Category Archives: Best Practices

Dear Vendor: Your Top 10 ProcureTech resolutions for 2025: Part 1

We know that our last post said that we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, and officially we are, but if you’re going to make ProcureTech resolutions for 2025, then you should at least make good ones. So we’re going to give you ten great ones. The first five today. The next five next Monday.

#10 Cut the Cr@p

First of all, Procurement does NOT need to be reimagined! As per our post back in July, Procurement is not something to be reimagined as it is not something that should even be redefined at the core. The purpose of Procurement has not changed since the first known Purchasing Manual was published back 137 years ago. It’s the process of sourcing, acquiring, and paying for the goods and services the organization needs, and doing it in a manner that ensures that the products will meet the needs, at the best price, and show up at the right time — and that as many orders as possible are “perfect” (or, more precisely, problem free). No more, no less.

If you want to survive the coming consolidation that will see a massive amount of mergers, acquisitions, and outright failures, you need to sell. If you want to sell, you need to not only solve customer problems, but convince the customers you can solve theirs. And the best way to convince a customer you can, and will, solve their problem is to be completely honest and transparent about your solution, what it does, how it does it, and what it will deliver against the real needs they have. With no cr@p.

#9 Data Foundation

In Procurement, everything relies upon good data. Solutions require good data — platforms, the modules they contain, the algorithms that power them, and every other technical component. Moreover, the humans relying on those platforms require good data to make decisions — good data that is processed by analytics into good information that give the human professionals the insight they need to make the right decisions. (At the end of the day, it’s human intelligence [HI] and the best platforms support human intelligence with Augmented Intelligence.)

This requires doubling down on creating a good schema, collecting good data, verifying that data, and maintaining that data over time. It shouldn’t be just collect some data haphazardly, execute a function, push it to a table in the database, and forget it. Your solution has to be normalize and cleanse the data, validate the data, use the data as required, store it in a standard schema, and mark any data that can change to be reverified on a schedule.

Organizations need a data foundation. Make sure the data foundation you give your customers is enough.

#8 Risk Awareness

COVID (Pandemic). Special Military Operations. (Geo-Political Conflicts, Border Closures, and Sanctions.) Canal closures and more Logistics Challenges. (Panamanian droughts and Houthis in the Red Sea.) Tariff threats (that are soon to be reality). This is just the beginning. The soon to be total abandonment of climate regulations in the US (and possibly a few other “first world” countries) is going to accelerate global warming (if the number of bombs dropped in the Middle East over the past year hasn’t accelerated it already). This will result in more unpredictable natural disasters. The tariffs coming in the US are going to spark unpredictable trade wars. Monetary and oil shocks that will come from the BRICS allowing alternate currencies to be used, as well as pursuing their own, will lead to more risk and disruption. The ease in trade we saw for the first two decades of this century may never be seen again in our lifetimes. Risk is everywhere, and compounding daily.

Thus, you must ensure that your solution is as risk aware as it can be. Sourcing modules must collect risk information. Analysis modules need to collect and process risk metrics. SXM modules need to track all available qualitative and quantitative risk information about every supplier being used. Contract modules need to support, check for, and suggest risk clauses. Procurement modules need to bring up risk information before every order, and automatically block suppliers where the risk has become too great.

Risk is critical. That’s why Sourcing Innovation did a 9-part series on supply chain risk.

#7 Focus, Focus, Focus

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Don’t even try to be anymore than you are. Procurement people are realizing that any company that claims this can’t deliver because you can’t be everything to everyone. Instead, focus on your core modules and strengths, define your ICP, double down on your value prop, and focus on being the best you can on those modules and strengths.

Doing so will increase your chances of customer success, and customer success generates potential customer interest. Plus, focus will allow you to optimize your sales, implementation, integration, and execution processes; get customers up faster; get them results faster; make them happy faster; and that will lead to renewals and, most likely, increased subscriptions at renewal time.

We’ve tried to hit upon this point throughout the years, most recently in our smart company series, but hopefully this is the year it will stick.

#6 Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Since you can’t be everything to everyone, you need to focus. And since customers will usually need more extensive solutions than any vendor can offer, usually for specialized needs, the most successful vendors will integrate with complementary best-of-breed vendor solutions that will make it really, really easy for their customers to share the data they need between the applications they need.

The key is to support an end-to-end ecosystem for Source-to-Pay+ by integrating with all of the solutions necessary for your customers to support end-to-end Source-to-Pay+ solutions. Successful companies make their customers successful, no matter what. They work with partners and complementary providers as needed.

Organizations need platforms, not just point solutions. Especially since you need to be risk aware.

We Want to Be a Smart Company — Is That It? Part II

We’ve read the dumb company: avoiding the fork in the road articles, dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard articles, the two installments of “we want to be a smart company”, and we truly want to be a smart company, and we are taking the mistakes, and advice, to heart. Is there anything else we can do?

As per Part I, there’s always more you can do! However, there’s not much left to talk about that’s true across the board for all software companies. That being said, we are giving you ten final pieces of advice that just may help if money is tight, leads are few, and sales are hard. Yesterday, we gave you the first five. Today, give you the final five.

06. Stagger the Billing on Suites and Seats

If it will take 9 months for the multi-module suite, don’t charge the annual license fee for the whole suite until all of the modules are fully implemented and in use. Stagger the fee based on the functional modules the user will have each month. The same goes if you are selling on seats. If there is an additional fee per seat, or the pricing is based on blocks, don’t charge for all the users up front who will eventually use it when most won’t until month 7.

Remember that your solution is going to cost the company mid to high six or seven figures once all of the direct and indirect costs are factored in, a cost that won’t be returned right away, especially if you are selling a (mini)suite. This means that even though your price tag might be worth it, it’s a hard price tag to swallow for a customer who won’t get the full use out of it for almost a year, and, thus, a hard sell.

However, if they only pay for functionality as they get it, and will start to see value before the next fee hike, that bitter pill is a lot easier to swallow, and while it might mean less money up front for you, a happy customer always means more money on the back end, especially at renewal time — which will always happen as long as they remain happy.

07. Ditch the Office & WeWork … Get Creative

If you have an expensive office, can you ditch it? Covid proved that you don’t need to work 9-5 in the same space everyday to be productive. As long as people have a space they can come together to meet when they need to, or want to, that’s more than enough.

Also, if you have a dedicated WeWork-like space, that’s not getting used daily, do you need it? If you only have it so your employees can meet one day a week, and that’s all they use it, why do you need a high cost space? (And while these spaces are cheaper than dedicated offices, they are still pricey, especially if they are not used daily.)

Local hotels with empty meeting rooms during the week will give you a good deal if you buy food. If you’re bringing people in quarterly for a meeting, they’ll give you the meeting room for free if you fill a room block, and give you a good price on that block if you have breakfast and lunch at the hotel.

And if you’re small, get more creative. Some restaurants and pubs have private function rooms that sit empty most of the day, or all day if there are no private after work functions on a weekday. They are super cheap, especially if you eat there. Some will give you a contract for, say, every Thursday for a quarter or year! the doctor knows a company in London that has no dedicated space except for a room in a pub connected to a tube station that they use weekly. Costs them next to nothing (as they’d buy their employees food anyway when they are asked to come into London) and the location ensures that if the employees stay for a few drinks, they can safely tube home. (Now, this won’t work for every company if they are in “dry counties” or have a lot of employees that don’t drink, but you get the point that creativity can save a lot of money.)

08. Compete on Service

This is not said enough. Customers don’t want software. No one every wants software. Absolutely positively f6ck1ng no one wants software! They want solutions, and, more specifically, solutions that help them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and come with the support they need to learn the solutions and learn them to the best of their ability.

And before you say “but everybody in business buys software”, let the doctor stop you right there. They buy it because they need it. They don’t buy it because they want it. Have you ever heard your buddy Joe say “hey, I can’t wait for the new version of AccAtack25 so I can get started on my taxes for next year“. Or hear Jesse say “I really need a new glitzy word processor to accompany the 6 others I don’t use for the screenplay that I’m thinking about but not actually writing“. Or Carl say “I want the new version of Excel so I can write even more convoluted, and pointless, macros for my financial analysis to appease my boss“. You haven’t. Because no one wants business software. They want tools to do their jobs, which is why you can’t sell software like consumer entertainment apps (video games). Business software is not fun, and, thus, no one wants it.

So once you’ve made the solution as usable as it is, compete on service. That will make a huge difference.

09. Think Sponsorships — Esp. Educational Ones

As per our last instalment, customers need education and want vendors who educate them. Those vendors always win in the end. If you don’t have the time, experience, or in-depth knowledge to do so, sponsor independent authorities (blogs that aren’t going anywhere*, educationally oriented consultancies, independent analysts and/or small firms) and associations that do and they will focus on educating your audience on what your audience needs to know to understand what your solution does and why your audience needs your solution when they talk to you.

Don’t underestimate the value that a potential customer places on education. The only thing that can come close to equalling that value is the right service level, which will be dependent on, and deliver, education.

10. Get Help Where You’re Lacking

We can’t say this enough. Stop pretending you can do it all, that you can figure it out once the mistake is pointed out to you, or that you can find a new full time resource (when you look at the cost of the part time consultant) that can wear six different hats and accomplish the same goals in a short amount of time. You can’t. Focus on the niche consultancies and the true experts and you will find that consultants are cheap relative to the value they bring.

11. Bonus: Fire the MBAs!

If the only degree they have is an MBA, show them the door as fast as possible. MBAs are Masters of Business Annihilation and have done more damage to modern corporations than even the most visionary of us could have predicted (with some of the utter ineptitude covered in Jason Premo’s LinkedIn article). Real companies, like real structures, have always been built by real engineers, not spreadsheet pushing financial analysts who don’t have a clue what the company actually does.

The point of an MBA should be to teach engineers the basics of good business and financial management, and how to operate in different regulatory and reporting contexts, so they can make the right trade-off decisions to grow their company and improve their offering in step-wise fashion, not to arm nitwits with spreadsheets to make ridiculously unsound decisions that could ruin the corporation in the pursuit of near-term profits!

* Specifically, look for blogs that have survived at least 3 years. In the mid 2000s, shortly after THE PROPHET, the doctor, and THE REVELATOR started, we went from less than two dozen in the mid 2000s to almost 160 across Source to Pay and Supply Chain around 2008/2009. By 2011, dozens disappeared. By 2016, dozens more. By/during COVID, the majority of those that remained left us. Of the 160 blogs SI once chronicled on the now defunct resource site, less than two dozen remain. You can count them on your fingers and toes even if you are missing a few digits.

We Want to Be a Smart Company — Is That It? Part I

We’ve read the dumb company: how to avoid the fork in the road (part 1 and part 2) and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8) articles, and the two installments of “we want to be a smart company” (part 1 and part 2), and we truly want to be a smart company, and we are taking the mistakes, and advice, to heart. Is there anything else we can do?

There’s always more you can do! However, there’s not much left to talk about that’s true across the board for all software companies. That being said, we can give you ten final pieces of advice that just may help if money is tight, leads are few, and sales are hard. Today, we’ll give you the first five.

01. Don’t Put Off Improvements / Hard Decisions You Know You Need to Do / Make

Fixing it later always takes longer than you think, and the timeframe multiplies the longer you wait! If you need to rip and replace part of the platform core for scalability, start as soon as you realize that it needs to be done. If your target customers aren’t educated enough to realize why they need your product, start investing in a series of educational content pieces of different forms to get them there. If you need to cut the marketing and sales deadweight, do so ASAP. The longer you wait, the more it hurts you and them. Doing it early allows you to give them a fair notice period and time to help them find a more suitable role.

02. Chop the Dead Wood — especially in Management & the C-Suite

Refocus the dollars on the developers, content creators, and solution-focussed sales people who are actually generating value. the doctor can’t say this enough. You wouldn’t believe how many startups in tech have been dragged into oblivion by an overweighted inappropriate management team (because the investors thought big names would bring success) — but if they aren’t the right people for the job, or the job isn’t even needed to begin with, nothing could be further from the truth … and instead of being the buoyant striders intended to get you across the lake, they are the cement shoes that sink you to the bottom.

03. Tell the Truth, No Matter What

Especially around what your product does today, and especially especially with respect to anything asked by a customer. Any individual with a half a brain knows that no product does everything, and any individual with a brain can be educated as to why no product should and, more importantly, why they don’t want some of the features the Free RFP vendors are promoting (because it’s not feature, it’s function, and, more specifically, the function they need to do).

The reality is that a good customer will value the truth, especially when they hear so little of it these days among the lies, damn lies, statistics, Gen-AI, marketing buzzwords and hogwash. Moreover, they know they probably don’t need everything they ask for and definitely not day one (as it takes time to learn modules and suites and use them to full effect). They also know that most of the “wish list” gathered from across the organization is just stakeholders trying to be useful and they really only want the functionality to do their daily jobs, and, more importantly, the stakeholders will be happy if that core functionality is done well.

So if you’re missing a few things, that’s okay. The customers know there will always be pain (if work was always fun, people would want to work for as little as they could afford to), so as long as you can relieve the majority of, and the most common, pain, those customers will be quite happy to suffer a little aggravation here and there instead of the cluster(f6ck) migraine they currently have on a daily basis.

04. Sales Channel Reconsideration

Look at how you are selling now and think about if that is how, or the only way, you should be selling.

If you are not doing partner/channel sales, maybe you need to do partner/channel sales. If there is a niche consultancy advising clients on a daily basis with problems that your solution solves, maybe you should be training those consultants on how your solution can be used to solve the problems, training those consultants on how to install the solution, and then putting a partnership agreement in place for those consultants to sell the solution for you to their clients for which it is appropriate.

If you are relying mostly on partner/channel sales, and they aren’t coming in fast and furious like you hoped, maybe you need to step up direct sales. In the right circumstances the right partners will do wonders for sales, but if they are consultancies, it will be highly dependent on what customers come to them, since most niche consultancies still have to take what they can get (while the Big X take the lion’s share of projects, even those which they probably shouldn’t because they are already so busy trying to support so many clients with digital transformation projects, because any consultant who turns away any work at a Big X risks getting fired). So even if your consulting/services partner is your greatest champion, you can’t always rely on them to be a consistent source of sales.

05. Rethink Partnerships

Regardless if it is part of your strategy or not and what partners you do, or don’t, have today. It’s rare for a company to get it right out of the gate, or for the strategy that is right out of the gate to be the best one down the road as markets change, directions change, plans change, etc. If things are going well, you follow the if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If things aren’t going well, you evaluate and rethink it. Your strategy/partners could still be the right strategy/partners, and it just needs more time for the strategy/relationships to take off, or it might be that you need a new strategy/relationship.

No consultancies or complementary offerings selling your solution? Why? We’ve mentioned time and time again that no solution is everything to everyone, and there’s always a complementary solution or service that can add value, even if it takes a bit of work to identify it. So if you don’t have a services / implementation partner trained and certified to sell for you, why not? And if you don’t have relationships with one or more complementary solutions with companies with a complementary culture and value, why not? Even if it is only the odd referral, it could help … and if you’re going up against a suite, and your solution is not, it could definitely help. (After all, most customers who need a “suite” really only need a few key modules, at least for the first few years.)

Alternatively, if you only have partners who filled your ears with sweet nothings until you agreed to be a partner and then gave you sweet nothing once the deal was inked, they are NOT partners, especially if right after the deal was inked they decided to partner with another solution provider with a bigger offering and price tag and sell that instead. Those partners should be dropped faster than a radioactive potato and replaced with a new one.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

We Want to Be a Smart Company — What Else Can We Do! Part 2

In part 1, you admitted that you read the dumb company: avoid the fork in the road and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard articles (links in part 1), taken them to heart, admitted you’re making some mistakes and that you’re not doing some key functions as well as you could. Most importantly, you know you need to do more to avoid becoming a casualty of the next mass corporate extinction that’s coming. And you asked us to tell you what else you could do to avoid becoming a dead company walking (or, even worse, a zombie company*)? And yesterday we gave you our first five suggestions. Today we give you our next five.

06) Remember Websites are MORE than Static Web Pages

Your website should be a dynamic and interactive website that quickly guide visitors to the educational and informative content they want, with point-based and constructable demos, targeted education and thought leadership, and easy to find contact us options for information requests and specific live demos from thought leaders and solution professionals, not sales people. (Qualify the lead, then pass it on to sales.)

It should not, like the majority of websites today, be an overload of hogwash messaging and buzzwords, fancy animated graphics that don’t actually show the solution in use, a constant barrage of questions (along the “do you have trouble with …”) with the uniform “contact us for answers” directive. It definitely should not contain nonstandard terminology for modules, functions, and processes. (And definitely don’t mislead and say you’re an e-Procurement tool if you’re an e-Sourcing tool, and if you don’t know the difference, that just means you didn’t do your homework!) Confusing or non-existent information on target industries and market size (as we all know there is no one size fits all solution, and pretending that your company has one is just obnoxious). Or utter lack of information on pricing tiers and benefits. (Maybe you can’t give an exact price because you offer SSDO or advanced analytics that requires a lot of pay-per-use cloud processing, but you can still give a base license fee or range. If you’re a M+ annual solution, you don’t want companies that can’t, or won’t, pay more than 100K reaching out. The market should understand you get what you pay for and that a 100K solution won’t, or at least shouldn’t, have all the features of a 1M solution, but also that, if they are a smaller company, they shouldn’t need all the advanced features of the 1M solution either.)

07) Tap Your Talent for Top Tens

Sometimes the talent you overlook (because you think they are just a developer, pre-sales solution advisor, etc.) has the best ideas (and sometimes they don’t, and that’s why you use your leadership to filter out the best ideas).

If you have a problem, or just want to look for opportunities for improvement, ask your people first. Now, they won’t identify or come up with everything (as they have a limited view from a single function and may not have the decades of experience that is sometimes required to come up with something that is both “obvious” and revolutionary), but why should you pay a consultant to help you with improvements you can identify and make in house? You want the consultant focussed on the big win improvements you don’t see (and not easily sidetracked with the dozens of things you can do better).

So, ask all of your employees to come up with, anonymously if it helps, the

  • ten best ways to save money,
  • ten best investments across the business,
  • ten best ways to improve productivity,
  • ten SaaS apps you can do without,
  • ten functions that would totally change customer productivity in your core offering
  • ten functions that could be removed from the roadmap because they are actually low value,
  • etc.

And while you will get a lot of pyrite, you will get some gold nuggets. And if you’re knowledgeable enough, you’ll be able to separate the gold nuggets out. (And if not, you’ve jump started your expert advisor with some unique insights into your business and your team and that will improve their productivity.)

08) Always Pause for Innovation

Regardless of how you interpret what we tell you in #10, if an opportunity for innovation presents itself, always pause to evaluate it and see if it is a true opportunity, fits in with the plan, and would make the product, and the plan, better. If it would make the plan better, and it wouldn’t slow progress down more than a small amount, work it into the plan. If it would make the plan better, but would slow progress down a moderately significant amount, put it on the roadmap to be considered in the next plan update (as new ideas might emerge that make it less of an impact by then). Moreover, when you stumble upon it, the right innovation will improve the product, the plan, and even the timeline.

09) Sign in Blood

Once you have a plan, sign your name to it in blood. The only thing worse than not having a proper plan is abandoning a good plan part way through (because you get too anxious or lose faith) … if, after investing a lot of time and effort, you abandon a plan part way through, you might as well just shut the doors now instead of retreating into the castle to starve as you wait out the siege. Greatness takes time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice.

10) Drive Decisions Like You Just Heisted the Antwerp Diamonds

Once you have a direction, don’t stop. Don’t pull over. Keep going until you successfully escape the EU, sorry, until you escape mediocrity and unprofitability. (And definitely don’t panic along the way. If you got out clean, and have 24 hours to make your escape, use every last hour, because once you cross the border, you’re off Scot-free.)

Once you have it all figured out and committed to, you have to be Hagar behind the wheel and drive, drive, drive. Slowing down will lead to stopping. Stopping to abandonment, and then, instead of improvement and success, it will be failure and the beginning of the end. As per 09, you have to see the plan through, and this will only happen if you never stop — you have to keep going as long as there is a drop of gas in the tank.

* yes, zombie companies exist in our space too; and, as the entertainment industry would have you believe, since we’re not medical doctors working in morgues with a constant fresh supply of brains, it is a fate worse than corporate death!

Dear Enterprise Software Vendor: Should You Fire Your PR and Marketing?

Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant!  Your mileage will vary!  (And not about any firm in particular, as a few non-isolated incidents opened up a whole new line of questioning.)

In response to a post by eCornell (which is/was here), THE REVELATOR wrote this comment (which is/was here) which is repeated here in its entirety in case it gets deleted, since anytime we tried to have a serious conversation around sales, marketing, public relations, and/or Gen-AI with Big X firms and/or (mid-sized) consultancies and analyst firms, they have quickly deleted our comments, and sometimes their entire posts rather than enter into a real conversation on the subject (and now we have developed an implicit distrust any corporate account and keep copies of everything):

NOTE: The following post was inspired by a comment by Paul Rogers

Despite feeling like someone walking the hallowed halls of Cornell University wearing a “Yeah, Harvard University” t-shirt, sometimes you have to say things that need to be said – which is the purpose of sharing this article.

Ask ChatGPT the following two questions:

🤔 What is the role of the Public Relations professional?
🤔 What is the role of the Marketing professional?

Do you see any mention of end client or customer success as a priority? Whose best interests are PR and marketing professionals focused on? What does the answer to these questions tell you?

Corporate communication has always been about putting a positive spin on business and the brand. It reminds me of the 1986 Richard Gere movie Power – if not a great movie, it is certainly interesting and engaging. Denzel Washington’s role as public relations expert Arnold Billings is worth the price of admission alone.

Unfortunately, beyond the company they represent, are PR and marketing people doing more harm than good?

Thoughts?

To which the doctor responded (which is/was here)

Well, SI, which has repeatedly told companies in our space to fire their PR firms going back to 2008: Blogger Relations, firmly believes that PR firms are doing more harm than good because

  1. you are NOT selling enterprise software to consumers and
  2. it’s not “image”, it’s “solution”!

As for marketing, corporate marketing can be good if it exists to educate and explain, but when was the last time that happened on a regular basis in our space? Over a decade ago … now it’s all AI-this, orchestrate-that, and whatever the bullcr@p of the day is. It’s all buzz, no honey. All show, no substance. All confusion, no clarity. (It’s bad enough that Trump has brought back the Land of Confusion with his populist politics that have taken by storm the first world over, we don’t need it in our workplace!)

So, right now, I’d say at least 6/7, if not 9/10, marketers are doing more harm than good and should be fired with their PR brethren.

There are over 666 companies in our space, and way too many pandering any type of solution you can think of. While we need at least 3-5 in each industry group – market size – geo region – module focus you can think of for competition, we don’t need 30+. Most are not going to survive, especially when most of these don’t have solid solutions built from years of experience that solve real customer problems (as opposed to just offering some shiny new tech that looks good but doesn’t solve the majority of pain points in real organizations).

This means that companies need to focus less on marketing and selling and more on:

  • market research, especially listening to what the real pain points are of the customers they want to sell to (and they need to focus in on a customer group here, you can’t be everything to everyone in our space and any company that thinks it can is the first company you should walk away from)
  • solution (not product) development — not shiny new tech, tried-and-true tech that works
  • market education, explaining what they do, how they do it, and why it solves real pain points after building a solution that solves the pain points they identified in their research

Which means, especially if money is tight, they should forget the marketers and instead focus on hiring researchers and educators. People are getting tired of the 80%+ tech project failure rates. They’d welcome some real insight and real focus on real solutions. If only the market would wake up and realize this!