This is part 4 of a series on choosing a Customer Reference Management Solution.

One of the most overlooked steps in the selection of a customer reference management system is establishing a baseline of needs based on common scenarios from your environment. This is important at several points in the selection process: demonstrations and the hands-on evaluation.

Demonstrations
Let’s face it: demonstrations go far too quickly and far too smoothly in a majority of cases. We love when buyers come to the first demonstration with a list of scenarios they want to see played out in our system. But probably 80% of the time or more, we’re asked to just show the system. While any proficient “demo jock” can cover a system in 30 or 60 minutes, ultimately it means you see the system as the vendor wants to show it, which may leave many unanswered questions. With all the bells and whistles that exist today, you’ll quickly be blinded by features if they aren’t presented in a context that’s meaningful to you.

Hands-On Evaluations
We’re strong advocates of hands-on evaluations of reference management systems (RMS). Even though we encourage it and set up evaluation sites routinely, a small portion of decision makers actually live with the system. Whether we win or lose the opportunity, we always feel badly that we’re selected or rejected based on so little working knowledge of our solution, or our competitor’s.

Who buys a car without actually driving it? The answer is: extremely busy people who don’t consider the long term consequences.

So what can you do to ensure a better fit? Prepare scenarios which you will ask each vendor on the short-list to follow, record the pros and cons for each solution tested and then compare notes as a team.

Thinking Through Your Scenarios
Your team gets requests from Sales, PR and other colleagues. Maybe they arrive via email or voicemail. Those requests are handled by one person, or maybe split between multiple people based on the region of origin, solution or service. After a request is received and someone takes ownership. How are requests managed: solo or collaboratively? How will stakeholders follow the progress of the activity? What happens when the request is fulfilled? Do you issue rewards or points? How will you report on this activity? Do you need a dashboard for a quick pulse check on current activity?

In the end, a scenario for requests might look like this:

• A request is submitted into the reference management system directly, or indirectly (CRP team member enters it)
• Requests are routed to different people based on their region of origin
• Requests including multiple customers may be worked by different CRP team members
• Once complete, each customer should be awarded X points (later used to rank customers)
• Stakeholders should be able to easily track the progress of any request in the “pipeline” visually
• Request reports should allow us to see how requests break out by product, industry, region, etc.
• We need an easy way to get data out of the system for further manipulation in PowerPoint for monthly scorecards

You’ll have 5-10 of these core scenarios related to functions like content management, customer management, reporting, search, etc. We’d recommend that you use a 3 column format where the items above are in the first column, a numeric value is in the second column (1=easy or good fit, 2=not hard, but not easy, etc.), and the final column contains notes. In addition, each scenario will be weighted for its importance, because let’s face it, all needs are not created equal.

What About Sales?
Don’t neglect the sales user experience! If salespeople don’t adopt the system all is for naught. Be sure to list out a few common sales use scenarios and have salespeople run through them during the hands-on evaluation. They’ll be quick to tell you what’s intuitive and what’s easy or hard.

In the end…
This scenario-based approach will help you objectively assess the pros and cons of each system reviewed. It is an investment in time, but we’ve come across many reference managers who are living with the result of a rushed selection process (“If I only knew then what I know now.”), aren’t able to easily get out of the system they’ve chosen and wish for a do-over. You don’t have to be one of them.

Checkout the complete Choosing a System podcast series.