Best practices for selecting a financial services CRM through an RFP process

For private capital markets seeking to modernize deal and relationship management, choosing the right CRM platform is a high-stakes decision. But how do you evaluate solutions thoroughly and confidently — especially when multiple stakeholders are involved? That’s where a request for proposal (RFP) process comes in.

This structured buying process, which involves issuing a set of standardized questions to a set of potential technology solutions partners, simplifies software selection by allowing stakeholders to assess their options in a consistent, comprehensive manner. At Intapp, we’ve participated in hundreds of RFP processes over the years for top advisory, investment banking, and private capital firms — many of which became clients. As a result, we have unique insight into what makes an RFP process successful.

This blog post dives into the pros and cons of using an RFP process to select your financial services CRM, and shares best practices for running an effective process that will allow your firm to make a confident technology investment.

RFP pros and cons

Buying through an RFP process has pros and cons.

Because of how well documented the process is, your firm can conduct an extremely thorough evaluation. It gives relevant stakeholders across the business the opportunity to align on what the ideal solution should offer — and vendors’ ability to meet those requirements is comprehensively captured before any buying decision is made.

One downside of an RFP process, however, is speed. It takes time for stakeholders to write the RFP, agree on requirements, evaluate vendor responses, and reach a decision. As a result, choosing a solution via an RFP process typically takes longer than a more informal or ad hoc buying process — potentially delaying vendor selection, solution onboarding, and time to value for end users.

Prerequisites to issuing an RFP

There are several prerequisites to address before issuing your RFP. One is whether you’ll include a request for information (RFI) as part of your process.

An RFI helps you narrow the list of CRM vendors that will receive your RFP by gathering preliminary information about their business, capabilities, and the market landscape. Vendors with promising responses are selected to receive the RFP.

In many cases, your firm may already be in discussions with certain vendors. These vendors can often bypass the RFI and move directly to the RFP.

Here are three other things to address before issuing an RFP to CRM vendors:

1. Scope: Which teams are likely to use the solution? This will inform which stakeholders should be involved in the RFP process. It’s advised to include representatives from each business unit that will use the chosen solution, along with stakeholders from relevant IT or compliance teams. All stakeholders involved should reach a rough agreement on decision criteria before the RFP process begins.
2. Budget: Your firm should be committed to making a financial investment, and have a rough sense of the budget. While exact pricing may be unknown until vendors respond to the RFP, the firm should understand the approximate scale of the investment it’s willing to make.
3. Timeline: Define each step of the RFP process and deadlines for milestones, including the RFP issue date, vendor questions and responses, and product demonstrations.

RFP requirements

RFPs typically consist of a narrative document that introduces the firm, outlines the process logistics, and highlights important use cases and requirements. This is usually accompanied by a questionnaire (often in Microsoft Excel) that vendors must complete to demonstrate their ability to meet specific requirements.

This questionnaire captures the firm’s decision criteria and enables a thorough comparison across vendors. Well-defined RFP requirements are essential to ensuring that your business requirements are met and that vendors tailor their responses and demos to your actual use cases — rather than offering generic features that may or may not work for your firm.

Many firms select tech-savvy members from each stakeholder team to help define the requirements, while others hire consultants to conduct fact-finding interviews with each team and draft the requirements. Typically one team member from IT or procurement will compile all input and manage the overall process.

Based on our experience, we recommend including the following requirement categories and questions in your RFP:

• Relationship management
  • What data is collected about contacts or companies in the firm’s network?
  • How is this data collected (e.g., Outlook emails, calendars, third-party market intelligence, etc.)?
  • What is the process for manually entering data?
  • What automated data enrichment capabilities are available to reduce manual data entry?
  • Describe any deal and relationship insights the solution can provide based on firm and third-party market intelligence.
• Sourcing/pipeline
  • How does the solution enable pipeline building and tracking?
  • What analytics are available for sourcing and deal activities?
  • How does the solution report on pipeline progress and deal status?
• Deal execution
  • How does the solution help professionals execute deals?
  • What task management functionality is available?
  • What deal structures can the solution accommodate (e.g., fundraise, investment, merger, acquisition, co-investment, etc.)?
• Reporting
  • How can users consume information (e.g., on demand, via tearsheets, on a mobile app, etc.)?
  • How are reports configured, populated, and distributed?
  • What features provide leadership with visibility into deal cycles?
• Marketing
  • Does the solution provide email marketing campaign creation and management capabilities within the platform or through integrations?
  • What marketing analytics exist, and how can marketing teams leverage the solution to measure campaign performance?
  • How does the marketing functionality integrate with the solution — does it provide professionals with visibility into all contact interactions?
  • What capabilities are available for managing events?
• Integrations
  • What out-of-the-box integrations are available?
  • What is the effort required for a typical integration?
  • Is an API available?
  • Have you ever integrated your solution with [list specific tools your firm uses]?
• Implementation and support
  • What does a typical implementation timeline look like?
  • How much does a typical implementation cost?
  • What level of support and training will we receive after we go live?
• Vendor information
  • Employee count and office locations
  • Number of years in business
  • R&D budget and revenue
  • Number of active clients
  • Clients in the same industry
  • Client references
• Pricing
  • What is your pricing model (per seat vs. enterprise license)?
  • What is the total cost of ownership, including base price, the price of add-ons, and the typical cost of implementation and maintenance?
• Information security
  • How does this solution meet our firm’s information security requirements?
  • List all requirements including those related to your cloud provider, architecture details, SSO, or certifications like SOC2.

Thinking about issuing an RFP for a CRM platform? Download our customizable RFP template to equip your firm with a vendor evaluation matrix, built-in scoring framework, and other tools that will help you make the right choice.