Almost every vendor selection process includes reference checks. And almost every reference check follows the same pattern: the vendor provides a list of three to five customers who are happy to speak with you. You call them. They tell you the product is great. You feel reassured. You proceed.
Vendors curate their reference lists carefully. The clients on that list have been asked to be references because they're satisfied customers, often ones who have a positive ongoing relationship with the vendor and a natural incentive to maintain it. They've also, in many cases, been coached on what to emphasize.
None of this means they're being dishonest. They genuinely may have had a good experience. But their experience may not reflect yours, for reasons that won't surface in a thirty-minute call.
Real due diligence requires going beyond the list. Here's what that means in practice:
- Find references the vendor didn't give you. Use LinkedIn to identify people who have worked with this vendor, ideally at organizations similar to yours. Reach out directly. People who aren't official references tend to be considerably more candid.
- Ask about the hard moments. Every implementation has them. The question isn't whether things went wrong, it's how the vendor behaved when they did. Did they own it? Did they resource up? Did they become defensive and contractual?
- Talk to the people who actually did the work. The executive sponsor who provides an official reference had a very different experience of the implementation than the project manager who was in the trenches. Talk to both.
- Ask about total cost of ownership, not just licensing. What did the implementation actually cost vs. what was quoted? What ongoing costs weren't clear upfront? What would they do differently?
If you're working with a system integrator or implementation partner, the due diligence bar needs to be even higher. These are the people who will be in your organization for months or years, and their capabilities, culture, and staffing practices will have an enormous impact on your outcome.
- Ask specifically who will be on your project, not the partners and senior consultants who appear in the proposal, but the actual team members who will be there day to day.
- Understand their bench depth. What happens when a key resource rolls off your project? How quickly can they backfill? What's their track record on staffing continuity
- Ask for examples of projects that didn't go well and how they were handled. If they can't point to any, that's itself a signal.
References are a starting point, not a conclusion. The organizations that invest in real due diligence before they sign tend to have substantially fewer surprises after they do.
