Choosing a software vendor is a responsible task for any company out there. Doesn’t matter the scale of your business - in any case, you’d probably want to get a reliable, accessible, and intuitive product reinforced by some good tech maintenance for your money. Let’s take a look at the four crucial stages of efficiently selecting a software vendor that would make a truly trustful business partner.
Seeking a reliable software vendor - top 4 tips
In order to find out not simply a good software vendor but one of the best in the business, try to focus on the following points.
Conversations, not checklists
Usually, a company looking for a software vendor starts with composing a checklist that includes all the major requirements for future solutions. This is utterly wrong. Remember, you’re not looking for a readymade product. You are looking for experts that would create it for you.
This means that with a checklist only, you, basically, hire people that showed you a CV, but wouldn’t go through a private interview. Try to always dedicate at least 15-20 minutes to a bit of personal communication with your employment candidates (there are numerous apps just for that purpose like Skype, Hangouts, and others). Otherwise, after some time cooperating with a vendor, you may start experiencing difficulties in finding a compromise.
Evaluate the people, not just the product
We’d like to emphasize once again the importance of realizing the fact that you’re about to work with real, live people. Most probably, in a long-term perspective. This means that you need to build professional relationships with everybody designing, building, testing, launching into release, maintaining, and updating your future solution.
Always go for a separate live interview with a general project manager. This is the person you will be interacting with most of the time. If initially, you see that not all your points are clarified and taken to attention, further on, deadlines can be undermined and other risks may appear. Moreover, we’d strongly recommend forming an elaborate list of software vendor interview questions to help you understand whether your potential partner gets what you want from the get-go.
Probe their expertise
Despite the fact that the vast majority of modern software development companies have presentable, promotion-heavy websites, many embellish the reality. Some overdo their portfolios with loads of non-existent or irrelevant content, some deceivingly claim to have prominent companies among their partners. Thus, as they say, trust, but verify.
Before making a final choice, contact a few representatives of establishments included in the list of your potential contractor and ask about their cooperative experience. You can find most of them through LinkedIn. Be ready for some bitter surprises, though, which will surely indicate how much you can trust a certain vendor.
Moreover, if your business niche stands out in that it requires in-depth expertise (e.g., you operate in the Insurtech niche), then it’d be reasonable to seek software vendors that specialize in the development of solutions in that niche specifically.
Ensure that vendor understands your goals
As you may already know, many large IT companies have a particular vision of workflow and focus on the projects of a certain format. Such companies may be quite renowned among clients in the market, however, don’t be fast to go for them at once.
The thing is, many such organizations specifically target large-scale projects and startups, which may bring them some good popularity on top of the sole income. And if your project can be deemed ordinary to some extent and not featuring any technological innovations, it can be taken as a minor cooperation opportunity. Therefore, figure out in all details what both you and your contractor company strive for in the long run if you want to build efficient, long-term cooperative relationships.
Conclusion
As you can see, selecting the right software vendor who can really be trusted may be somewhat challenging. Nevertheless, if you go by the above-mentioned recommendations from our “criteria of choosing a reliable software vendor list”, you’ll boost your chances of final success dramatically.
If you don’t wish to spend either time or money for such purposes, contact us. Our software dev aces have been building highly-reliable, scalable, and accessible custom business solutions for years. We’ll be glad to fruitfully cooperate with you!
