP Vendor Landscape

• CRM Suite Evaluation and RFP Scoring Tool

2.2 Select your SMMP

• SMMP Vendor Demo Script Template
• SMMP RFP Template

3.1 Establish best practices for SMMP implementation

• Social Media Steering Committee

3.2 Assess the measured value from the project

Guided Implementations

• Identify organizational fit for the technology.
• Evaluate social media opportunities within your organization.
• Evaluate which SMMP use-case scenario is best fit for your organization

• Discuss the use-case fit assessment results and the Vendor Landscape.
• Review contract.

• Determine what is the right governance structure to overlook the SMMP implementation.
• Identify the right deployment model for your organization.
• Identify key performance indicators for business units using an SMMP.

Onsite Workshop

• Social Media Maturity Assessment
• SMMP Use-Case Assessment

• Selection of an SMMP

• A plan for implementing the selected SMMP

Preparation

Workshop Day

Workshop Day

Workshop Day

Working Session

• Facilitator meets with the project manager and reviews the current project plans and IT landscape of the organization.
• A review of scheduled meetings and engaged IT and business staff is performed.

• Conduct activities from Develop a technology enablement approach for social media phase, including social media maturity and readiness assessment.
• Conduct overview of the market landscape, trends, and vendors.

• Interview business stakeholders.
• Prioritize SMMP requirements.

• Perform a use-case scenario assessment.

• Review use-case scenario results; identify use-case alignment.
• Review the SMMP Vendor Landscape vendor profiles and performance.

• Continue review of SMMP Vendor Landscape results and use-case performance results.

• Create a custom vendor shortlist.
• Investigate additional vendors for exploration in the market.

• Meet with project manager to discuss results and action items.
• Wrap up outstanding items from workshop.

• The facilitator will support the project team to outline the RFP contents and evaluation framework.
• Planning of vendor demo script. Input: solution requirements and use-case results.

This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project.

This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.

This icon denotes a slide that pertains directly to the Info-Tech vendor profiles on marketing management technology. Use these slides to support and guide your evaluation of the MMS vendors included in the research.

Info-Tech Insight

Before an SMMP can be selected, the organization must have a strategy in place for enterprise social media. Implementing an SMMP before developing a social media strategy would be akin to buying a mattress without knowing the size of the bed frame.

• Project launch
• Completion of requirements gathering and documentation

Key Activities Completed

• Readiness assessment
• Project plan / timeline
• Stakeholder buy-in
• Technical assessment
• Functional assessment

Outcomes from This Phase

Social Media Maturity Assessment

• Assess your readiness for the SMMP project.
• Evaluate social media opportunities within your organization.

• Discuss how an SMMP can assist with marketing, sales, and customer service.
• Evaluate which SMMP use case scenario is best fit for your organization.

• Assess your social media maturity.
• Inventory social media networks to be supported by the SMMP.

• Assess best-fit use-case scenario.
• Build the metrics inventory.

• Social Media Maturity Assessment Tool
• Social Media Opportunity Assessment Tool

• SMMP Use-Case Fit Assessment Tool

• Social Media Maturity Assessment
• SMMP Use-Case Assessment

1.1

1.2

Why build a social media strategy?

• Social media is neither a fad nor a phenomenon; it is simply another tool in the business process. Social channels do not necessitate a radical departure from the organization’s existing customer interaction strategy. Rather, social media should be added to your channel mix and integrated within the existing CRM strategy.
• Social media allows organizations to form direct and indirect connections through the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) model, which increases the credibility of the information in the eyes of the consumer.
• Social media enables organizations to share, connect, and engage consumers in an environment where they are comfortable. Having a social media presence is rapidly becoming a pre-requisite for successful business-to-consumer enterprises.

Important considerations for an enterprise social media strategy:

• Determine how social media will complement existing customer interaction goals.
• Assess which social media opportunities exist for your organization.
• Consider the specific goals you want to achieve using social channels and pick your services accordingly.
• Not all social media services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) are equal. Consider which services will be most effective for goal achievement.

Distributed Stage

• Open-source or low-cost solutions are implemented informally by individual depts. for specific projects.
• Solutions are deployed to fulfill a particular function without an organizational vision. The danger of this stage is lack of consistent customer experience and wasted resources.

Loosely Coupled Stage

• More point solutions are implemented across the organization. There is a formal cross-departmental effort to integrate some point solutions.
• Risks include failing to put together an effective steering committee and not including IT in the decision-making process.

Command Center Stage

• There’s enterprise-level steering committee with representation from all areas: execution of social programs is handled by a fully resourced physical (or virtual) center.
• Risks include improper resource allocation and lack of end-user training.

Info-Tech’s Social Media Maturity Assessment Tool will help you determine your company’s level of maturity and recommend steps to move to the next level or optimize the status quo of your current efforts.

• Instead of thinking of customers as an island, think of them interacting with each other and with organizations in the social cloud. As a result, the social cloud itself becomes a point of interaction, not just individual customers.
• The social cloud is accessible with services like social networks (e.g. Facebook) and micro-blogs (Twitter).
• Previous lessons learned from the integration of Web 1.0 e-channels should be leveraged as organizations add the social media channel into their overall customer interaction framework:
  • Do not design exclusively around a single channel. Design hybrid-channel solutions that include social channels.
  • Balance customer segment goals and attributes, product and service goals and attributes, and channel capabilities.

• Social Networking: Social networking services use the Friend-of-a-Friend model to allow users to communicate with their personal networks. Users can share a wide variety of information and media with one another. Social networking sites include Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Blogging: Blogs are websites that allow users to upload text and media entries, typically displayed in reverse-chronological order. Prominent blogging services include Blogger and WordPress.
• Micro-Blogging: Micro-blogging is similar to blogging, with the exception that written content is limited to a set number of characters. Twitter, the most popular service, allows users to post messages up to 140 characters.
• Social Multimedia: Social multimedia sites provide an easy way for users to upload and share multimedia content (e.g. pictures, video) with both their personal contacts as well as the wider community. YouTube is extremely popular for video sharing, while Instagram is a popular option for sharing photos and short videos.

Info-Tech Best Practice

In many cases, services do not fit discretely within each category. With minor exceptions, creating an account on a social media service is free, making use of these services extremely cost effective. If your organization makes extensive use of a particular service, ensure it is supported by your SMMP vendor.

• Effectively managing social channels is an increasingly complicated task. Proliferation of social media services and rapid end-user uptake has made launching social interactions a challenge for small and large organizations.
• Using multiple social media services can be a nightmare for account management (particularly when each brand or product line has its own set of social accounts).
• The volume of data generated by the social cloud has also created barriers for successfully responding in-band to social stakeholders (social engagement), and for carrying out social analytics.
• There are two methods for managing social media: ad hoc management and platform-based management.
  • Ad hoc social media management is accomplished using the built-in functionality and administrative controls of each social media service. It is appropriate for small organizations with a very limited scope for social media interaction, but poses difficulties once “critical mass” has been reached.

Proven Useful*

Potentially Useful

Social media is invaluable for marketing, sales, and customer service. Some social media services have a higher degree of efficacy than others for certain functions. Be sure to take this into account when developing a social media strategy.

Source: Info-Tech Survey, N=64

• Features such as unified account management and social engagement capabilities boost the efficiency of social campaigns. These features reduce duplication of effort (e.g. manually posting the same content to multiple services). Leverage account management functionality and in-band response to “do more with less.”
• Features such as comprehensive monitoring of the social cloud and advanced social analytics (i.e. sentiment analysis, trends and follower demographics) allow organizations to more effectively use social media. These features empower organizations with the information they need to make informed decisions around messaging and brand positioning. Use social analytics to zero in on your most important brand advocates.

The value proposition of SMMPs revolves around enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of social media initiatives.

Social Listening & Analytics — Monitor and analyze a variety of social media services: provide demographic analysis, frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, and content-centric analysis.

Social Publishing & Campaign Management — Executing marketing campaigns through social channels (e.g. Facebook pages).

Social Customer Care — Track customer conversations and provide the ability to respond in-platform to social interactions.

Cloud-Centric

Social Monitoring

Content-Centric

• Brand and product monitoring
• Reputation monitoring
• Proactive identification of service opportunities
• Competitive intelligence

• Monitor and manage discussions on your social properties (e.g. Twitter feeds, Facebook Pages, YouTube channels)
• Execute marketing campaigns within your social properties

Social Analytics

(Source: The State of Social Media Analytics (2016))

Before: Manual Social Media Management

• Account management: a senior marketing manager was responsible for updating all twenty of the firm’s social media pages and feeds. This activity consumed approximately 20% of her time. Her annual salary was $80,000. Allocated cost: $16,000 per year.
• In-band response: Customer service representatives manually tracked service requests originating from social channels. Due to the use of multiple Twitter feeds, several customers were inadvertently ignored and subsequently defected to competitors. Lost annual revenue due to customer defections: $10,000.
• Social analytics: Analytics were conducted in a crude, ad hoc fashion using scant data available from the services themselves. No useful insights were discovered. Gains from social insights: $0.

Ad hoc management is costing this organization $26,000 a year.

After: Social Media Management Platform

• Account management: Centralized account controls for rapidly managing several social media services meant the amount of time spent updating social media was cut 75%. Allocated cost savings: $12,000 per year.
• In-band response: Using an SMMP provided customer service representatives with a console for quickly and effectively responding to customer service issues. Service window times were significantly reduced, resulting in increased customer retention. Revenue no longer lost due to defections: $10,000.
• Social analytics: The product development group used keyword-based monitoring to assist with designing a successful new product. Social feedback noticeably boosted sales. Gains from social insights: $20,000
• Cost of SMMP: $6,000 per year.

The net annual benefit of adopting an SMMP is $36,000.

Go with an SMMP if…

• Your organization already has a large social footprint: you manage multiple feeds/pages on three or more social media services.
• Your organization’s primary activity is B2C marketing; your target consumers are social media savvy. Example: consumer packaged goods.
• The volume of marketing, sales and service inquiries received over social channels has seen a sharp increase in the last 12 months.
• Your firm or industry is the topic of widespread discussion in the social cloud.

Stick with ad hoc management if…

• Regulatory compliance prohibits the extensive use of social media in your organization.
• Your organization is focused on a small number of institutional clients with well-defined organizational buying behaviors.
• Your target market is antipathetic towards using social channels to interact with your organization.
• Your organization is in a market space where only a bare-bones social media presence is seen as a necessity (for example, only a basic informational Facebook page is maintained).

Info-Tech Best Practice

1. Remember that departmental goals will overlap; gaining customer insight is valuable to marketing, sales, and customer service.
2. The social media benefits you can expect to achieve will evolve as your processes mature.
3. Often, organizations jump into social media because they feel they have to. Use this assessment to identify early on what your drivers should be.

1.1

1.2

• Content-centric social analytics allow sales staff to see click-through details for content posted on social networks. In many cases, these leads are warm and ready for immediate follow-up.
• A software development firm uses an SMMP to post a whitepaper promoting its product to multiple social networks.
  • The whitepaper is subsequently downloaded by a number of potential prospects.
  • Content-centric analytics within the SMMP link the otherwise-anonymous downloads to named social media accounts.
  • Leads assigned to specific account managers, who use existing CRM software to pinpoint contact information and follow-up in a timely manner.
• Organizations that intend to use their SMMP for sales purposes should ensure their vendor of choice offers integration with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the business formal of social networks, and is the network with the greatest proven efficacy from a sales perspective.

Using an SMMP to assist the sales process can…

• Increase the number of leads generated through social channels as a result of social sharing.
• Increase the quality of leads generated through social channels by examining influence scores.
• Increase prospecting efficiency by finding social leads faster.
• Keep account managers in touch with prospects and clients through social media.

• Large organizations must define separate workflows for each stakeholder organization if marketing’s duties are divided by company division, brand, or product lines.
• Inquiries stemming from marketing campaigns and advertising must be handled by social media teams. For example, if a recent campaign sparks customer questions on the company’s Facebook page, be ready to respond!
• Social media can be used to detect issues that may indicate product defects, provided defect tracking is not already incorporated into customer service workflows. If defect tracking is part of customer service processes, then such issues should be routed to the customer service organization.
• If social listening is employed, in addition to monitoring the company's own social properties, marketing teams may elect to receive notices of major trends concerning the company's products or those of competitors.

“I’m typically using my social media team as a proactive marketing team in the social space, whereas I’m using my consumer relations team as a reactive marketing and a reactive consumer relations taskforce. So a little bit different perspective.” (Greg Brickl, IT Director, Organic Valley)

• Have a marketing manager jointly responsible for the selection of an SMMP to realize higher overall success. This will significantly improve customer acquisition approval and competitive intelligence, as well as the overall SMMP success.
• The marketing manager should be involved in fleshing out the business requirements of the SMMP in order to select the most appropriate solution.
• Once selected, the SMMP has multiple benefits for marketing professionals. One pivotal benefit of SMMPs for marketing is the capability for centralized account management. Multiple social pages and feeds can be rapidly managed at pre-determined times, through an easy-to-use dashboard delivered from one source.
• Centralized account management is especially pertinent for organizations with a wide geographic client base, as they can manage wide social media campaigns within multiple time zones, delivering their messaging appropriately. (e.g. contests, product launches, etc.)

• SMMPs are an invaluable tool in customer service organizations. In-band response capabilities allow customer service representatives to quickly and effectively address customer service issues – either reactively or proactively.
• Reactive customer service can be provided through SMMPs by providing response capabilities for private messages or public mentions (e.g. “@AcmeCo” on Twitter). Many SMMPs provide a queue of social media messages directed at the organization, and also give the ability to assign specific messages to an individual service representative or product expert. Responding to a high-volume of reactive social media requests can be time consuming without an SMMP.
• Proactive customer service uses the ability of SMMPs to monitor the social cloud for specific keywords in order to identify customers having issues. Forward-thinking companies actively monitor the social cloud for customer service opportunities, to protect and improve their image.

SMMPs enable organizations to monitor the social cloud for service opportunities and provide proactive service in-band.

Our research indicates that the most important stakeholder to ensure steering committee success is Customer Service. This has a major impact on CRM integration requirements – more on this later.

• Public relations is devoted to relationship management; as such, it is critical for savvy PR departments to have a social media presence.
• SMMPs empower PR professionals with the ability to track the sentiment of what is said about their organization. Leverage keyword searches and heuristic analysis to proactively mitigate threats and capitalize on positive opportunities. For example, sentiment analysis can be used to identify detractors making false claims over social channels. These claims can then be countered by the Public Relations team.
• Sentiment analysis can be especially important to the PR professional through change and crisis management situations. These tools allow an organization to track the flow of information, as well as the balance of positive and negative postings and their influence on others in the social cloud.
• Social analytics provided by SMMPs also serve as a goldmine for competitive intelligence about rival firms and their products.

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis for PR

• Take the pulse of public perception of your brands (and competitors).
• Mitigate negative comments being made and respond immediately.
• Identify industry and consumer thought leaders to follow on social networks.

Use sentiment analysis to monitor the social cloud.

• Social media provides more direct connections between employer and applicant. It’s faster and more flexible than traditional e-channels.
• SMMPs should be deployed to the HR silo to aid with recruiting top-quality candidates. Account management functionality can dramatically reduce the amount of time HR managers spend synchronizing content between various social media services.
• In-band response capabilities flag relevant social conversations and allow HR managers to rapidly respond to prospective employee inquiries. Rapid response over social channels gives candidates a positive impression of the organization.
• Analytics give HR managers insight into hiring trends and the job market at large – sentiment analysis is useful for gauging not just candidate interests, but also anonymous employee engagement.

A social media campaign managed via SMMP can…

• Increase the size of the applicant pool by “fishing where the fish are.”
• Increase the quality of applicants by using monitoring to create targeted recruitment materials.
• Increase recruiting efficiency by having a well-managed, standing presence on popular social media sites – new recruiting campaigns require less “awareness generation” time.
• Allow HR/recruiters to be more in-touch with hiring trends via social analytics.

What It Looks Like
Functionality for capturing, aggregating, and analyzing social media content in order to create actionable customer or competitive insights.

How It Works
Social listening and analytics includes features such as sentiment and contextual analysis, workflow moderation, and data visualization.

What It Looks Like
Functionality for publishing content to multiple networks or accounts simultaneously, and managing social media campaigns in-depth (e.g. social property management and post scheduling).

How It Works
Social publishing and campaign management include features such as campaign execution, social post integration, social asset management, and post time optimization.

What It Looks Like
Functionality for management of the social customer service queue as well as tools for expedient resolution of customer issues.

How It Works
Social customer care use case primarily relies on strong social moderation and workflow management.

This tool will assess your answers and determine your relative fit against the use-case scenarios.

Fit will be assessed as “Weak,” “Moderate,” or “Strong.”

Consider the common pitfalls, which were mentioned earlier, that can cause IT projects to fail. Plan and take clear steps to avoid or mitigate these concerns.

Note: These use-case scenarios are not mutually exclusive. Your organization can align with one or more scenarios based on your answers. If your organization shows close alignment to multiple scenarios, consider focusing on finding a more robust solution and concentrate your review on vendors that performed strongly in those scenarios or meet the critical requirements for each.

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analyst will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

1.1.1

An Info-Tech analyst will facilitate a discussion to assess the maturity of your organization’s social media program and take an inventory of your current efforts across different departments (e.g. Marketing, PR, Sales, and Customer Service).

1.1.2

The analyst will facilitate an exercise to catalog all social media networks used in the organization.

1.1.3

Based on the maturity assessment, the analyst will help identify whether an SMMP will help you achieve your goals in sales, marketing, and customer service.

1.2.1

An analyst will facilitate the exercise to answer a series of questions in order to determine best-fit scenario for social media management for your organization.

1.2.2

An analyst will lead a whiteboarding exercise to brainstorm and generate metrics for your organization’s social media goals.

Info-Tech Insight

Taking a use-case-centric approach to vendor selection allows you to balance the need for different social capabilities between analytics, campaign management and execution, and customer service.

• Vendor Selection
• Finalized and Approved Contract

Key Activities Completed

• RFP Process
• Vendor Evaluations
• Vendor Selection
• Contract Negotiation

Outcomes from This Phase

The completed procurement of an SMMP solution.

• Selected SMMP solution
• Negotiated and finalized contract

• Evaluate the SMMP marketspace.
• Re-evaluate best-fit use case.

• Determine your SMMP procurement strategy.
• Reach out to SMMP vendors.

• Review vendor profiles and analysis.
• Create your own evaluation framework and shortlisting criteria.

• Prioritize your requirements.
• Create an RFP for SMMP procurement.
• Evaluate vendor responses.
• Set up product demonstrations.

• SMMP Vendor Landscape (included here)
• SMMP Vendor Shortlist Tool

• SMMP RFP Template
• SMMP Vendor Demo Script Template
• SMMP Evaluation and RFP Scoring Tool

• Finalize vendor and product selection

2.1

2.2

VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Info-Tech's Methodology

Vendors qualify and rank in each use-case scenario based on their relative placement and scoring for the scenario.

Champion: The top vendor scored in the scenario

Leaders: The vendors who placed second and third in the scenario

Players: Additional vendors who qualified for the scenarios based on their scoring

Each use-case scenario also includes a Value Index that identifies the Value Score for a vendor relative to their price point. This additional framework is meant to help price-conscious organizations identify vendors who provide the best “bang for the buck.”

VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Review the SMMP Vendor Evaluation

How It Got Here

• The SMMP market was created in response to the exploding popularity of social media and the realization that it can be harnessed for a wide variety of enterprise purposes (from consumer intelligence to marketing campaigns and customer service).
• As the number of social media services has expanded, and as the volume of content generated via social networks has ballooned, it became increasingly difficult to mine insights and manage social campaigns. A number of vendors (mostly start-ups) began offering platforms that attempted to streamline and harness social media processes.
• As usage of social media expanded beyond just the marketing and PR function, being able to successfully scale a social strategy to a large number of customer care and sales interactions became paramount: SMMPs filled a niche by offering large-scale response and workflow management capabilities.

Where It’s Going

• The market is segmented into two broad camps: SMMPs focused on social listening and analytics, and SMMPs focused on social engagement. Although the two have begun to converge, there continues to be a clear junction in the market between the two, with a surprising lack of vendors that are equally adept at both sides.
• With the rise of SMMPs, the expectation was that CRM vendors would offer feature sets similar to those of standalone SMMPS. However, CRM vendors have been slow in incorporating the functionality directly into their products. While some major vendors have made ground in this direction in the last year, organizations that are serious about social will still need a best-of-breed SMMP.
• Other major trends include using application integration to build a 360-degree view of the customer, workflow automation, and competitive benchmarking.

The Table Stakes

What does this mean?

The products assessed in this Vendor Landscape meet, at the very least, the requirements outlined as Table Stakes.

Many of the vendors go above and beyond the outlined Table Stakes, some even do so in multiple categories. This section aims to highlight the products’ capabilities in excess of the criteria listed here.

Scoring Methodology

For an explanation of how Advanced Features are determined, see Information Presentation – Feature Ranks (Stoplights) in the Appendix.

Scoring Methodology

Info-Tech Research Group scored each vendor’s overall product attributes, capabilities, and market performance.

Features are scored individually as mentioned in the previous slide. The scores are then modified by the individual scores of the vendor across the product and vendor performance features.

Usability, overall affordability of the product, and the technical features of the product are considered, and scored on a five-point scale. The score for each vendor will fall between worst and best in class.

The vendor’s performance in the market is evaluated across four dimensions on a five-point scale. Where the vendor places on the scale is determined by factual information, industry position, and information provided by customer references and/or available from public sources.

Product Evaluation Features

Vendor Evaluation Features

Core Features

Additional Features

Social Media Channel Integration – Inbound

Social Moderation and Workflow Management

Social Post Archival

Feature Weightings

Product Evaluation Features

Vendor Evaluation Features

	Best Overall Value Award
Sysomos: A strong analytics capability offered in Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat at a relatively low cost places Sysomos as the best bang for your buck in this use case.

Players in the social listening and analytics scenario

• Sprinklr
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social

The Value Score indexes each vendor’s product offering and business strength relative to its price point. It does not indicate vendor ranking.

Vendors that score high offer more bang-for-the-buck (e.g. features, usability, stability) than the average vendor, while the inverse is true for those that score lower.

Price-conscious enterprises may wish to give the Value Score more consideration than those who are more focused on specific vendor/product attributes.

For an explanation of how the Info-Tech Value Index is calculated, see Information Presentation – Value Index in the Appendix.

Core Features

Additional Features

Social Media Channel Integration – Outbound

Social Moderation and Workflow Management

Social Post Archival

Social Asset Management

Post Time Optimization

Social Media Channel Integration – Inbound

Trend Analysis

Sentiment Analysis

Dashboards and Visualization

Feature Weightings

Product Evaluation Features

Vendor Evaluation Features

	Best Overall Value Award
Sendible: Sendible offers the best value for your money in this use case with good response workflows and publishing capability.

Players in the social publishing and campaign management scenario

• Sprout Social
• Sprinklr
• Sendible

The Value Score indexes each vendor’s product offering and business strength relative to its price point. It does not indicate vendor ranking.

Vendors that score high offer more bang-for-the-buck (e.g. features, usability, stability) than the average vendor, while the inverse is true for those that score lower.

Price-conscious enterprises may wish to give the Value Score more consideration than those who are more focused on specific vendor/product attributes.

For an explanation of how the Info-Tech Value Index is calculated, see Information Presentation – Value Index in the Appendix.

Core Features

Additional Features

Social Media Channel Integration – Outbound

Social Moderation and Workflow Management

Social Response Management

Social Post Archival

Sentiment Analysis

Dashboards and Visualization

Campaign Execution

Trend Analysis

Post Time Optimization

Feature Weightings

Product Evaluation Features

Vendor Evaluation Features

	Best Overall Value Award
Sysomos: Sysomos is the best bang for your buck in this use case, offering essential response and workflow capabilities.

Players in the social listening and analytics scenario

• Sendible
• Sysomos
• Viralheat (Cision)

The Value Score indexes each vendor’s product offering and business strength relative to its price point. It does not indicate vendor ranking.

Vendors that score high offer more bang-for-the-buck (e.g. features, usability, stability) than the average vendor, while the inverse is true for those that score lower.

Price-conscious enterprises may wish to give the Value Score more consideration than those who are more focused on specific vendor/product attributes.

For an explanation of how the Info-Tech Value Index is calculated, see Information Presentation – Value Index in the Appendix.

VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Vendor Profiles and Scoring

This section of the Vendor Landscape includes the profiles and scoring for each vendor against the evaluation framework previously outlined.

Vendor Profiles Include an overview for each company. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the product and vendor. Identify the three-year TCO of the vendor’s solution (based on a ten-tiered model).

Use the Harvey Ball scoring of vendor and product considerations to assess alignment with your own requirements.

Review the use-case scenarios relevant to your organization’s Use-Case Fit Assessment results to identify a vendor’s fit to your organization's SMMP needs. (See the following slide for further clarification on the use-case assessment scoring process.)

Review the stoplight scoring of advanced features to identify the functional capabilities of vendors.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 8 between $500,000 and $1,000,000.

Pricing provided by vendor

• Adobe Social is a strong offering included within the broader Adobe Marketing Cloud. The product is tightly focused on social analytics and social campaign execution. It’s particularly well-suited to dedicated digital marketers or social specialists.

• Adobe Social provides broad capabilities across social analytics and social campaign management; its integration with Adobe Analytics is a strong selling point for organizations that need a complete, end-to-end solution.
• It boasts great archiving capabilities (up to 7 years for outbound posts), meeting the needs of compliance-centric organizations and providing for strong longitudinal analysis capabilities.

• The product plays well with the rest of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, but the list of third-party CRM and CSM integrations is shorter than some other players in the market.
• While the product is unsurprisingly geared towards marketers, organizations that want a scalable platform for customer service use cases will need to augment the product due to its focus on campaigns and analytics – service-related workflow and automation capabilities are not a core focus for the company.

Adobe Social provides impressive features, especially for companies that position social media within a larger digital marketing strategy. Organizations that need powerful social analytics or social campaign execution capability should have Adobe on their shortlist, though the product may be an overbuy for social customer care use cases.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 6, between $100,000 and $250,000.

Pricing derived from public information

• In the past, Hootsuite worked on the freemium model by providing basic social account management features. The company has since expanded its offering and put a strong focus on enterprise feature sets, such as collaboration and workflow management.

• Hootsuite is extremely easy to use, having one of the most straightforward interfaces of vendors evaluated.
• It has extensive monitoring capabilities for a wide variety of social networks as well as related services, which are supported through an app store built into the Hootsuite platform.
• The product provides a comprehensive model for team-based collaboration and workflow management, demonstrated through nice cross-posting and post-time optimization capabilities.

• Hootsuite’s reporting and analytics capabilities are relatively basic, particularly when contrasted with more analytics-focused vendors in the market.
• Running cross-channel campaigns is challenging without integration with third-party applications.

The free version of Hootsuite is useful for getting your feet wet with social management. The paid version is a great SMMP for monitoring and engaging your own social properties with good account and team management at an affordable price. This makes it ideal for SMBs. However, organizations that need deep social analytics may want to look elsewhere.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 7, between $250,000 and $500,000

Pricing provided by vendor

• Social Studio is a powerful solution fueled by Salesforce’s savvy acquisitions in the marketing automation and social media management marketspace. The product has rapidly matured and is adept at both marketing and customer service use cases.

• Salesforce continues to excel as one of the best SMMP vendors in terms of balancing inbound analytics and outbound engagement. The recent addition of Salesforce Einstein to the platform bolsters deep learning capabilities and enhances the product’s value proposition to those that want a tool for robust customer intelligence.
• Salesforce’s integration of Marketing Cloud, with its Sales and Service Clouds, also creates a good 360-degree customer view.

• Salesforce’s broad and deep feature set comes at a premium: the solution is priced materially higher than many other vendors. Before you consider Marketing Cloud, it’s important to evaluate which social media capabilities you want to develop: if you only need basic response workflows or dashboard-level analytics, purchasing Marketing Cloud runs the risk of overbuying.
• In part due to its price point and market focus, Marketing Cloud is more suited to enterprise use cases than SMB use cases.

Social Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud remains a leading solution. Organizations that need to blend processes across the enterprise that rely on social listening, deep analytics, and customer engagement should have the product on their shortlist. However, companies with more basic needs may be off-put by the solution’s price point.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 4, between $25,000 and $50,000

Pricing derived from public information

• Founded in 2009, Sendible is a rising player in the SMMP market. Sendible is primarily focused on the SMB space. A growing segment of its client base is digital marketing agencies and franchise companies.

• Sendible’s user interface is very intuitive and user friendly.
• The product offers the ability to manage multiple social accounts simultaneously as well as schedule posts to multiple groups on different social networks, making Sendible a strong choice for social engagement and customer care.
• Its affordability is strong given its feature set, making it an attractive option for organizations that are budget conscious.

• Sendible remains a smaller vendor in the market – its list of channel partners lags behind larger incumbents.
• Sendible’s contextual and visual content analytics are lacking vis-à-vis more analytics-centric vendors.

Sendible offers a viable solution for small and mid-market companies, as well as social agencies with a focus on customer engagement for marketing and customer service use cases. However, organizations that need deep social analytics may want to look elsewhere.

Pricing derived from public information

• Sprinklr has risen rapidly as a best-of-breed player in the social media management market. It markets a solution geared towards multiple use cases, from customer intelligence and analytics to service-centric response management.

• Sprinklr’s breadth of capabilities are impressive: the vendor has maintained a strong focus on social-specific functionality. As a result of this market focus, they have invested prudently in advanced social analytics and moderation workflow capabilities.
• Sprinklr’s user experience design and data visualization capabilities are top-notch, making it a solution that’s easy for end users and decision makers to get up and running with quickly.

• Relative to other players in the market, the breadth and scope of Sprinklr’s integrations with other customer experience management solutions is limited.
• Based on its feature set and price point, Sprinklr is best suited for mid-to-large organizations. SMBs run the risk of an overbuy situation.

Sprinklr is a strong choice for small and mid-market organizations offering breadth of social media management capabilities that covers social analytics, engagement, and customer service.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 6, between $100,000 and $250,000

Pricing derived from public information

• Sprout Social has built out its enterprise capabilities over the last several years. It offers strong feature sets for account management, social monitoring and analytics, and customer care – it particularly excels at the latter.

• Sprout’s unified inbox and response management features are some of the most intuitive we’ve seen. This makes it a natural option for providing customer service via social channels.
• Sprout Social is priced competitively in relation to other vendors.
• The product provides strong social asset management capabilities where users can set content permissions and expiration dates, and limit access.

• Deep contextual analysis is lacking: the solution clearly falls more to the engagement side of the spectrum, and is particularly suited for social customer service.
• Sprout Social has a limited number of technology partners for integrations with applications such as CRM and marketing automation software.
• It still has a predominantly North American market focus.

Sprout Social’s easy-to-understand benchmarking and dashboards, paired with strong response management, make it a great choice for mid-sized enterprises concerned with social engagement. However, organizations that want to do deep social analytics will need to augment the solution.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 4, between $25,000 and $50,000

Pricing derived from public information

• Sysomos began life as a project at the University of Toronto prior to its acquisition by Marketwire in 2010.
• It split from Marketwire in 2015 and redesigned its product to focus on social monitoring, analysis, and engagement.

STRENGTHS

• MAP and Heartbeat offer extensive contextual and sentiment analytics, consolidating findings through a spam-filtering process that parses out a lot of the “noise” inherent in social media data.
• The solution provides an unlimited number of profiles, enabling more opportunities for collaboration.
• It provides workflow summaries, documenting the actions of staff and providing an audit trail through the entire process.

CHALLENGES

• Sysomos has introduced a publishing tool for social campaigns. However, its outbound capabilities continue to lag, and there are currently no tools for asset management.
• Sysomos’ application integration stack is limited relative to other vendors.

Sysomos’ broad array of good features has made it a frequent challenger to Marketing Cloud on analytics-centric SMMP evaluation shortlists. Enterprise-scale customers specifically interested in social listening and analytics, rather than customer engagement and campaign execution, will definitely want to take a look.

3 year TCO for this solution falls into pricing tier 6, between $100,000 and $250,000

Pricing derived from public information

• Viralheat has been in the social media market since 2009. It provides tools for analytics and in-band social engagement.
• The company was acquired by Cision in 2015, a Chicago-based public relations technology company.

STRENGTHS

• Viralheat offers robust workflow management capabilities for social response and is particularly useful for customer service.
• The product has strong post time optimization capability through its ViralPost scheduling feature.
• Cision’s acquisition of Viralheat makes the product a great choice for third-party social media management, namely public relations and digital marketing agencies.

CHALLENGES

• Viralheat remains a smaller vendor in the market – its list of channel partners lags behind larger incumbents.
• Contextual and sentiment analysis are lacking relative to other vendors.

Cision has upped its game in terms of social workflow and response management and it monitors an above-average number of services. It is a steadfast tool for brands that are primarily interested in outbound customer engagement for marketing and customer service use cases.

1. Eliminate misaligned vendors with knock-out criteria
   Use the SMMP Vendor Shortlist &am; Detailed Feature Analysis Tool to eliminate vendors based on specific knock-out criteria on tab 2, Knock-Out Criteria.
2. Create your own evaluation framework
   Tailor the vendor evaluation to include your own product and vendor considerations on tab 3, Weightings. Identify the significance of advanced features for your own procurement on a scale of Mandatory, Optional, and Not Required on tab 4, Detailed Feature Analysis.
3. Review the results of your customized evaluation
   Review your custom vendor shortlist on tab 5, Results.

Knock-Out Criteria

Sample Vendor Shortlist from tab 5, Results

Interpreting the Results
Your custom shortlist will rank vendors that passed the initial knock-out criteria based on their overall score.
The shortlist will provide broken-down scoring, as well as a custom value index based on the framework set in the tool.

2.1

2.2

• Follow your own organization’s procurement procedures to ensure that you adhere to your organization’s policies.
• Based on your organization’s policies, identify if you are going to conduct a private or public RFP process.
  • If your RFP will contain sensitive information, use a private RFP process that is directed to specific vendors in order to protect the proprietary practices of your business.

Info-Tech Insight

If you are still not sure of a vendor’s capabilities, we recommend sending an RFI before proceeding with an RFP.

INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

If your organization lacks a clear procurement process, refer to Info-Tech's Optimize IT Procurement research to help construct a formal process for selecting application technology.

Info-Tech’s 15-Step Procurement Process

Use Info-Tech's procurement process to ensure that your SMMP selection is properly planned and executed.

1. Initiate procurement.
2. Select procurement manager.
3. Prepare for procurement; check that prerequisites are met.
4. Select appropriate procurement vehicle.
5. Assemble procurement teams.
6. Create procurement project plan.
7. Identify and notify vendors about procurement.
8. Configure procurement process.
9. Gather requirements.
10. Prioritize requirements.
11. Build the procurement documentation package.
12. Issue the procurement.
13. Evaluate proposals.
14. Recommend a vendor.
15. Present to management.

Much of your procurement process should already be outlined from your charter and initial project structuring.
In this stage of the process, focus on the successful completion of steps 7-15.

1. Outline the organization's procurement instructions for vendors (Sections 1, 3, and 5).
2. Input the requirements package created in Activity 5.2 into your RFP (Section 4).
3. Create a scenario overview to provide vendors an opportunity to give an estimated price.

Approval Process

Each organization has a unique procurement process; follow your own organization’s process as you submit your RFPs to vendors.

4. Ensure compliance with your organization's standards and gain approval for submitting your RFP.

Info-Tech RFP
Table of Contents

1. Statement of Work
2. General Information
3. Proposal Preparation Instructions
4. Scope of Work, Specifications, and Requirements
5. Vendor Qualifications and References
6. Budget and Estimated Pricing
7. Vendor Certification

Section

Why is this section important?

Activity

Build a fair evaluation framework that evaluates vendor solutions against a set criteria rather than relative comparisons.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Have members of the SMMP evaluation team review the RFP responses given by vendors.
2. Input vendor solution information into the SMMP RFP Evaluation and Scoring Tool.
3. Analyze the vendors against your identified evaluation framework.
4. Identify vendors with whom you wish to arrange vendor briefings.
5. Contact vendors and arranging briefings.

• Review the feature list and select where each feature is mandatory, desirable, or not applicable.
• Select if each feature has been met by the vendor RFP response.
• Enter the costing information provided by each vendor.
• Determine the relative importance of the features, architecture, and support.

• Costing
• Overall score
• Evaluation notes and comments

Demo

Provide the vendor with some usage patterns for the SMMP tool in preparation for the vendor demo.

Provide the following information to vendors in your script:

• Usage for different groups.
• SMMP usage and [business analytics] usage.
• The requirements for administration.

• Change visualization/presentation.
• Change the underlying data.
• Add additional datasets to the artifacts.
• Collaboration capabilities.
• Perform an investigation in terms of finding BI objects and identifying previous changes, and examine the audit trail.

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analyst will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Our Info-Tech analyst will walk you through the RFP preparation to ensure the SMMP requirements are articulated clearly to vendors in this space.

An analyst will walk you through the demo script preparation to guide the SMMP product demonstrations and briefings offered by vendors. The analyst will ensure the demo script addresses key requirements documented earlier in the process.

Info-Tech Insight

Even a solution that is a perfect fit for an organization will fail to generate value if it is not properly implemented or measured. Conduct the necessary planning before implementing your SMMP.

• Plan for implementation and expected go-live date

Key Activities Completed

• SMMP Implementation Plan
• Governance Plan
• Change Control Methods

Outcomes from This Phase

Plans for implementing the selected SMMP tool.

• Determine the right governance structure to overlook the SMMP implementation.
• Identify integrations with other applications.
• Establish an ongoing maintenance plan.
• Assess the different deployment models.

• Determine the key performance indicators for each department using the SMMP
• Identify key performance indicators for business units using an SMMP

• Establish a governance structure for social media.
• Specify data linkages with CRM.
• Identify risks and mitigation strategies
• Determine the right deployment model for your organization.

• Identify key performance indicators for business units using an SMMP

• Social Media Steering Committee

• Implementation Plan
• SMMP KPIs

3.1

3.2

Plan

• Develop a strategy for customer interaction
• Develop a formal strategy for social media
• Determine business requirements

Create RFP

• Translate into functional requirements
• Determine evaluation criteria

Evaluate

• Evaluate vendors against criteria
• Shortlist vendors
• Perform in-depth vendor review

Implement

• Integrate with existing CRM ecosystem (if applicable)
• Establish ongoing maintenance policies
• Map deployment to organizational models
• Train end-users and establish acceptable use policies
• Designate an SMMP subject matter expert

• Outline the committee’s structure, composition, and responsibilities using the Info-Tech Social Media Steering Committee Charter Template.
• This template also outlines the key tasks and responsibilities for the committee:
  • Providing strategic leadership for social media
  • Leading SMMP procurement efforts
  • Providing process integration
  • Governing social media initiatives
  • Ensuring open communications between departments with ownership of social media processes
• Keep the completed charter on file and available to all committee members. Remember to periodically update the document as organizational priorities shift to ensure the charter remains relevant.

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

• Linking social media to existing customer relationship management solutions can improve information accuracy, reduce manual effort and provide more in-depth customer insights.
  • Organizations Info-Tech surveyed, and who integrated their solutions, achieved more goals as a result.
• Several major CRM vendors are now offering products that integrate with popular social networking services (either natively or by providing support for third-party add-ons).
  • For example, Salesforce.com now allows for native integration with Twitter, while an add-on available for Oracle gathers real-time information about prospects by pulling their extended information from publicly available LinkedIn profiles.
• Some CRM vendors are acquiring established SMMPs outright.
  • For example, Salesforce.com acquired Radian6 for their clients that have advanced social media requirements.

• Social media is a valuable tool from a standalone perspective, but its power is considerably magnified when it’s paired with the CRM suite.
• Many SMMPs offer native integration with CRM platforms. IT should identify and enable these connectors to strengthen the business value of the platform.

An example of how an SMMP linked via CRM can provide proactive service while contributing to sales and marketing.

• New channels do not mean they stand alone and do not need to be integrated into the rest of the customer interaction architecture.
• Challenge SMMP vendors to demonstrate integration experience with CRM vendors and multimedia queue vendors.
• Manual integration – adding resolved social inquiries yourself to a CRM system after closure – cannot scale given the rapid increase in customer inquiries originating in the social cloud. Integration with interaction management workflows is most desirable.

“These tools are enabling sales, and they help us serve our customers better. And anything that does that, is a good investment on our part.” Chip Meyers, (Sales Operation Manager, Insource)

• Like other enterprise applications, the SMMP will require periodic upkeep. IT must develop and codify policies around ongoing platform maintenance.
• Platform maintenance should touch on the following areas:
  • Account access and controls – periodically, access privileges for employees no longer with the organization should be purged.
  • Platform security – cloud-based platforms will be automatically updated by the vendor to plug security holes, but on-premises solutions must be periodically updated to ensure that there are no gaps in security.
  • Pruning of old or outdated material – pages (e.g. Facebook Groups, Events, and Twitter feeds) that are no longer in use should be pruned. For example, a management console for an event that was held two years ago is unnecessary. Remove it from the platform (and the relevant service) to cut down on clutter (and reduce costs for “per-topic” priced platforms.)

IT: SMMP Maintenance Checklist

• Account upkeep and pruning
• Security, privacy, and access
• Content upkeep and pruning

• Risk of inappropriate exchange of information between personal and business social networks (e.g. a personal account used for company business).
• Abuse of privacy and confidentiality laws.

• Whenever possible, implement separate social network accounts for business, and train your employees to avoid using personal accounts at work.
• Have a policy in place for how to treat pre-existing accounts versus newly created ones for enterprise use.
• Use the “unified sign-on” capabilities of an SMMP to prevent employees from directly accessing the underlying social media services.

• Copyrighted information could inappropriately be used for promotional and other business purposes (e.g. using a private user’s images in collateral).

• Legal should conduct training to make sure the organization’s social media representatives only use information in the public domain, nothing privileged or confidential. This is particularly sensitive for Marketing and PR.

• Employees on social media channels may post something inappropriate to the nature of your business.
• Employees can post something that compromises industry and/or ethical standards.

• Use SMMP outbound filtering/post approval workflows to censor certain inappropriate keywords.
• Select the team carefully and ensure they are fully trained on both official company policy and social media etiquette.
• Ensure strong enforcement of Social Media AUPs: take a zero tolerance approach to flagrant abuses.

• Implement policies that outline appropriate precautions by employees, such as using effective passwords and not downloading unauthorized software.
• Use web-filtering and anti-malware software that incorporates social media as a threat vector.

• Plan for any bandwidth requirements with IT network staff.
• Most social media strategies shouldn’t have a material impact on bandwidth.

• In a public social network, you cannot prevent this. Monitor your own brand as well as competitors’. If client secrecy must be maintained, then you should use a private social network (e.g. Jive, Lithium, private SharePoint site), not a public network.

• Augment existing customer service responsibilities with social media requests.
• If a dedicated resource is not available, dedicate a specific amount of time per employee to be spent addressing customer concerns via social media.

• Fine tune your efforts in each business process domain by matching social technologies to specific business workflows. This will clearly delineate where value is created by leveraging social media.
• Common business process domains that should be targeted include marketing, sales, and customer service. Public relations, human resources, and analyst relations are other areas to consider for social process support.
• For each business process domain, IT should assist with technology enablement and execution.

• In the agency model of SMMP deployment, the platform is managed on behalf of the organization by a third party – typically a marketing or public relations agency.
• The agency serves as the primary touch point for the client organization: the client requests the types of market research it wants done, or the campaigns it wants managed. The agency uses its own SMMP(s) to execute the requests. Often, the SMMP’s results or dashboards will be rebranded by the agency.

• Pros: The agency model is useful when large portions of marketing, service, or public relations are already being outsourced to a third-party provider. Going with an agency also splits the cost of more expensive SMMPs over multiple clients, and limits deployment costs.
• Cons: The client organization has no direct control over the platform; going with an agency is not cost effective for firms with in-house marketing or PR capabilities.
• Advice: Go with an agency-managed SMMP if you already use an agency for marketing or PR.

• In the centralized model, a single SMMP workspace is owned and operated predominantly by a single business unit or department. Unlike the agency model, the SMMP functionality is utilized in-house.
• Information from the SMMP may occasionally be shared with other departments, but normally the platform is used almost exclusively by a single group in the company. Marketing or public relations are usually the groups that maintain ownership of the SMMP in the centralized model (with selection and deployment assistance from the IT department).

• Pros: The centralized model provides small organizations with an in-house, dedicated SMMP without having to go through an agency. Having a single group own and manage the SMMP is considerably more cost effective than having SMMPs licensed to multiple business units in a small company.
• Cons: If more and more departments start clamoring for control of SMMP resources, the centralized model will fail to meet the overall needs of the organization.
• Advice: Small-to-medium enterprises with mid-sized topic or brand portfolios should use the centralized model.

• In the distributed model, multiple SMMPs (sometimes from different vendors) or multiple SMMP workspaces (from a single vendor) are deployed to several groups (e.g. multiple departments or brand portfolios) in the organization.

• Pros: The distributed model is highly effective in large organizations with multiple departments or brands that each are interested in SMMP functionality. Having separate workspaces for each business group enables customizing workspaces to satisfy different goals of the different business groups.
• Cons: The cost of deploying multiple SMMP workspaces can be prohibitive.
• Advice: Go with the distributed model if your organization is large and has multiple relevant departments or product marketing groups, with differing social media goals.

3.1

3.2

User Engagement
Quantity and quality of customer interactions with a brand or with each other, either on- or offline.

Impressions
The number of exposures your content, ad, or social post has to people in your target audience.

Product Innovation
The quantity and quality of improvements, updates, and changes to existing products.

Time-to-Market
Time that passes between idea generation and the product being available to consumers.

New Product Launches
A ratio of completely new product types released to brand extensions and improvements.

Cancelled Projects
Measure of quality of ideas generated and quality of idea assessment method.

Conversion Rate
How many sales are made in relation to the number of leads.

Revenue by Lead
Total revenue divided by total number of leads.

Time to Resolution
Average amount of time it takes for customers to get a response they are satisfied with.

First Contact Resolution
How often customer issues are resolved on the first contact.

Contact Frequency
The number of repeated interactions from the same customers.

Satisfaction Scores
Determined from customer feedback – either through surveys or gathered sporadically.

Employee Engagement
Rating of employee satisfaction overall or with a given aspect of the workplace.

Employee Productivity
A comparison of employee inputs (time, effort, etc.) and outputs (work).

• E.g. build a positive brand image

• Net increase in brand recognition

• Launch a viral video campaign showcasing product attributes to drive increased YT traffic

• Net increase in unaided customer recall

• Enhance sales lead generation through social channels

• Net increase in sales lead generation in the social media sales funnel

• Produce more timely responses to customer enquiries and complaints

• Reduced time to resolution

• Enhance social media recruitment channels

• Number of LinkedIn recruitment

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analyst will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

3.1.1

Our Info-Tech analyst will walk you through the exercise of developing roles and responsibilities to govern your social media program.

3.1.2

The analyst will help you identify the points of integration between the SMMP and your CRM platform.

3.1.3

Our Info-Tech analyst will facilitate the discussion to identify the top risks associated with the SMMP and determine mitigation strategies for each risk.

3.1.4

An analyst will demonstrate the different SMMP deployment models and assist in determining the most suitable model for your organization.

3.2.1

An analyst will work with different stakeholders to determine the top social media goals for each department.

Calculations

Each product has a vendor multiplier calculated based on its weighted performance, considering the different criteria scored in the Harvey Ball evaluations.

To calculate each vendor’s performance, the advanced feature scores are multiplied against the weighting for the feature in the use-case scenario’s configuration.

The weighted advanced feature score is then multiplied against the vendor multiplier.

The sum of each vendor’s total weighted advanced features is calculated. This sum is used to identify the vendor’s qualification and relative rank within the use case.

Each use case’s feature weightings and vendor/product weighting configurations are displayed within the body of slide deck.

Use-Case Vendor Performance

Vendors who qualified for each use-case scenario are ranked from first to last in a weighted bar graph based on the features considered.

Advanced features are determined by analyst expertise, leveraging information gained from conversations with clients. Advanced features chosen as part of the evaluation are representative of what Info-Tech clients have indicated are of importance to their vendor solution. Advanced features are evaluated through a series of partial marks, dedicated to whether the solution performs all aspects of the Info-Tech definition of the feature and whether the feature is provided within the solution. Analysts hold the right to determine individual, unique scoring criteria for each evaluation. If a feature does not meet the criteria, Info-Tech holds the right to score the feature accordingly.

Use cases use features as a baseline of the inclusion and scoring criteria.

Info-Tech’s Value Index is an indexed ranking of solution value per dollar as determined by the raw scores assigned to each criteria (for information on how raw scores are determined, see Vendor Landscape Methodology: Scoring, above).

Value scores are calculated as follows:

1. The TCO Affordability criterion is removed from the Affordability score and the remaining product score criteria (Features, Usability, Architecture). Affordability scoring is adjusted with the TCO weighting distributed in proportion to the use case’s weighting for Affordability. Weighting is adjusted as to retain the same weightings relative to one another, while still summing to 100%.
2. An adjusted multiplier is determined for each vendor using the recalculated Affordability scoring.
3. The multiplier vendor score and vendor’s weighted feature score (based on the use-case scenario’s weightings), are summed. This sum is multiplied by the TCO raw score to yield an interim Value Score for each solution.
4. All interim Value Scores are then indexed to the highest performing solution by dividing each interim Value Score by the highest interim Value Score. This results in a Value Score of 100 for the top solution and an indexed Value Score relative to the 100 for each alternate solution.
5. Solutions are plotted according to Value Score, with the highest score plotted first, and all remaining scores plotted in descending numerical order.

Where pricing is not provided by the vendor and public sources of information cannot be found, an Affordability raw score of zero is assigned. Since multiplication by zero results in a product of zero, those solutions for which pricing cannot be determined receive a Value Score of zero. Since Info-Tech assigns a score of zero where pricing is not available, it is always in the vendor’s best interest to provide accurate and up-to-date pricing. In the event that insufficient pricing is available to accurately calculate a Value Index, Info-Tech will omit it from the Vendor Landscape.

Value Index

Vendors are arranged in order of Value Score. The Value Score each solution achieved is displayed, and so is the average score.

Those solutions that are ranked as Champions are differentiated for point of reference.

Info-Tech’s Price Evaluation is a tiered representation of the three-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a proposed solution. Info-Tech uses this method of communicating pricing information to provide high-level budgetary guidance to its end-user clients while respecting the privacy of the vendors with whom it works. The solution TCO is calculated and then represented as belonging to one of ten pricing tiers.

Pricing tiers are as follows:

1. Between $1 and $2,500
2. Between $2,500 and $10,000
3. Between $10,000 and $25,000
4. Between $25,000 and $50,000
5. Between $50,000 and $100,000
6. Between $100,000 and $250,000
7. Between $250,000 and $500,000
8. Between $500,000 and $1,000,000
9. Between $1,000,000 and $2,500,000
10. Greater than $2,500,000

Where pricing is not provided, Info-Tech makes use of publicly available sources of information to determine a price. As these sources are not official price lists, the possibility exists that they may be inaccurate or outdated, and so the source of the pricing information is provided. Since Info-Tech publishes pricing information regardless of vendor participation, it is always in the vendor’s best interest to supply accurate and up to date information.

Info-Tech’s Price Evaluations are based on pre-defined pricing scenarios (see Product Pricing Scenario, below) to ensure a comparison that is as close as possible between evaluated solutions. Pricing scenarios describe a sample business and solicit guidance as to the appropriate product/service mix required to deliver the specified functionality, the list price for those tools/services, as well as three full years of maintenance and support.

Price Evaluation

Call-out bubble indicates within which price tier the three-year TCO for the solution falls, provides the brackets of that price tier, and links to the graphical representation.

Scale along the bottom indicates that the graphic as a whole represents a price scale with a range of $1 to $2.5M+, while the notation indicates whether the pricing was supplied by the vendor or derived from public sources.

Awards categories are as follows:

• Champion Awards are presented to the top performing solution in a particular use-case scenario. As a result, only one Champion Award is given for each use case, and the entire Vendor Landscape will have the same number of Champion Awards as the number of evaluated use cases.
• Leader Awards are presented to top performing solutions for each use-case scenario. Depending on the use-case scenario and the number of solutions being evaluated, a variable number of leader awards will be given. This number is at the discretion of the analysts, but is generally placed at two, and given to the solutions ranking second and third respectively for the use case.
• Best Overall Value Awards are presented to the solution for each use-case scenario that ranked the highest in the Info-Tech Value Index for each evaluated scenario (see Vendor Landscape Methodology: Information Presentation – Value Index, above). If insufficient pricing information is made available for the evaluated solutions, such that a Value Index cannot be calculated, no Best Overall Value Award will be presented. Only one Best Overall Value Award is available for each use-case scenario.

Vendor Awards for Use-Case Performance

	Info-Tech’s Champion Award is presented to solutions that placed first in an use-case scenario within the Vendor Landscape.
	Info-Tech Leader Award is given to solutions who placed in the top segment of a use-case scenario.
	Info-Tech’s Best Overall Value Award is presented to the solution within each use-case scenario with the highest Value Index score.

There are three primary objectives when deploying Microsoft 365: from a business perspective, the expectations are based on productivity; from an IT perspective, the expectations are based on IT efficiencies, security, and compliance; and from an organizational perspective, they are based on a digital employee experience and collaborative functionality.

Of course, all these expectations are based on one primary objective, and that is user adoption of Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint Online. A mass adoption, along with a high usage rate and a change in the way users work, is required for your investment in M365 to be considered successful.

So, adoption is your first step, and that can be tracked and analyzed through analytics in M365 or other tools. But what else needs to be considered once you have released M365 on your organization? What about backup? What about security? What about sharing data outside your business? What about self-service? What about ongoing training? M365 is a powerful suite of tools, and taking advantage of all that it entails should be IT’s primary goal. How to accomplish that, efficiently and securely, is up to you!

John Donovan
Principal Research Director, I&O
Info-Tech Research Group

Collaboration, efficiencies, and cost savings need to be earned

Migrating to M365 is a disruptive move for most organizations. Additionally, it poses risk to untrained IT staff, including admins, help desk, and security teams. The aim for organizations, especially in this new hybrid workspace, is to maintain efficiencies through collaboration, share information in a secure environment, and work from anywhere, any time. However, organizations need to manage their licensing and storage costs and build this new way of working through post-deployment planning. By reducing their hardware and software footprint they can ensure they have earned these savings and efficiencies.

Understand any shortcomings in M365 or pay the price

Failing to understand any shortcomings M365 poses for your organization can ruin your chances at a successful implementation. Commonly overlooked expenses include backup and archiving, especially for regulated organizations; spending on risk mitigation through third-party tools for security; and paying a premium to Microsoft to use its Azure offerings with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, or any security add-on that comes at a price above your E5 license, which is expensive in itself.

Spend time with users to understand how they will use M365

Understanding business processes is key to anticipating how your end users will adopt M365. By spending time with the staff and understanding their day-to-day activities and interactions, you can build better training scenarios to suit their needs and help them understand how the apps in M365 can help them do their job. On top of this you need to meet the business KPIs and IT’s drive for adoption and usage. Encourage early adopters to become trainers and champions. Success will soon follow.

M365 is a full suite of tools for collaboration, communication, and productivity, but organizations find the platform is not used to its full advantage and fail to get full value from their license subscription.

Many users are unsure which tool to use when: Do you use Teams or Viva Engage, MS Project or Planner? When do you use SharePoint versus OneDrive?

From an IT perspective, finding time to help users at the outset is difficult – it’s quite the task to set up governance, security, and backup. Yet training staff must be a priority if the implementation is to succeed.

M365 projects are fraught with obstacles. Common mistakes organizations make include:

• No post-migration plan in place.
• User training is an afterthought.
• Lack of communication to end users.
• No C-suite promotion and sponsorship.
• Absence of a vision and KPIs to meet that vision.

To define your post-migration tasks and projects:

• List all projects in a spreadsheet and rank them according to difficulty and impact.
• Look for quick wins with easy tasks that have high impact and low difficulty.
• Build a timeline to execute your plans and communicate clearly how these plans will impact the business and meet that vision.

Failure to take meaningful action will not bode well for your M365 journey.