Vendor Onboarding Playbook

FISPAN’s Vendor Onboarding Playbook

Manage your enterprise buying process, align multiple stakeholders, and make it easy for customers to buy from you.

FISPAN’s platform helps financial institutions remove friction and provide an enhanced omnichannel experience for their commercial clients through embedded business banking services. As FISPAN sells to financial institutions, the evaluation, approval and buying process takes several months, with many technical, third party risk, due diligence and legal requirements. That’s why FISPAN’s sales team uses a Vendor Onboarding playbook to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy and onboard FISPAN.

Why should I use this playbook?

If you sell to enterprise customers or companies with a lot of regulatory requirements, there’s typically a complicated process for being selected and onboarded as a vendor.

Following a playbook for complex deals enables you to:

• Elevate your project management
  

Creating a structured, shared playbook to map out the timeline, milestones, and key next steps is critical for organizing and creating mutual accountability the process. 

• More easily get a consensus approval
  

More stakeholders mean more people who need to approve. Make it easier for your customers to buy by leaving “breadcrumbs” for them to easily pick up and follow through the process.

• Get new stakeholders up to speed quickly
  

By outlining all the steps, details, and resources in one place, new stakeholders can jump in halfway through the process and have the context they need. This helps avoid the possibility of new stakeholder and approvers derailing the deal.

What’s in this playbook?

Zack uses this playbook to customize the buying and approval process to fit the customers’ needs, and then to create mutual control the process and keep both sides accountable. The playbook covers broad requirements for being accepted by the financial institution, the scope of the project, and all the legal agreements needed to sign off on the purchase.

First, the bank needs to accept and approve the Accord playbook, which Zack includes as the first step so all stakeholders can see it was approved. Then, the shared playbook guides customers through four main stages:

1. Vendor Onboarding & Resource Prioritization – joint alignment, preparation, and approval of the procurement process
2. Third Party Risk & InfoSec – specific steps for regulated organizations
3. Technical Diligence Validation – validate FISPAN’s software
4. Legal Agreements – align on and track approval of all legal documents
   

Who is this playbook for?

If your organization sells software to enterprise customers and goes through new vendor onboarding, evaluation, or procurement, this playbook can help you streamline your process and provide an upgraded buying experience.

FISPAN uses the Vendor Onboarding playbook specifically for banks and financial institutions, but it can be used and adjusted for any major software industry with deals of $100K+.

How should I use this playbook?

When selling to enterprise customers, you’ll likely follow similar reviews and controls as the ones included in this playbook – there will almost always be a technical validation process and a security or risk management program. You may be able to remove the due diligence or regulation-related steps if your customers don’t need to follow those.

Otherwise, Zack recommends adjusting the steps to the typical procurement process of your industry or organization. He also suggests translating your internal vocabulary into more customer-facing language when possible.