Crowdteria

Today I’d like to announce a significant milestone for a project I have been working on. Those that are close to me know that I am passionate about technical presales and becoming a trusted advisor to my customers. The past decade has taught me that the most successful projects are built on a foundation of mutual trust between evaluators and vendors. This ensures that project requirements represent the needs of an organization accurately, and proposed system designs reflect the real capabilities of a vendor’s offering. Unfortunately, experience has shown that achieving this level of collaboration is difficult and often relies more on the skills of the teams involved and less on a set of repeatable processes. The issue is compounded by the out of date tools evaluators use to issue, and vendors use to respond to, RFIs and RFPs. These tools ignore the reality of the modern IT sales cycle where needs can evolve over time, many stakeholders must be involved, and vendors often help to define requirements. To achieve optimal collaboration between evaluators and vendors, the industry needs better tools for IT product evaluation. To solve these challenges, I have spent the last 2.5 years creating Crowdteria, an RFX platform that unifies evaluator and vendor workflows in a single web-based application. For evaluators, Crowdteria simplifies needs gathering across multiple stakeholders and incorporates valuable intelligence about which requirements are trending for a given product type or industry. Crowdteria can then issue the RFX project, contact the vendors, collect responses, and assist in ranking vendor submissions. For vendors, Crowdteria fosters response teamwork and includes an integrated document library to automatically populate the submission with the most accurate information. Crowdteria even allows vendors to proactively create templates for sharing with prospects that are still in the process of defining their requirements. The net effect is end-to-end automation of the business processes that underpin the RFX on both the evaluator and vendor side, while allowing flexibility to evolve project criteria on the fly. Crowdteria is now available for both evaluators and vendors to begin testing during an initial preview period. The application is live and ready to begin accepting your projects. If you would like to test Crowdteria, please reach out to me directly. Experience firsthand what a better RFX workflow designed to reclaim time and improve teamwork can be like. There will be much more to come in the next several weeks as I further introduce Crowdteria’s capabilities to you, but for now there is cause for celebration. Thanks to those of you that gave a helping hand, a listening ear, or candid feedback during development. It is through your guidance that this platform exists today.