07/11/2023
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If you acquire SaaS and negotiate contracts without benchmark information, you’re leaving money on the table. Vendor Management Office Manager Tara Kalkwarf-McGee saw this quickly after implementing Zylo Benchmarks for SADA, a leading global business technology provider. She notes SADA realized $50K in cost avoidance within the first week of onboarding with the tool.
In a time of budget cuts, these savings prove critical. “Top-level leadership has an expectation for us procurement, sourcing, and vendor management professionals of finding those cost savings,” Kalkwarf-McGee said. “[They’re] expecting it from your programs, especially given the economic uncertainties and the impacts we’re seeing across all global sectors. There’s a hyperfocus on cost savings across all industries right now.”
Kalkwarf-McGee recently discussed how SaaS benchmarks arm businesses with the critical data needed to tackle all SaaS decisions — whether a new purchase or a renewal — with confidence during The SaaS Management Event (SaaSMe) 2023.
Watch the full session below or continue reading for tips on how to leveraging SaaS benchmarking data to negotiate smarter and trim the fat from your SaaS budget.
Guide Negotiations with Data
Before Zylo, the process of preparing for negotiations was manual and time-consuming.
“A lot of us who sit in leadership roles within procurement sourcing, strategic sourcing, and vendor management, we know the pain experienced when it comes to negotiations — understanding our spend, understanding if we’re getting a fair market value,” Kalkwarf-McGee said.
With Zylo, sourcing and vendor management teams save time they would have otherwise spent scouring the internet and often contacting sales teams for pricing information.
“There was nothing that could provide us with the quantitative and qualitative data the benchmarking tool allows us to implement,” Kalkwarf-McGee said. “We finally have visibility into something that we haven’t had before. Zylo is breaking ground, allowing us leaders to spend less time looking for the benchmarking online, and putting it right in front of us to make sound business decisions and execute on cost savings.”
Improve the Termination Strategy
In addition to guiding negotiations, Zylo empowers the SADA team to make better decisions when termination requests come their way. Often, team members require a tool’s functionality, but would like to work with a different vendor.
“Benchmarking data allows us to stack up that competition and understand, ‘OK, we had a really tough time with this vendor, but here is the market for other service providers in that space,’” Kalkwarf-McGee said.
They can then use the pricing information to compare providers and ensure they get a fair deal with any new vendors.
Understand Your Tech Stack
Just discovering the tools within your SaaS portfolio opens the door to savings.
“If we have redundancy in our tech stack, whether intentional or not intentional, we can take a look at the information inside of Zylo to know how much we’re paying,” Kalkwarf-McGee said.
From there, you can decide whether to keep or consolidate the tools. And when keeping tools, Kalkwarf-McGee noted the leverage of knowing your options and what those options cost allows you to drive down prices.
SADA wins, enabled by benchmarks, include:
- Secured 15% discount on messaging and collaboration tool
- Negotiated $20K savings on a new contract with an application tracking system
- Netted $58K savings on contract for diagramming and content creation tool
Benchmarking Saves Money, Improves Efficiency
Whether you’re part of an IT team that manages SaaS acquisition or you’re a finance/procurement professional tasked with optimizing spend and renewals, benchmarking provides critical price and application comparison data that allows you to make smarter decisions when negotiating and purchasing SaaS.
“Very quickly, we were able to identify that Benchmarks was going to help this team solidify those big [cost savings] goals that we had for 2022 and beyond and be able to achieve a quick ROI,” Kalkwarf-McGee said.
Zylo Benchmarks is backed by the industry’s largest data set of $30B in SaaS spend under management and nearly 20K applications in the Zylo Library. In addition, the tool proves the value and importance of vendor management.
“You can’t help but feel empowered when you and your team are getting $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 savings using this tool,” Kalkwarf-McGee said. “Your team starts feeling put together, and your leadership starts trusting you.”
To learn more about how to start negotiating smarter with SaaS benchmarks, watch the on-demand session here.