Category Archives: SaaS

Why Is It So Hard to Buy Software?

A recent post on LinkedIn by Robert Goodman asked Why has it gotten really hard to buy software?, which is a really good question, because, while it should be easier in the modern SaaS age, for an enterprise, it’s much, much harder.

Robert started his vent by noting that the companies I want to partner with on average do a bad job selling/explaining/connecting/not making me dislike them or generally making the process frictionless and the companies I have little interest in are incredibly responsive and almost stalkerish. He goes on to state that Most companies are still WAY too much about making their numbers at month or quarter end (a them issue, not a me issue) and this seems to dominate their “strategy.”

And I’m sad to say that he’s right. Not just because I’m hearing this from multiple buyers (on and off LinkedIn), but because, for the past year or so, most of the companies approaching me / having conversations with me are only interested in “how I can help them sell”, as if that’s the role of an analyst/product consultant. (Well, as I noted in Vendors Have Lured Big Analyst Firms Astray Because Buyers Don’t Understand They Get What They Pay For, this is probably what they expect if their only dealings have been with big analyst firms where it’s pay for promotion, and leads, and no real advice on product strategy and direction.) The majority are focussed on sales, and not on understanding what they have, whether or not it actually solves customer problems, and what is missing from their product, process, or marketing that is preventing them from selling.

The reality is that the’ve forgotten that you don’t sell by marketing, or doubling-down on the latest and greatest feature function your dev team just added, stalking your prey when they need time to digest, or threatening them that they made a bad decision when you don’t get selected (and/or trying to bypass the process by skipping the CPO and going direct to the CFO or CEO).

You sell by focussing on the customer. The successful vendors:

  1. take the time to understand the customer’s problem
  2. explain how they will solve it
  3. help the customer build the value case (especially if the customer needs help getting (additional) funding)
  4. work side-by-side with the customer until the solution is fully implemented and the customer is realizing the ROI while
  5. not making you feel like you are walking on hot coals through the entire process.

Moreover, when they reach out to an expert analyst/consultant, they would

  1. focus on understanding the market: who the customers are and what they want
  2. what they have and don’t have to serve that need
  3. how they could better position and market what they have so customers would be more interested

But the reality is that, with so many companies having taken too much money at too high a valuation during the last two M&A frenzies, we have the situation where, at many vendors:

  • their ego is through the roof (because they think they are the only option of their caliber based on the raise) or
  • they have to meet a ridiculous sales target to keep their jobs, and they don’t care about your value or experience, just getting the sale.

And that’s why we have the situation that Robert is complaining about where it’s really hard to buy software these days. We don’t have the space we had 20 years ago in ProcureTech post dot-com crash where every vendor was doing anything it could to prove value because investment (potential) was low and there wasn’t a single vendor with a ridiculous sales target … they were just focussed on survival and real growth.

Now, this isn’t to say all vendors are bad, or that you are guaranteed a bad experience … there are still vendors out there who didn’t get, or didn’t take, too much investment, have greater control over their own destiny, and will do whatever they can to make you successful. However, don’t be surprised if you end up with the experience with your initial shortlist that this is the exception and not the norm. In other words, do your best to track down the best, but don’t expect a chill experience every time.

Cutting Edge Tech Is NOT Defined by the C-Suite, …

… Financiers, or the Marketers pushing hype (from the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.) at you 24/7.

Nor is it defined by the algorithms it uses, the software stacks it runs on, or the hardware stacks it makes use of.

Cutting edge tech is ANY and ALL tech that

  • solves one or more significant problems that not being solved by your tech today and
  • does it by automating at least 90% of the tactical data processes that can be automated

It can be based on the latest AI algorithm or twenty year old RPA. It doesn’t matter if it shines a light using a LAMP stack, if it is an edgy MEAN stack, an Austin Powers inspired Grails stack, or even a .NET stack (though the doctor personally shuddered typing those last three caps out). The entire point of enterprise software is to solve your problems.

The point of software is NOT to provide

  • an excuse for a C-Suite to cut his tech-bro buddy a fat check,
  • a new Tulip Market for greedy financiers who think they can score big and get out before the crash, or
  • marketers a platform to pump out pompous poop on a daily basis.

As Mr. Koray Köse penned in a recent piece on LinkedIn on how you are in need of cutting edge technology, the last thing you want to do is take your direction from the VC-pumped C-Levels who do nothing but repeat the marketing garbage they are fed, sometimes changing the baseline of the garbage mid-sentence!

You have to remember:

  • All the VCs and most of the PEs want to create the next unicorn and get rich quick overnight. So most of these VCs and PE firms are pumping huge amounts into companies with little to no product (to support their grand vision that even SAP and Oracle haven’t managed to achieve after 5 decades and trillions of dollars) and directing the majority of that to be spent on buzz-creating sales and marketing (and not real product development). After all, you don’t actually have to create anything beyond buzz to get rich — market crashes throughout history have proven that since Tulip Mania. (What was created there of value? Nothing. But hype made a few men rich and many men poor.)
  • Even though today’s LLMs are dumber than a doorknob (and demonstrate more than any previous generation of the tech that AI should stand for Artificial Idiocy), with performance degrading every iteration (because there is no more data to steal, and the AI engines are now training each other on regurgitated digital garbage), marketers are still taking storytelling to a whole new level (and we mean storytelling because ALL the claims are fake) with a spin that even the Spin Doctors of old would be envious of. (Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong now, right? They want to Make You A Believer so you hand over all your Money when you should Exit … Stage Left and Run To The Hills!)
  • This copy is being pushed onto the C-Suites of all of the other investments in their portfolio with assurances that it’s all true, and being similarly echoed to all of the CXOs that attend the conferences they speak at, the golf outings they are invited to, and the exclusive social gatherings they arrange.

Not one of these groups knows what you need, and two of these groups have absolutely no interest in giving it to you — their interest is all about getting your money, building the hype, inflating the value, and, hopefully, cashing out big before the next hype cycle and/or the inevitable market crash that’s coming.

The technology you need is the technology that is:

  • built with real world problems in mind,
  • tested on real world problems in real companies and proven to deliver, and
  • scalable and extendable to your operations and needs.

This type of tech is built over years and doesn’t use unreliable probabilistic AI at the core. (It runs on traditional, configurable, RPA that is 100% reliable and auditable. Now, this tech might employe AI to help with the configuration by analyzing your systems and processes and self-assessed gap analysis by recommending configurations for you to approve, and that’s okay, because it’s not randomly making decisions, its recommending options and letting you confirm or deny. It might also use SLMs for specific problems where they work a high percentage of the time to jump-start searches, documents, and processes for you, and as long as you retain full control and can accept, modify, or reject, that’s okay too. But everything is built on a solid core, with 100% dependable automation for all key data intake, processing, and pushes that is done without any manual intervention, appropriately calibrated to your business rules, processes, and goals.)

It’s also built slow, rolled out to a small group of beta customers or development partners, and hardened in the field before being rolled out en masse.

And, most importantly, it’s built by a company that is boot-strapped or frugally running on a shoe-string budget from minority SEED investors to get that first version up-and-running successfully in its first 10 customers before that company goes for any VC funding to scale up. A company that has the time to get it right before being under constant pressure to make demanding, if not impossible, sales targets.

Moreover, to have any chance of getting this software, you need to know three things:

  1. how to identify what you need that will form the heart and soul of the RFX,
  2. how to write a good technology RFX and analyze the responses, and
  3. how to identify the right companies to invite to the RFX.

What You Need

For Supply Chain, as Mr. Koray Köse points out, if you need help identifying your true needs and cutting through the noise, he can help you out with that with the eyes of a hawk, the skill of a surgeon, and the wit of a Williams (a Robin Williams). For Procurement, Joël Collin-Demers can slice through your organizational landscape like a hot knife through butter and let you know exactly what you need in priority order.

The Technology RFP

Every consultancy and their mascot claims they can help you here, but you need to be very, very careful.

  • many of their consultants are not technology experts and tend to prioritize features over functions, as that’s all they know
  • many of these firms have partnerships with the (mega) suite players, and you don’t maintain sycophant, sorry, Gold/Platinum/Diamond, status unless you direct a LOT of business their way each year, so they tend to try to fit everyone into one of these buckets
  • many follow the old consulting model of “give the client exactly what he thinks he wants” and don’t take the time to figure out what you actually need and educate you, leading to an RFP that is no better than what you would have written yourself, as they spend half their time questioning you, and the other half writing down your responses

For true success, you need someone who is simultaneously:

  • an expert in the domain,
  • an expert in technology, and
  • not incentivized to help any vendor whatsoever and, preferably
  • an expert in project assurance (but not always necessary)

If you need help writing that ProcureTech / Direct Sourcing/Supply Chain RFP, feel free to reach out. This is my expertise. And for some tips, feel free to start with our recent series on How Do You Write A Good RFP?

Vendor Selection

Very few analysts and consultants know more than a handful of vendors. The big firms focus on the big vendors who cut big cheques, which are the 20-ish same vendors you see in their maps year after year after year. They don’t know about the other 700. Only a few of us independent analysts go far and wide and actually know what is out there and how it can help you.

For ProcureTech, SI should be your first stop. It’s the site that gave you the mega map to open your eyes as to just how wide the playing field is. Moreover, if you need something really niche where the doctor doesn’t have the expertise, he’ll find the right expert to refer you to.

For SupplyChain, Mr. Köse knows a lot of the players. But don’t overlook Bob Ferrari of The Ferrari Group. As one of the original supply chain analysts, he knows all the players and what their platforms can and can’t do inside and out.

And if you reach out to the right experts and get the right help, maybe you can get true cutting edge tech that actually helps you!

Bells and Whistles Lead to Cells and Thistles! Part IV

In Part I, after noting that I’ve been hearing and seeing the following too often lately:

  • smaller vendors struggling to close/losing deals because the bigger/splashier vendors have more “Bells and Whistles”
  • vendors getting lots of (and possibly too much) funding focusing heavy on bells and whistles

I said that we were going to dive into some of the most common bells and whistles and why, in the best case, they’re a complete waste of money and, in the worst case, the thorn prick will end up being so painful that your team will simply stop using the software. (And often do so before the subscription is half, or even a third, up, which leaves you in an expensive subscription jail you cannot stop paying for even though no one is using it.)

We started by diving into Intake before addressing the general situations of Flashy UX and Adaptive AI-Driven Automation which are permeating the space for little to no value whatsoever. In our last post we continued our discussion of the bells and whistles in Source to Pay that offer little to no value and we still need to address a few useless Procure to Pay whistles before we can complete our discussion, but first we have to address another across the board useless feature.

Actual Animated Bells and Whistles (complete with Bell and Whistle Sounds) …

Along with their equivalents.

First off, let me state that this is something I should NOT have to write. Let me also stat that it angers me that in 2025 some companies still mistake flash for substance or believe that it adds any value whatsoever. Not only does flash NOT add substance, but the annoyance factor soon becomes aggravation and leads to users ACTIVELY boycotting the platform you spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions on, and in particular, the users who should be using it daily.

Let me explain with one of the worst examples of this, which is present in some of the (big) intake/orchestration platforms and upstart P2P platforms. Animated images that signal when a user has received a requisition, PO, and purchase order (sometimes complete with bell sounds). Now, to a manager, this looks cool because the system draws an animated graph from requester to purchaser to supplier back to purchaser and shows an animation on request complete (purchaser processed the request), requisition complete (and supplier received the PO), acknowledgement complete (purchaser received the acknowledgement, and possibly a delivery date), invoice received (purchaser approved and sent to Accounts Payable), etc. To an average user who uses the system once a month to make a requisition for something, it looks like it will be very easy peasy to use.

But for the Procurement Buyer who has to deal with, and verify the routings on, 50 requisitions a day and deal with 50 “where is my payment” requests a week because the supplier rep is literally too technologically stupid to both login to the platform AND do two clicks to get to the right search screen and then enter their PO # flawlessly, IT IS AN ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE! (And not the Alice Cooper kind!)

Think about it. REALLY THINK ABOUT IT! They have to review 50 requests, deal with them, reassign them, or just verify them. After every request. they have to deal with an animated graph that just slows them down. Plus, because each request has these big animated logos, maybe they can fit 10 on a screen in a table view, vs. being able to see all 50, sort by type, drill down, reassign in bulk, and move on.

But it gets worse when a supplier accounts receivable rep or seller calls and says what’s the status of my invoice (and for some reason, doesn’t have the PO number because the PO # is in the system he can’t figure out how to get into), and you have to do multiple clicks to even bring up the advanced search/filter tab, and even when you manage to filter down to the 3 day window it’s in, because the supplier batches, them, you have 50 on that day and can only see 10 at a time — and no line item details. Vs. No animations at all, a tabular view with key line items, and the ability to quickly scroll and find the invoice, and a single, quickly scanned, word that shows the status. After a few weeks of animation atrocity, you get so angry and fed up you beg to get the green screen ERP back! I’m not joking here. Your back office people are overworked, and any system that slows them down quickly gets their ire and loathing and if they can avoid it, they will.

P2P: Consumer-Style Catalogs

Your requisitions want a one-click, but your Procurement personnel DON’T want an Amazon style catalog. They don’t want “the best deals today” popping up beside the on-contract / preferred vendor catalog items and the budget owner with catalog authority choosing that off-contract “best-deal” thinking she is saving the organization when, in fact, a failure to meet your contractual commitments negates the rebates you were counting on at quarter’s end.

Moreover, when a user wants to requisition a new phone or laptop, she doesn’t want 20 options if only 2 are company approved for her. Nor does she want a lot of fancy graphics and super deep dives on the main screen, with hard to find “add to cart” and “buy now” options because they are buried in too much text/images.

Buyers want a get-in, find it quick, buy/requisition it now, and get out experience. Procurement personnel want a system that not only enforces policy, but makes buying on the contract easier than doing literally anything else, including going to a third party site and ordering something on the P-Card. Remember, as a fellow analyst likes to say, humans are lazy and if doing it right is easier than doing it wrong, they’ll do it right. (As a classic example of this, take music piracy. It was rampant in the mid to late 90s, but as more on-line / streaming options, like Apple Music and Spotify, came online it dropped suddenly because getting what you wanted at the best quality was cheaply and easier to do legally. Make Procurement like that, and policies just get followed.)

There are other examples, but by now you should get the point. Buy a solution because it has the breadth and depth you need, NOT because it has bells and whistles, because as soon as the solution is found lacking, usage will drop. Moreover, if all the solution does is annoy your daily users with useless bells and whistles, they will do their best to stop using it entirely!

To repeat one more, and hopefully final, time, as we said in the last three parts, bells and whistles look and sound cool, until you realize that the ringing can be deafening to the point it gives you such a headache that you can’t get your work done. So don’t get lured in by the bells and whistles, focus on real solutions that will make the majority of your work easy and the remaining minority possible, even if the solution doesn’t look much better than the green screen you have now. You want solutions, not shock-and-awe where only shock remains once you realize the awe was fabricated.

Bells and Whistles Lead to Cells and Thistles! Part III

In Part I, after noting that I’ve been hearing and seeing the following too often lately:

  • smaller vendors struggling to close/losing deals because the bigger/splashier vendors have more “Bells and Whistles”
  • vendors getting lots of (and possibly too much) funding focusing heavy on bells and whistles

I said that we were going to dive into some of the most common bells and whistles and why, in the best case, they’re a complete waste of money and, in the worst case, the thorn prick will end up being so painful that your team will simply stop using the software. (And often do so before the subscription is half, or even a third, up, which leaves you in an expensive subscription jail you cannot stop paying for even though no one is using it.)

We started by diving into Intake before addressing the general situations of Flashy UX and Adaptive AI-Driven Automation which are permeating the space for little to no value whatsoever. Today we continue discussing the bells and whistles in Source to Pay that offer little to no value.

RFX: Generation

This sounds super cool and super helpful, except, in all but one case I’ve seen so far, it’s not. The way most of these products are implemented is they ask you a few questions, create a very detailed prompt, feed it to a generic LLM, and pull back what looks like a good RFP because it’s reasonably long and really well written (compared to the average RFP written by a junior buyer who has written anything without the aid of an LLM in 5 years).

Except what it brings back is an RFP that is written to the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, not average, and definitely not the wisdom of crowds because these LLMs are trained on whatever data can be scraped from the internet, and the data there is the most of becomes the data that influences the LLM the most, and that data is the lowest common denominator data. So, you get a rather generic RFP with little to no useful specifics, which means that the RFP is okay for indirect and standard services at best, and poor for direct and complex services, if it’s even usable.

RFX: Response

You have some vendors that are building LLM solutions to help vendors build RFX responses based on their data (pretty good) and standard responses, which is not so good because, again, it’s lowest common denominator responses with absolutely no unique capabilities conveyed or any unique thought. You want a vendor who took the time to review your RFP, understand it, and come up with a thoughtful, customized, valuable solution to your problem — not a vendor who trusted an LLM to create a winning response.

Supplier Discovery

Quite a few vendors are now integrating AI, and Gen-AI in particular, into their supplier directories, networks, and internet search and promising quick, easy, powerful supplier search for any need you can think of. A few of them, primarily the industry specific solutions, work pretty good, but the majority of them give you results that are no better than a random Google search. This is because, without deep supplier profiles and deeper product and service files, you can’t do good supplier discovery.

Automated Supplier Risk Profiles

Now, this sounds really useful, and if they were reliable, they would be. But most of these platforms are pulling in third party rating data, computing risk statistics off of incomplete web data (supplier site, articles, social media sites) based on LLM/statistical processing that’s not fully accurate. This results in both false positives and false negatives. False positives because the incomplete data results in a poor reliability or performance or brand score, which isn’t too big a deal if you think you might need the supplier, dive in, identify the issues, provide the missing data, and fix the scores. (But if the suppliers who are the false positives are the best options and you overlook them because you choose to focus on the suppliers who were all green, and only middle of the road, then you end up with mediocre suppliers when you could have had good ones.)

But if the suppliers turn up green, and you trust the scores because the handful of green scores you verified when the system went live were reasonable, and you select a supplier that was on the verge of bankruptcy (because the financial ratings agencies didn’t have the data from recent events because the supplier was private) who has been turning out poor quality products over the last few months, you could end up with a supply shortage on short notice followed by a lot of returns and demands for replacements you can’t provide — and that’s not a good thing.

The best solutions are semi-automated, force the buyers to build the right profiles and metrics, compute data confidence, and force buyers to verify data of low confidence. They don’t promise miracle ratings, they promise reliable solutions.

In other words, as we said in the last part, bells and whistles look and sound cool, until you realize that the ringing can be deafening to the point it gives you such a headache that you can’t get your work done.

Finally, because we want to make it extra clear how useless bells and whistles are, we are going to continue this series and address a few major areas of Procure to Pay as well.