When a consulting group submitted an “outrageous” proposal for Toastmasters International’s new web platform, COO and CIO Heidi Hollenbeck turned to Gartner for a review that saved her organization millions.
A two-year, $2.5 million deal was renegotiated, leading to a more cost-effective nine-month, $500K deal that achieved the same outcomes and delivered stronger value to shareholders.
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Heidi Hollenbeck, COO and CIO
We were researching a new web platform and we brought in a consulting group to give us an analysis and a plan, and it seemed a little outrageous to me, so I took it to Gartner and had them review it, and they found some really great insight into that proposal that made me go back and rethink what we were looking for. So I did not move forward with that proposal.
Initially, that proposal was a $2.5 million, two-year deal. And now we’re doing a half a million, nine-month deal and getting the same outcome. You have endless research and business cases that you can look at. If you’re just giving a presentation to the board of directors, you can look at how to do that, best practices. If you want to actually submit budgets or contracts for review, you get feedback from what is working out in the workforce.
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