software, saas, cloudWhat’s the best way to find software to power my business?
Right now, I’m looking for software to manage my office supplies. How much we use, how much it costs, daily costs, etc.
I’m not asking for help actually finding the software, but rather I’m asking how I can find it.
How do I effectively find software vendors and talk to them? What’s the best way to learn whether business-to-business software is high quality and set at a good price point? Are there general tips about choosing SaaS software that I should keep in mind?
Two main sites to find and evaluate business software are G2Crowd and Software Advice. I do not have any affiliation with either.
Both include categories, descriptions, recommendations, and fairly intuitive interfaces. I think G2Crowd has more reviews.
Software to manage office supplies probably falls under Expense Management. G2Crowd has a ranked list of vendors in that space.
When evaluating vendors, for choices that are important enough, I recommend:
Clearly identifying your goals. What are you looking to achieve? What metrics and benchmarks would define success?
Creating a forced rank list of features. Forced ranking is useful for prioritizing. You can then assign weights to the features you need most.
Creating a scored feature matrix for the top companies, giving points to each company for how well they implement each desired feature and multiplying by the weight of the feature (e.g. 1-5x). Note you can also evaluate customer service, price, and other non-feature traits. This can take time so you may want to outsource this task to an intern or crowdsourced site.
This should reveal what companies should be in your top 2-3. If you are making a big commitment and need additional qualitative answers, I recommend:
Contacting the company's sales team to ask questions specific to your needs.
Contacting any people who have used company's products through a backchannel to gauge satisfaction. Testimonials may mean a little but I wouldn't put too much weight on them.
Finally, I don't know your business and thus could be wrong but software to manage office supplies doesn't seem likely to be high-value. Accounting software could help you track office supply expenses and I would think that could help you manage inventory by proxy. Your mileage may vary. :) Hope that helps.
How do I effectively find software vendors and talk to them?
The best way is to ask around. At the local networking events you participate in, for instance. Or in online venues such as forums or LinkedIn groups or the Software Recommendations Stack Exchange. People love to talk about how they’re using this or that piece of software successfully.
What’s the best way to learn whether business-to-business software is high quality and set at a good price point? Are there general tips about choosing SaaS software that I should keep in mind?
The best way to know what using a software is like is to try it, and the two important points to have in mind to forge your purchase decision in my opinion are form and value. Mark made the commendable suggestion that you should use a forced rank list and a scored feature matrix to come up with a decision. But in my experience, software features are secondary when compared to form and value.
The importance of value is a no-brainer. Is using the software helping you to move forward with whatever goal you had in mind? Is it saving you or your staff an hour per month? Per week? More? Is it providing valuable insights that you shouldn’t have without it? Anchor those against your costs, and you will know if the software is worth the money.
The importance of form might be less clear, but don’t overlook it. An important part of your decision process should amount to gut feeling – as in do you or its end-users actually like using the software. This is crucial because nothing is more soul-draining than forcing yourself to use a piece of software that you hate. (Using some kind of project management or customer relationship management tool that generates sexy looking stats and reports, for instance, would make little sense if it means your staff needs to deal with a scratch-your-eyes-out batshit-crazy interface that forces them to do mind-numbing data entry.)
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