When organisations are looking for a new content management system (CMS), the selection process is designed to evaluate all the offerings in the marketplace to find the product that is the best fit to the organisation’s needs.

Requirements are documented, and vendors asked to provide written responses, give demonstrations, and provide whatever other information is required. All of these activities are designed to assess the quality and effectiveness of the solutions on offer.

What is rarely recognised, however, is that while we are evaluating vendors, CMS vendors are also evaluating us.

Submitting a tender response

While we are looking for the best products in the marketplace, we don’t stop to think that these vendors might also be in the most demand, and therefore the busiest. In practice, even a moderately successful CMS vendor will be receiving more than a half-dozen tender requests every week.

It costs real money for vendors to submit a tender response, as well as a significant amount of time. It is therefore not possible (or financially viable) for vendors to pursue every opportunity, as that would be a short road to bankruptcy.

Instead, vendors must pick which battles they will fight, with the primary goal being to win the highest percentage of tenders that they submit.

[CM Briefing 2006-06, read the full article]