Eight questions, not thirty.
Most vendor-selection tools ask thirty questions to produce a top-10 that includes whoever paid the most. The PIM Shortlist tool asks eight, because eight is actually enough to cut the 42-vendor classified index to a top-5 with >80% fit probability.
- Target audience (B2B, B2C, both)
- Industry (food, fashion, electronics, manufacturing, etc.)
- Company size
- SKU range
- Active channels
- IT maturity
- Governance needs
- Enrichment / authoring complexity
How a vendor gets ranked.
Each vendor in the classified set is tagged against the same eight axes. The match score is a weighted dot-product: your answers against the vendor's profile, weighted higher on the axes that tend to be deal-breakers (SKU range, segment fit, deployment model).
The scoring is deliberately conservative. A score of 80+ means 'this vendor has publicly referenced customers with your shape'. A score of 60–80 means 'plausible fit, verify in shortlist discovery'. Below 60 drops off the top-5.
Things the tool deliberately refuses to score.
- Price. Too opaque across vendors; use the Cost Calculator separately.
- Cultural fit. No questionnaire can score whether your team will get on with the SI.
- Product roadmap. Vendor roadmaps move quarterly; the tool only scores what ships today.
- Regional presence. We tag this but don't let it dominate; a great vendor without a local partner is still worth shortlisting with caveats.
Treat it as a first filter, not a final answer.
The tool's job is to cut 42 options to 5 without you having to read 42 profiles. The top-5 then gets a real discovery call, a real demo, and a reference-customer conversation. If you skip those three steps, no scoring tool will save you.