How DeepBench Chooses New Vendors

Choosing a vendor to alleviate pain points or enhance strengths in your company is key in its success.

Here’s a look inside our Operations Team: how we analyze, compare, and decide on new vendors.

DeepBench itself is evaluating and re-evaluating vendors all the time. In just the past year, we’ve evaluated software that impacts our: sales lead generation, QA testing, load testing, email marketing, accounting, along with many others.

All this considered, we would like to share some tips on how we evaluate vendors.

1. Price Tag

Time is money. Consider what this vendor offers to take off of your daily workload when reviewing their price.

It seems obvious, right? You are evaluating a new vendor because you either want to spend less money or save more time.

Saving the dev team an hour of QA testing time so they can focus on building new features could be hugely valuable. Determining that exact value is essential to moving forward with a solution.

Option A may save the team 10 hours a week, and Option B only saves them 8.

What price would you pay for those 2 hours? How much is it worth to the company?

Option A could be 10x the cost of Option B and still be worth it. The key is understanding the value of an employee’s time.

2. Time Saved

Can this vendor save you or your employees from hours of work down the road?

As mentioned above, software should be saving us time. Almost any software we’re reviewing will still have some sort of manual component to it.

The question is, how much?

Usually the more manual work involved, the cheaper the monthly cost, but as alluded to above, time is money.

So, sticking with our example above, if QA testing Option A is 10x faster and more efficient than option B, that needs to be factored in to the overall “price tag.”

Additionally, we factor in adoption time, or the time it takes to integrate with this new offering.

For example, if setting up option B takes four weeks of dev time, and option A only takes two hours, that can be a big incentive to lean another way.

3. Optionality

More options makes it more difficult to make a decision. Consider these points to weigh those options.

If you have two options, both cost the same each month, and both require the same low-level of manual input, what’s left?

Of course, it’s the quality and performance of the software.

Does one option have “bells and whistles” that the other doesn’t?

Does one company have a more aggressive product roadmap than another?

Even if your team isn’t equipped to consider these enhanced options right now, it can be a time consuming process to change vendors.

You may as well get “married” to the right one.

4. Be Realistic

Choose the vendor that excels at your most important needs and run with it.

There’s rarely a silver bullet.

We all want an option that’s cheap, saves us the most time, is easy to integrate with, and has the most advanced functionality.

In every case we’ve seen, one vendor will excel in one of the above three points, but lack in another.

Especially for a growing startup, price often takes precedence over optionality, as is indicated by the order of the list.

We always try to avoid large long-term contracts, giving us the flexibility to evaluate and re-evaluate vendors frequently, to make sure they’re excelling in all of the above areas.

Want to know how stakeholders will evaluate your specific offering?

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We can connect you to the right people to get your questions answered!