Once you have an Ideal Vendor Profile, the next trap is obvious: you still run the same bloated selection process as before. You have better criteria, but you apply them to an overcrowded longlist, and the cycle drags on anyway. Most teams do not need more vendor meetings. They need a cleaner way to decide who is worth meeting in the first place.

Why your shortlists keep exploding

When a new market entry or cleanup of your global footprint kicks off, the pattern tends to repeat:

Everyone throws names into the ring, past vendors, referrals, big brands, niche specialists.
An RFP goes out to “keep it fair,” and suddenly you are reading responses from a dozen providers.
Demos start, calendar load spikes, and people anchor on surface impressions because they are tired.

The result is not usually a terrible decision. It is a “fine” decision that was more expensive, slower, and harder to justify than it needed to be. The quiet cost is everything you did not do while the selection dragged on, hires postponed, launches delayed, issues papered over with stopgaps.

The point of an IVP is to avoid this, not just to add another slide to your deck.

A different goal for the first 48 hours

Once your IVP exists, the first 48 hours of any selection process should have one goal: shrink the universe of options to a shortlist that makes sense on paper before you talk to anyone. That means using your IVP as a filter, not a narrative:

Start with must‑haves only: markets, service scope, risk posture, scale. If a provider cannot clear those, they do not make any list.
Look for evidence of real work that looks like yours: recent implementations in your countries, at your size, with similar complexity.
Ignore anything that is not tied to your IVP: generic “global coverage,” beautiful platforms, or noise about future roadmap.

If you cannot explain, in one paragraph, why each vendor is on your list in terms of your IVP, they should not be on it.

What a better shortlist actually looks like

A useful shortlist has three traits:

Every vendor clearly meets your must‑haves. You are no longer wasting time on players that were never viable.
Each one is strong on different dimensions of your IVP, so your internal debate is about real trade‑offs, not “who is obviously disqualified.”
You can defend, in writing, why each name is there, tied directly to your requirements, not to who shouted the loudest.

When you get this right, the work shifts: less time arguing about who to include, more time pressure‑testing scenarios like “How do you handle an unexpected entity closure in China?” or “What happens if we double headcount in Mexico inside 12 months?”

Making your process less performative, more honest

The other benefit of a tighter shortlist is cultural. It takes some theater out of the process. Internally, people see fewer options and feel more permission to go deep instead of skimming. Externally, vendors are not dragged into cycles they have no realistic chance of winning. They can opt out early when the fit is wrong.

You will still use RFPs, demos, security reviews, and reference checks. The difference is that you are using them to answer targeted questions about a small number of sensible candidates, not to churn through the entire market.

Where tools and intermediaries actually help

There are two honest ways to get to this kind of shortlist:

Build it yourself: maintain your own internal view of providers, update it as you learn, and apply your IVP every time you go to market.
Use a neutral intermediary or tool that does the structuring for you—turning your requirements into filters and giving you a focused set of options tied to your profile.

KonduitHUB sits in that second bucket: it takes your markets and priorities, runs them against structured data on providers, and gives you a ranked list to react to in 24–48 hours. The value is not the list itself; it is the time and attention you get back to spend on the conversations that actually matter.

If you already have a strong internal map of the market, you may not need help. If you do not, borrowing someone else’s structure is often cheaper than building your own.

The quiet questions behind every selection

When you look ahead to your next 12–24 months of global work, a simple question tells you whether your process needs to change: If we ran our last vendor selection again, with what we know now, would we:

Invite the same vendors?
Spend as much time on them?
Make the same trade‑offs?

If the honest answer is “probably not,” the issue is not your ability to evaluate vendors. It is how you build the shortlist in the first place. Fix that, and everything downstream; RFPs, demos, security reviews, gets lighter, faster, and less political.

After the IVP: How to Shortlist Global Vendors Without Burning a Quarter