The Procurement Filter That Keeps Mid-Market Buyers from a Boutique ServiceNow Consulting Partner
A head of IT at a 650-person logistics group in southern Germany called me in late September. He had just signed with one of the Big 4 for a two-year ServiceNow programme covering ITSM, HRSD and basic SPM. The number on the SOW was a shade under €2.3 million. He was not calling to celebrate. He was calling because, three weeks in, he had met four different people from the delivery team, none of whom had been in the sales meetings, and the solution architect who had sold him the design was now scheduled for one day a month on the engagement. I asked him why he had not seriously evaluated a smaller partner. His answer was the thing I want to write about today: his procurement team ran a standard RFP template they had used for ERP and the enterprise data warehouse. The template filtered out every firm with fewer than 500 employees globally in question 3. He never got to see a boutique ServiceNow consulting proposal because the gate stopped them before the technical scoring started. This is the mechanism. It is not that mid-market buyers prefer the Big 4. It is that mid-market procurement teams import filters built for different categories of spend and apply them to platform work...
