Category Archives: Market Intelligence

We’re In the Midst of Conference Season … What Have We Learned So Far?

There are two conference seasons in enterprise software, Spring and Fall, and enterprise sourcing and procurement falls into this squarely.

Every year, it seems to get crazier and crazier, but what have we learned?

The Bigger You Want to Appear, the Bigger Your Conference Needs to Be

Back in the day, if you were big, you satisfied yourself with a low-key user workshop … so low-key that it might not have even made your website. These days, you do big 3-day affairs, splashed across the relevant parts of the web, and keynote it with the biggest names you can get, whether or not they have anything to do with Sourcing.

The Bigger You Want to Appear, the More Events You Appear At

It used to be that you went to an event or two and splashed your banner, but now you go to every major event — ISM, Procurement Leaders, ProcureCon, SIG, etc — and all their instantiations. You’re on a constant roadshow, because the gospel needs to be spread far and wide.

The More Attention You Want, The More You Focus on Indefinites

Instead of focussing on functions, or process improvements, or knowledge, there is a big focus on value, customer success, or organizational recognition.

In other words, many of the big vendors, who have been pumped up by big PE coffers or IPOs, have apparently used their reserves to lure away the big enterprise CMOs under the assumption that the broader enterprise success strategies will work in Sourcing and Procurement. Their tactics are certainly getting them noticed, but these people are used to selling to IT, Operations, Marketing, Accounting, etc. — everyone but Procurement.

They haven’t yet figured out that Procurement is different.

First of all, Procurement are tough negotiators — they’re not going to pay a penny more than they think the software, and the services (be it implementation, process improvement, or other best practice education) that comes is worth. So unnecessarily boosting overhead by spending money on trade shows that don’t deliver value (because they don’t enable any learning opportunity) or on keynotes that don’t advance the knowledge of the attendees (because they don’t know anything about Procurement) or on drastically overpriced venues doesn’t help their case.

Secondly, Procurement want more than one-way conversations. They want interactions. They want input into the next release and the overall roadmap. And they want to learn as they do it. But these days, many user conferences have done away with the user feedback sessions, even though it’s the perfect place to do it.

It wasn’t long ago the marketers in this space got that. Let’s hope they reclaim their top spots after the new mega cos realize that the enterprise marketers they brought in are missing these fundamentals. Because for our space to advance, everyone has to be smart on all sides.

April Planning Prevents May Panning (for Gold)

Let’s face it, once May comes around, you’re under the gun to identify significant savings before the end of June when you, or more importantly, your bosses want to take some time off during the summer (and know that suppliers do the same and results will likely be limited until people get back to work full force in September).

But if you wait until May to identify those categories you are going to go after for quick wins, you’re better off panning for gold … it will have a better success rate. Even if the best method to capture those savings is identified as a reverse auction, and even though it can be run in a day, by the time you

  • run a spend analysis across categories not significantly under contract or where the contract is expiring
  • collect market / should cost pricing and demand across the categories and estimate savings opportunities
  • rank the opportunities
  • evaluate each opportunity and identify the best strategy
  • extract those where auction is the best choice
  • identify the appropriate supply base for this subset of categories
  • get the suppliers onboarded in your SRM/Sourcing system
  • send the invites and get commitment
  • run the auction
  • cut and sign the contracts

… it’s mid to late summer. But if you start this process now, limit the quick-hit projects to those where you already have most of the suppliers in the system, and get going just on those, you will have time to finish a few of them before summer hits. Otherwise, if you wait for May, you’re better off packing your pans and booking a ticket to Alaska.

Don’t Go Down In Flames …

… just like Jesse James.

For those of you into Americana, One Hundred and Thirty Five (135) days ago today, Robert Ford, who was in Jesse’s gang, killed Jesse James for a reward. Jesse James was one of America’s most famous outlaws who, after the civil war, gained significant notoriety, and even public sympathy, as a result of his many successful robberies that included banks, stagecoaches, and even trains and the portrayal of him as America’s Robin Hood (who stole from the rich and gave to the poor), even though there is no evidence that he or his gang actually shared their spoils in that way. (And when he was killed, he became one of the legendary figures of the Wild West.)

And while it might be nice to be legendary, a corporate death is not the type of legendary you want to be. But it’s one that’s easy to realize if:

  • You upset too many senior stakeholders with aggressive savings-focused sourcing events that ignore stakeholder desires and even requirements (even though this may make the CFO do the dance of joy)
  • You achieve too much success (too fast) while satisfying all of the sourcing requirements and make your peers look bad in comparison (because you achieve double digit savings while adhering to every business constraint and satisfying every named stakeholder requirements) … giving them incentive to back-stab you (and set you up for failure not of your doing)
  • You step on the toes of too many powerful incumbent suppliers (with CEOs that join your CEO on the golf course) and/or take too much business away from them too fast (even though they may need to be replaced, replacement of major incumbents often has to be done slowly and with care)

So, when you are reviewing your contracts and (re) sourcing your significant categories, be sure to do so with care and finesse — your incumbents may need replacement, but such replacement will have to be done with care, and support. It’s a sad truth that sometimes your efforts will be undermined by personal relationships between chief executives and board members, but a truth you need to be aware of and approach with caution. Once these individuals understand what their relationships are costing them, or you get the CFO or CEO to help you explain that to the stakeholders, you will be able to (slowly) replace the suppliers and make the right sourcing decisions (and save), but the last thing you want to be is alone, because, instead of being seen as a hero, you will be seen as an outlaw, and someone who will be given up for a bigger reward. Sad, but true.

The Hidden Value of SI Association

What’s the value of SI Sponsorship? Quite a lot — you can contact the doctor <at> sourcinginnovation <dot> com to find out more, but here are two interesting statistics that SI has not advertised until now:

1/3 of all companies that have had a commercial relationship with SI have merged or been acquired and are now bigger, more successful entities

2/3 of all companies that have sponsored SI have merged or been acquired and are now bigger, more successful entities

In other words, companies associated with SI have become so successful, they become very attractive to not only customers, but peers and PE firms! They have options!

To the best of SI’s knowledge, NO OTHER INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION or Independent Analyst Entity has had this success rate.

Can SI take all the credit?  Probably not, but the doctor is quite confident that the implied correlation is this — if you are visionary enough to focus on building your market (and work with SI to achieve that), instead of just trying to steal your competitor’s customers, you’re probably going to succeed.  And SI is one of the partners that is going to help you … greatly.

(And if you’re too big to merge or be acquired, don’t worry!  SI can still help you create new markets for your products.  And then you too can be happy.)

Trade is Getting Complicated. Trade Agreements More So. Are Your Contracts Up to Snuff?

It’s difficult enough to create contracts that specify what both parties want, but with the shifting global landscape, crumbling trade agreements, new ones rising to take their place, and new regulations cropping up all the time that companies need to adhere to just to do business in their home country, it’s almost impossible.

How do you define contracts that keep up? And, more importantly, how do you figure out which of your contracts are not up to par, and where they are falling short?

In the first case, you constantly monitor government sites, associations, and news sites for mention of new regulations and requirements to adhere to them. Then you process the news, make sense of the new requirements, and find some experts to help you understand the best way to contractually deal with the new rules.

In the second case, you need to be able to quickly analyze a contract and determine if there are clauses to address the regulations. But if it’s a 50 page contract, that’s not a quick effort. And if you have 1,000 of them? 10,000 of them? How can you even attempt to do that?

Manually, you can’t. You need tech that can identify which contracts are likely lacking one or more clauses to address one or more regulations and bring them to your attention, in order of priority. Advanced, semantic, technology that can understand documents, deficiencies, and suggest potential fixes.

And a few companies understand that, and that’s why you see the likes of companies like LawGeex and LegalSifter rising up to challenge Seal with a new take on contract analytics and the need for. Because, one way or another, once you reach a certain point on your sourcing journey, you’re going to need this technology.