[...]we adivce go to this website to see more about Miami Heat jerseys and others. [...]…

[...]we adivce go to this website to see more about Chicago Bears jerseys and others. [...]…

What about one more question on the disclosure of the third party and OEM components in their system?

#9 isn’t really fair. Sure, vendors are sloppy with their own sites (why tie up professional services in work that doesn’t generate revenue directly?). It’s a bit like doctors with a secret smoking habit. They should know better but hey, they’re only human

And the one I would add to the list: my favorite question while sitting through vendor demos (before I knew them as well as I do now). With a smoke-and-mirrors demo of all the features, always ask “Cool. But how do we turn it off?”

A couple of posts we did that compliment what you wrote here:
http://www.cmsmyth.com/blogs/cms_myth/archive/2009/04/14/get-your-cms-vendor-off-the-script.aspx

http://www.cmsmyth.com/blogs/cms_myth/archive/2009/05/30/does-your-cms-fit.aspx

I think I like Piero’s suggestion.

When we’re interviewing a candidate for a senior job, it’s not unusual to have 3 or 4 interviews of 60 minutes each. And it’s a whole lot easier to replace a badly hiring candidate than a badly chosen CMS, I think.

Secondly, it really worries me when I see a long agenda and a short amount of time allocated to conduct it. It raises flags with me that the buyer isn’t serious about the project to give it necessary investment of their time or they see the whole project as a buying a commodity. It can also indicate that they’ve already chosen a solution and is just going through the motions.

My recommendation to buyers is allow 1 hour of a end user focused demo / scenarios and a second hour for a more technical discussion (how easy is it to setup, how flexible are the templates, the architecture and other techie questions)

Back to the original point. As a vendor, none of these questions listed here would give me much heartburn (but then again, I’ve been doing this for 10 years…) I might prefer not to answer some of the questions, but they are all reasonable. Maybe the lesson learned is to treat these sorts of questions as a test for the vendor. Any vendor should be able to respond to odd questions. If they won’t (or can’t) it says a lot about the vendor and/or the vendor’s sales team.

If the buyer has involved some external help, like myself, I would not advice them to ask the questions. The customer should expect the external expert to know the answer to a few of them (e.g. 2, 3, 5, 6) and for the rest, I can’t see how their answers changes much.

Here some easy ways of keeping a vendor on their toes:
- if you want to show us slides, you have to send the PPT at least 2 days in advance
- follow the agenda
- show us a demo
- send us a list of who’s coming to the meeting, including names and title and role in project
- ask about the upgrade to the next planned version; how difficult will it be? when?
- ask about what they see as the most significant challenges in your project
- give them no more than 60 minutes

Keep up the great posts.

Cheers!

#3: How active is your developer community?
- Counting developers is like counting references – what matters is: Is it likely that somebody answers my questions. Again: Quality vs. quantity.

and for #5, I would ask for a listing of some recommended freelancers/contractors/implementation partners.

The other questions are interesting mostly for industry insiders, including those working at digital agencies. For buyers, I would call them a detour for CMS selection and probably a good source of confusion, at least for the uninformed buyers, some of which I am sure read this blog as well.

However, to complement your list, I have a question that I usually include whenever I have an advisory role in CMS selection projects: What kind of companies or websites is [product name] not primarily designed for?

Answers vary on this one, but I’ve found that this question often isn’t perceived as being “hostile” in any way, and you can learn a whole lot from the answer. Not only about the product, but about the vendor as well.

Tell us about 2 or 3 projects where you were not successful and the reasons for those. I am quite sure they will blame requirements or implementation team but if they are honest, it’ll help to know the kind of things they can’t do that well.

If, a vendor, doesn’t do this, it will come back as a boomerang and for sure they don’t want these kind of negative chatter going around. Especially with the power of social media these days!

I personally welcome any kind of questions and I would urge all who is thinking about buying a CMS, to really assess what is important for the organization and what will be important in a couple of years(this is a difficult one). Further more, organizations who are in a CMS selection, need to be aware that this needs to be done by someone who knows what a CMS is and what the capabilities of a CMS are, this way the chance of misinterpretations are minimal.