Interesting. I've found that for some earlier stage startups, but best in breed tend to have annual contracts as a non negotiable. Payment terms maybe, but I'm still contractually obligated for 1 year from my experience
They still have a 12 month contract, but you know you can walk away with 30 days notice in month 3 if implementation is poor.
That’s meeting in the middle and usually accepted by most businesses if you push.
If they say they risk not making a profit if you leave, offer to pay a setup fee that is entirely refunded if you stay past the 3rd month.
It means you’ll lose some more money if the implementation goes bad, but not as much as the whole 12 month term.
The reason is some mix of 1. we have real onboarding / startup costs, and those costs are frontloaded; 2. like many saas companies, we don't make much money on the first year; 3. if a prospect can't commit, it's a sign that implementation is highly likely to fail. We require work and resources from the customer to make this succeed. To use examples you've given elsewhere, an ESP requires training, engineering to import workflows, creation of new mail rules, etc. An annual contract is a component of our executive buyer's leverage to hammer through the work to realize value from us.
What OP may be able to make happen is a POC with written success criteria. Be prepared for vendors to be hard asses about the success criteria however. We refuse these for small (enterprise small) contracts.
OP should consider that perhaps their vendor selection process sucks? Or maybe -- if they're a high enough contract value -- getting references from other customers?
Note also that people here decrying annual -- or multiyear -- contracts will be the first to scream if a vendor raises prices. Which is absolutely fair play if a customer doesn't want an annual or multi-year contract. A customer's right to alter a deal with 30 days notice is a vendor's right to do the same.
Vendor selections can definitely always be better, but there doesn't seem to be too much flexibility for buyers when all said and done. At bigger companies annual commits (or longer) are welcome, but we've certainly had tool that are a total failure yet we're stuck with the bill. Someone on the buy side ends up seeing blame too, even if not our faults i.e. missing key feature that was misunderstood in buying process
I guess the answer is to negotiate hard to get what you want.
It’s absolutely a POC but with shared risk and a real concentration on onboarding/implementation - I’ve done this for lots of the software we use internally and it works well for us.