The Vendor's Evaluation Guide - Exit Playbook

Vendor evaluation season has changed. Renewals now resemble audits: what did we pay, what did we get, and how do we prove it. CFOs have compressed the payback window, and across the market employers are replacing partners that cannot demonstrate measurable impact. Benefits leaders have a well-worn playbook for selecting a vendor, few have a system for leaving one.

That is the gap this guide closes. The most consequential decisions of the year are rarely the launches. They are the exits: the program employees still value but that no longer justifies its cost, the capable partner that no longer fits the strategy, the investment whose return you can no longer defend to finance. Most leaders approach these moments without a framework, which makes a defensible decision feel harder than it is.

The Vendor's Evaluation Guide provides that framework. Two leaders who have run these transitions at enterprise scale set out how to read the signals, execute a clean rip and replace, communicate the change to employees without creating avoidable disruption, and select a replacement that clears a higher bar, so the same conversation does not return in two years.

What this guide helps you decide

A vendor rarely fails on a single day. It erodes. Engagement plateaus, the market advances, and the organization is left with a program that performs adequately but no longer earns its place. A total failure is straightforward to identify. The difficult judgment is the ambiguous one: the capable partner, the solution that is not broken but quietly stopped delivering the return that justified it.

The guide equips leaders to make that judgment with confidence. It shows how to separate genuine signals from sentiment, how to name the internal bias that keeps an underperforming program alive, how to design the transition around the member's experience rather than an internal timeline, and how to build the fiduciary record that documents and defends the decision. Every framework is vendor agnostic, so it applies to any partner currently under review.

Five things you will take away from the guide

• The signals that a solution has stopped earning its place, including the integration argument embedded vendors rely on to justify renewal.²
• The four break-up types, and why diagnosing yours first determines how much of the rationale you owe employees.²
• How to communicate a change to a well-liked program without creating concern among the majority who never used it.²
• The transition toolkit that keeps a rip and replace from disrupting members, from auto registration to white glove outreach from the incoming partner.²
• The evidence stack and eight validation questions that prevent you from replacing one vendor with the same category of risk.²

Written by two leaders who have lived these decisions from both sides of the table.

• Candace Jodice, Head of Benefits Strategy at Sword Health, previously managed a $3B+ annual benefits budget covering more than 300,000 employees at CVS Health. She has led vendor transitions at enterprise scale, including eight post-merger benefits harmonizations.
• Jeannette Abbott, Head of Ecosystem Relationships at Sword Health, has watched hundreds of enterprise employers make the same call, with a market level view of how top employers evaluate vendor performance.