Why your procurement team needs expert support.

Procurement teams are under significant pressure to deliver and maintain a company’s tech stack, but our research shows they are trying to do so whilst battling the following challenges:

• 82% of businesses do not fully utilize procurement automation, meaning that manual, inefficient and time-consuming tasks with risk of human error or delay are still active within the process
• 61% of a procurement teams’ working year is spent solely buying and renewing SaaS contracts - they cannot get ahead of their constant workload and be more strategic, instead they are constantly firefighting
• 385 working hours are lost a year to inefficient administrative meetings alone
• 44% of procurement leaders note a lack of cost-awareness throughout their business, meaning procurement process buy-in is lacking and maverick spending is rife
• 35% of organizations are unwilling to invest in more developed procurement skills, so teams cannot advance in capabilities

It’s clear that, even if you do have a dedicated procurement team in-house, they need support to keep up with the continuous mountain of work they have whilst also dealing with these weights holding them back.

We hear about these struggles from our customers before they’ve decided to get support from us. And they almost always sing from the same hymn sheet. Let’s take a look at some of them.

“We can’t be strategic and source the best tools when we are so reactive.”

Having to constantly be involved in lengthy negotiations, monitor upcoming renewals, facilitate various intake requests - all with mostly manual, disparate and decentralized processes - means it’s common for procurement to feel more akin to firefighting than facilitating growth.

But procurement provides the most benefit to the organization when it’s being strategic, both being involved in business growth strategy at the highest level, and in its operation.Our research has shown that companies with the most advanced procurement processes are 32% more able to implement new initiatives across the business, and 29% faster in bringing new products and services to market. This gives them a real competitive advantage.

However it’s hard to achieve this without help. If you want to negotiate effectively, you need to have visibility over your tech stack and good usage data and pricing benchmarks available to you. But how do you collect all of this information if you’re constantly involved in negotiations? This consistently puts you on the back foot.

Maybe others in the business can help? Employees, executives and stakeholders within your organization have other day jobs and mission-critical priorities, and so simply cannot regularly apply their focus and skills to negotiations. Plus, without a robust process and a cost-aware culture, maverick spending and Shadow IT rear their heads - meaning procurement teams spend more time finding and solving these issues.

This is why people are turning to Vertice. Not only can we provide a spend management solution that gives you total visibility over your tech stack, contract and pricing information and critical software data points, but it’s all in a single-pane-of-glass platform so it’s all easily and readily available.

And our expert buyers are exactly that - experts in negotiating the best contracts for SaaS. They can take care of all of your negotiations, freeing you up to conduct the empowering strategy work - safe in the knowledge that you’re still getting the best savings outcomes. Whilst some may give you negotiation as an add on, it’s a core part of Vertice. And if your internal team still wants to conduct these discussions, the Vertice buying team can support them with advice on which levers to pull to get the best deal.

“We don’t have comprehensive data, benchmarks and market research to help with our negotiations”.

SaaS contract negotiation is becoming ever more data-driven. Without it, customers are blind to key pricing points surrounding user volume, usage limits and additional features - not to mention having little idea what a ‘standard’ price for the base product would be.

Without data and benchmarks, guesswork is all buyers have, which leads to being locked into contracts that are overprovisioned, expensive and of poor value for the investment.

The problem is - collecting all of this is laborious and difficult to analyze effectively without either an appropriate SaaS tool (further amplifying the issue) or a dedicated analytics team. Or, if this stays within the remit of the procurement team, allocating time to research, collect and crunch the data from internal and external sources whilst undertaking their day-to-day responsibilities.

This leaves procurement teams in a perpetual cycle of knowing they need more data and benchmarks, but never getting any (or enough to be useful) and therefore stuck trying to refine guesswork. With the Vertice platform, you can get access to pricing and contract data, benchmarks, and research from over 16,000 global vendors. And you don’t have to go searching for it all either - it’s all there in the single-pane-of-glass platform design. Plus you can pick out key contract terms and information so it’s readily available for you as well.

This means you have everything you need to conduct an effective negotiation in an easily accessible manner, without having to find the time, expertise and effort to do it yourself. And it’s constantly updated, so you always have the latest market information and pricing benchmarks.

“We have to provide a lot of support and data to third party negotiators, which means we aren’t seeing any difference to doing it ourselves”.

Some third-party spend management vendors work with you to supplement or upgrade your negotiating powers, or even take it on for you so you can become more strategic in your procurement activities. However, this relies on said third-party having access to your internal contract information and prices, as well as comprehensive market data including typical contract terms, costs and up to date industry trends and information.

It’s a fact that many vendors in this space struggle to marry these up harmoniously. Some scenarios include:

• They have your internal information but very little or no external data, leading to negotiations that are purely based on your benchmarks - which may not be reflective of market rates and terms
• They have external market data but don’t combine it with your current contract information, usage data or procurement requirements, creating procurement projects that result in ill-fitting products being purchased or renewed. 
• They have access to your internal data but have not analyzed the numbers or contract information, meaning support is required to understand them or that the data is not properly used, negating any benefit. 
• They rely on preferred vendors to negotiate with - meaning they don’t use wider market information and only use basic data to inform decisions that are ‘one size fits all’.

Any of these create a situation where you, as their customer, are providing them with data and support when you have contracted them so you don’t have to. Therefore, it becomes a waste of time and money, and you still end up with imperfect contracts that you’ll have to remove and go through another procurement process later down the line.

With Vertice, this isn’t the case as our platform, team of expert buyers and proprietary data is a holistic offering. Not only do you get access to our world-class negotiating services as standard, but we work closely with you on a one-on-one basis to make sure our extensive external data and your internal information is fully understood and put to its best use.

Support for dedicated internal procurement teams is vitalProcurement is a complex business where uncertainty is part of the package. Teams should be focusing on lowering the level of uncertainty as much as they can by being strategic, having extensive data and benchmarks, and having the time and resources to fully commit to doing this.

However, as we have seen, many of our customers turned to us because they couldn’t get to this point. They were consistently mired in a daily grind of elongated and inefficient negotiation cycles and internal intake processes to get ahead of the game. Our research has shown that, with investment into strategic tooling and processes, as well as accelerants like automation, gives procurement teams the space they need to focus on data analysis, future planning and business strategy.

But this isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ - it correlates to a real business improvement. Companies that have the most advanced, modern and automated procurement functions - where teams can be strategic and use comprehensive data and benchmarks to maximum effect - see the following benefits:

• 32% more able to innovate and implement new initiatives
• 32% better at budget and cash flow control
• 29% faster in bringing new products and services to market
• A 20% improvement in security compliance 

With such upticks in business performance, you’ll want to get to this stage quickly to keep pace with competitors. That’s why Vertice is perfectly positioned to help. We provide comprehensive negotiation services with expert buyers - whether supporting your own efforts or taking them on ourselves, as well as the Vertice platform that contains comprehensive data sets, contract information and pricing benchmarks for you to access easily. And it’s easy to add your own internal data to compare how your current prices and contract terms stack up against the industry, and what you need to do to improve your own procurement efforts in these areas.

With all of this manual and time-consuming effort a thing of the past, you can turn to being more strategic and planning your tech stack to fully fit your requirements and empower company growth going forward. You’ll move from an enabler of workplace functions to a central cog of the business growth engine.

Extra support means access to more data analysis - are you looking at the right metrics?

The top performing procurement leaders are diving into their processes and workflows to dig out advanced data that, when leveraged correctly, point the way to better performance. But this accounts for only 1 in 6 procurement leaders.

The Procurement Metrics That Matter Report lifts the lid on these untapped goldmines of information so you can also reap the rewards.