Will Spendflo replace your procurement team? No.

When we talk to customers across the globe, an objection we often face is, “We already have an excellent procurement team.” Yes. And we’re not here to replace them. In fact, Spendflo is designed and built to help procurement teams navigate the labyrinth that SaaS buying has now become.

Labyrinthine SaaS buying

Traditional software procurement playbooks often don’t work with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Here’s why.

SaaS pricing is opaque

Enterprise pricing for SaaS is often opaque. For instance, most tools offer basic and individual pricing upfront, but invite you to email them for enterprise pricing. As a result, procurement teams enter negotiations without as much as a ballpark estimate of what they might have to pay.

SaaS procurement requires  different negotiation levers

SaaS pricing is structured differently and there is more room for negotiation. Your procurement teams may be using levers such as ‘competition’ or ‘longer-term agreements’ to negotiate contracts. But SaaS buying has other levers that can produce discounts. For example, you can offer marketing rights, a positive case study, collaborative events etc. for a better price, which procurement teams are unaware of. In fact, our study shows that 10% of procurement teams don’t use any lever at all. 

SaaS contract structures are complex

SaaS contracts typically include provisions related to data ownership, data privacy, security standards and compliance requirements. Determining data ownership is often complicated because the responsibilities are shared between the vendor and the customer. Moreover, the legal responsibilities of ensuring compliance and handling of personal data come with nuances that can make the task tedious for teams. As a result, procurement teams are stuck in vendor trust processes that further delay the process.

SaaS requires continuous optimization

SaaS procurement is not a one-time event. To maximize value, organizations need to continuously optimize their SaaS usage and contracts. This involves periodically reviewing and reassessing their subscriptions, evaluating the actual usage of the tools, identifying cost-saving opportunities and exploring potential upgrades, alternatives or downsizing options. Traditional procurement teams may struggle with the ongoing management and optimization required for SaaS contracts.

How Spendflo augments procurement teams

Across all the challenges above and more, Spendflo works as an extended arm to handle various complexities in SaaS buying. Here are a few ways we work alongside procurement teams.

Discovery

Take the example of the most basic category of project management tools. G2 lists over 430 products here! Spendflo understands your specific needs, identifies options for your consideration, recommends the tools that’re right for your use cases and budgets. We can also bring feedback of users just like you from our customer roster. 

SaaS negotiation

We leverage our bank of price benchmark data and negotiation playbooks to help you get the fairest deal quickly. We save Procurement teams hundreds of hours so that they can focus on strategic sourcing for the organization.

Vendor relationships 

Our expert buyers are more than happy to contact and negotiate your contracts for you. But, we do not insist on it. We can help you with insights and benchmark data so that your procurement teams can negotiate from a position of strength. This is exactly what we did for Remo, a virtual event platform, who saved 30% on their entire SaaS spends, and as high as 85% on certain tools with Spendflo’s assisted buying and negotiation levers. 

SaaS insights

We enable 360-degree visibility into licenses, costs and usage, empowering your procurement teams to make renewal decisions for ongoing optimization. With our sentiment surveys, procurement teams can understand which are the essential tools, how are they being used, how satisfied the users are etc. to make renew/renegotiate/replace decisions. 

SaaS management

The Spendflo platform offers an all-in-one solution for all SaaS buying needs. We’re committed to streamlining the entire procurement process through our platform, Slack app, dedicated CSM and real-time support.

Security & compliance

With Spendflo’s streamlined process and meticulous checklists, we accelerate the security and compliance parts of vendor onboarding. We collate all security requests and documents for quicker processing. 

In short, Spendflo is your procurement team’s superpower to buy SaaS at the right place at the shortest time. If you don’t have a procurement team, we can handle that for you as well. 

Would you like to see how all this works? Book a demo now and get a free savings analysis too.

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