In what marketing will refer to as the good old days of the Source-to-Pay marketplace, when the space was just emerging and most analysts couldn’t see past the shiny UI to what features were, or more importantly, were NOT, lurking underneath, it was a wild-west, anything goes marketplace.

Marketers could make grandiose claims as to what the platform did and did not do, and if they could give a good (PowerPoint) presentation to the analysts, the analysts would buy it and spread the word, and the story would grow bigger and bigger until it should be seen as crazy and unrealistic, but instead was seen as the new gospel according to the power on high.

Big names would get bigger, pockets would get fatter, but customers would lose out when they needed advanced functionality or configurability that just was not there. On the road-map, maybe, but would it get implemented before the company got acquired by a bigger company, which would halt innovative development dead in its tracks?

But those days, which still exist for some vendors with long-standing relationships with the big name analyst firms, may soon be numbered. Why? Now that SpendMatters is doing SolutionMaps, which are deep dives into well defined functionality, a customer can know for sure whether or not a certain provider has a real solution in the area, how deep it goes, and how it compares to other providers. As a result, the depth of insight that will soon be expected by a customer has been taken up a couple of notches, and any analyst firm and consultancy that doesn’t up the bar, is going to be avoided, left behind.

Once (potential) customers realize the degree of information that is available, and should be available, they’ll never settle for less. And that’s a good thing. Because it means the days of black box marketing will soon be over. While North America may never be a Germany where accurate technical specs lead the way, at least accurate claims will. And every vendor will be pushed to do better.