How to Tell If Your Vendor Is Selling You What You Actually Need

The reports are taking three days to run. Different programs define the same terms differently. Manual workarounds have their own workarounds. Leadership is starting to ask questions about why basic reporting takes so long.

Finally, the pain is bad enough that someone gets approval to fix it. Vendors are invited to present. Demos happen. Proposals arrive. IT evaluates the technology. Procurement evaluates the contract. A decision gets made.

But what about the step everyone knows should happen first, yet somehow becomes just a check-the-box exercise: figuring out what you actually need before evaluating what vendors are selling.

It’s not that people don’t know better. Every IT leader would agree in principle that you can’t evaluate whether a solution fits until you understand your environment, your problems, and your requirements. But when you’ve been operating without clear direction, when teams are siloed and cross-departmental collaboration is difficult, and when the problem has gotten painful enough that action feels urgent, that foundational work gets skipped.

The thinking goes: “We need to move. We’ll figure out the details during implementation.”

Here’s what happens instead.

The Predictable Pattern

Three months into implementation, the vendor discovers your data definitions conflict across programs. “This is more complex than expected,” they say. The timeline slips. The change order arrives. Or worse, the project continues on the original timeline but with compromises that mean the system works technically but doesn’t fit how your agency actually operates.

Six months in, you realize the vendor’s proposal assumed your environment was ready when it wasn’t. The scope didn’t account for the foundation work you needed. The budget didn’t include definition alignment, pipeline hardening, or integration stabilization. Those weren’t line items because nobody assessed whether they were necessary.

A year later, you have a delivered system that your team doesn’t use, or an expensive pilot that stalled, or a working implementation that required twice the budget and three times the timeline because the real scope emerged during execution instead of during planning.

This pattern is predictable because the root cause is always the same: you evaluated the vendor’s solution before you understood what you actually needed.

Why This Keeps Happening

It’s not ignorance. It’s incentives.

When budget pressure is high and leadership wants solutions, the path of least resistance is to skip straight to vendor evaluation. Internal work takes time. It requires pulling already-stretched teams into discovery sessions. It means admitting you don’t have perfect clarity about your current state. It risks surfacing problems that delay procurement.

Vendor evaluation, by contrast, feels productive. Demos are scheduled. Proposals arrive. Comparisons are made. Decisions feel imminent. The work is visible and forward-moving.

But evaluating vendors before doing internal work is like comparing house paint colors before you know whether the foundation is cracked.

The Work Nobody Wants to Do (But Everyone Needs)

Before you can tell whether a vendor is selling you what you actually need, you have to know what you actually need. That means auditing your current state, organizing your data, identifying the real operational problems, and mapping business requirements.

It also means understanding the difference between technology vendors who sell products and services vendors who sell implementation work, because each requires different evaluation criteria. It means recognizing when vendors are proposing solutions before assessing your environment. It means knowing which red flags indicate a vendor is overselling and which green flags indicate they’re aligned with your success.

And it means finding the balance between sufficient preparation and endless paralysis, because inaction has costs too.

We’ve built a comprehensive guide that walks through the internal work agencies need to complete, how to work with trusted partners on that work without outsourcing it entirely, and how to evaluate both technology and services vendor proposals once you’re ready.

Download the full guide to get the complete framework for making vendor decisions that actually fit your environment.