Evaluating Your Proposals

1. Make a shortlist

Once RFPs have been submitted, you will want to run an internal process to shortlist the top providers based on the information you have been given. You should rank the providers based on the ideal answers given in the sample RFP - one simple way of doing this would be to assign a rank from 1-5 for each answer, sum up the scores and rank the providers by score.

2. Invite the top to a round of meetings

You should pick the top providers and invite them for a round of meetings to make your final decision. Consider limiting yourself to three providers.

3. Hold stakeholder meetings to evaluate the top three

Set up meetings with your key internal stakeholders (typically representatives from finance, product, support, IT, and business) and outline to the providers that they should prepare slides explaining why their solution should be chosen, what their key advantages are versus other providers, and who will be attending the meeting from your side.

From each provider’s response, you should have made a list of:

a) Key advantages of using the provider Use the meeting to validate the provider’s response, going into more detail e.g. for particular integrations, are they feature-complete?

b) Key concerns with the provider If they are weak on certain subjects, use the meeting to probe more into these and find out whether the weakness can be mitigated, or if additional useful information can be provided on these.

Each provider should be scored using a similar system to before, along subject areas. Once the meetings are complete, each of your stakeholders should submit their personal evaluations and recommendations on behalf of their part of your business.

4. Make your decision

The leader of your procurement process should make a choice based on these evaluations and then sit down with each of the stakeholders to propose the solution that the business will choose and hear out any objections/concerns which may need to be considered.

Once this process has been completed, you should have a good idea of which provider you wish to go with. 

5. Carry out due diligence and referencing

We recommend getting references or testimonials on the preferred provider, to ensure that they do what they say they can do. Try and get at least three customers with a comparable size or use case as you. 

Find out about the reference’s onboarding journey and live experience. In particular, investigate whether the provider acts with integrity and with the interests of the customer in mind (rather than their own). The usual due diligence process should also be followed, i.e. check that the business is financially stable and ensure that the claims they have made with regard to regulation and sponsorship are legitimate.