We’ve worked on a couple of software evaluation projects this year – and have had to wrestle with all 4 clients on this one topic:  Don’t ask questions to software vendors if you don’t know what you are going to do with the answer.

For example, a couple of my clients were requesting 5 (five!) years of financial statements.  My questions to them:  What are you looking for – low debt, liquidity, earnings - what?  What constitutes a healthy financial statement?  I get a lot of blank stares, and at times, anger.  If you had to focus on one thing in the evaluation of a software company (not the product, the company)…my recommendation would be to look at the health and breadth of their prospect pipeline.  More on this another day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Software Selection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.