The Story of Olive

In 2017, Olive’s co-founder Chris Heard was waiting for yet another flight at a quiet airport bar, having just met his 30th stakeholder. A veteran in enterprise software sales, he spent months with countless meetings for just one organization, and still they couldn’t make up their minds. Working with his internal champion, Chris of course made every effort to influence the decision in his company's favor, but nine months into the sales cycle, he realized his solution may not actually be the right fit for this customer. 
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"This is not how companies should buy and sell software."
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Over the years Chris noticed a rapid increase in the software selection process being controlled by the sales teams. Buyers had become tired of complex buying processes and wanted to simplify their buying process so they could innovate faster. Unfortunately in simplifying this process, they handed control of the buying process to sales people. This resulted in vendors with the best sales teams winning their business, while the vendors with the ideal solution went unnoticed.
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Looking at the tools available for vendors Vs. sales people, it was obvious that the scales were heavily weighted in favour of the vendor. Olive would change that. Long time colleague (and now co-founder of Olive) Dan Harrison agreed. They ideated on how to develop a solution that would benefit buyers and sellers alike, enabling visibility into company-wide needs, automating tedious tasks, reducing time, effort, risk and cost of evaluations, and retiring the traditional RFP process, #RIPRFP!

The Solution? A technology evaluation platform for IT consultants and IT leaders that's efficient and free of bias, revolutionizing the vendor selection process.

In 2018 Olive was born, and Chris and Dan set to work on reimagining the current process of technology evaluation to remove the inefficiencies and bias from the buying process. 

Olive would be a tool made for IT consultants an buyers to find solutions that drive innovation. With our early customers, we learned that there were some major pain points in the software procurement process that we could solve immediately;

Save Time, Reduce Effort, and Minimize the Cost of Technology Evaluations

By enabling visibility into companywide needs, and transparency from vendors, we are innovating the RFP process. No more spreadsheets, no more googling for RFP templates! Save time, effort and reduce the cost of technology evaluations by streamlining your process in the Olive Platform.

Make the Perfect Buyer Technology Match,
Every Time

Extending this transparency into the process of working with solution providers, we connect sellers to buyers based on the buyer’s needs. Whether it’s HCM, CRM, ERP, LMS, POS, or any other type of software or technology solution, Olive helps determine the best fit based on unbiased data, so you can be confident you will make the best choice.