Our HRIS selection tool provides a great deal of information but the one glaring item missing is pricing. When we created the tool, we wanted to add pricing to the site but the majority of our vendors were reluctant to publish prices. Pretty much everyone has a price in mind or a budget for their HR Information Systems or HRMS solution. You are also likely to have a list of requirements that may or may not be included in our HRIS selection tool. You may have specific systems with which your HR software solution product will need to communicate. You certainly don’t want to waste your time with various meetings only to find in the 11th hour, that the cost of the system you have chosen is significantly over your budget or doesn’t contain required features.
Here’s what I suggest
When you have a short list of five to seven vendors from our HRIS selection tool who meet your basic needs, select free trials from each. Upon your first contact with each HRIS vendor, it might be a good idea to ask specific questions regarding capabilities, platforms or price that might eliminate that vendor from your short list. This entire qualification list can be as short as four or five items including price.
The vendors may be hesitant to provide you a price. This is nothing sneaky, it’s just hard to provide a price or even a range of prices until the sales person has an idea of what the prospect is looking to do with the software. It might be a good idea to let the sales person know a price range of what you are looking to spend and ask if that is possible with their system. This should tell you enough to be able to determine if the product is within your budget range.
If you have additional applications that will need to communicate with your HR software product, it’s also a good idea, during this initial conversation, to find out if the system will talk to what you need it to. Find out if interfaces to your systems are already created or if they will need to be custom created. Obviously, if it’s already created, the cost will be less and there should be less likelihood that issues with testing the interfaces will result.
The vendors also pre-qualify leads
When I was selling these systems and would receive a new lead, I would qualify the lead up front by providing the prospect a range of price and capabilities. If the prospect indicated the system was outside of their budget or feature requirements, we both saved a lot of time on future demos and the entire process. Often times I would recommend other products to the prospect that provided a better match to the prospect’s needs and budget.