Such companies do exist. They are usually run by friends of the people working in procurement at various companies.
Sounds like my reseller buddies.
SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
61–70 of 172 posts
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company. Sure, but as someone who works at that sort of company, we happily give lots of real money to companies that solve that problem for us. As recently as a few month ago I wanted to spend 1-3 thousand dollars pr year on a SaaS product. The problem internally was never exactly h…
I bet they were rational, but somehow I can't imagine the lifetime value of you as their customer would overcome bending a little bit to suit your procurement needs. Odd.
It's not a little bit. The process demands of a large company can suck the life out of a small one pretty easy. I've seen it happen.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say this would have worked at your company, and not to say it's perfect, but I think the "HACK" of the bottom-up approach for software like JIRA or others is that it is priced in a way where you can get your team at a company using it and showing demonstrable value from using it on a free or very low-cost (AKA your personal credit card) tier. Then, when you go to make it official, you have much more power in t…
I think maybe I wasnt clear. No one tried to keep us from licensing anything. Pretty much any solution was fine with then assuming it wasn't a security nightmare. > Just get it done Getting it done is a process heavy, minimum 4 month process because of purchasing rules. That's the problem I'm calling out.
Whether it's IT or Finance (purchasing rules), CEO/VP have the power to force them to make an exception or change their process if there's a clear business benefit.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The companies I'm taking about have 10K+ employees around the globe. The CFO would to nothing but type in the credit card number all day.
Why would employees be buying services individually? With 10K employees there would be a site licence.
Just because your company has 10k employees doesn't mean they need 10k licenses for everything they buy. Often only 10 people in one department in one country need that one specific thing.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#65An addition to all the comments in this thread, from a finance point of view, consolidating the tax treatment of multiple resold items would be nightmarish if you want to launch this service internationally. Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-off for onboarding I bet) or keeping wildly volatile short-term liabilities on their balan…
It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company. Sure, but as someone who works at that sort of company, we happily give lots of real money to companies that solve that problem for us. As recently as a few month ago I wanted to spend 1-3 thousand dollars pr year on a SaaS product. The problem internally was never exactly h…
> And the sole reason I didn't give that money to the SaaS company was because they couldn't work with our procurement process. We're now investigating a much more expensive solution from a much bigger company.
Bingo. My guess is that it may be efficient for many small companies to offload the burden of dealing with procurement processes to a single specialized entity.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#66He complains about the reseller and their incompetence, but (incompetence aside) this is basically what he's looking for? I know it's one of those things that tends to change over time, particularly if your account rep changes, but wouldn't simply finding a reseller that doesn't suck be the answer here? Perhaps one that lets you automate quotes and purchases...
Nope. Resellers are very hands on and high touch. I'm talking about something more like a pass-through payment processor than a reseller. Quotes in this case are as trivial as a PDF generator that just inserts the fixed price into a commercial offer template. As it stands, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to pry something like that out of a typical SaaS vendor.
I literally wrote “I’m begging on my knees” to a LastPass sales person recently.
I’ll make sure to have another solution in place before next year’s renewal.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The companies I'm taking about have 10K+ employees around the globe. The CFO would to nothing but type in the credit card number all day.
Why would employees be buying services individually? With 10K employees there would be a site licence.
That's a 2 year process to get 10K site licenses, possibly to the point where the CFO gets involved. Have fun with that.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would employees be buying services individually? With 10K employees there would be a site licence.
Just because your company has 10k employees doesn't mean they need 10k licenses for everything they buy. Often only 10 people in one department in one country need that one specific thing.
Indeed. The team should pick the right tools for them.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not my company, it's every large company I've ever worked for. I'm not looking for a band aid. I'm looking for a solution that helps the SaaS industry without demanding that the Fortune 500 get their act together, because they ain't changing for our benefit any time soon. Can you expand on > Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-…
In Sweden we also have something similar to purchase orders which is common even with B2C and it always bothered me how often it is used compared to the US where credit card was more normal. I think the article brings up a good point, if a startup could figure out the taxes and bookkeeping, set some reasonable margins or costs for the service it could be a really good business. Edit: Sorry, they would handle the POs…
>In Sweden we also have something similar to purchase orders which is common even with B2C and it always bothered me how often it is used compared to the US where credit card was more normal.
Our clients send us purchase orders in Europe, but the context is custom, turn-key, machine learning products developer for large enterprise. We take them by the hand from "I have many problems" to a product their people want to use.
We're building our machine learning platform to make that product development faster (data, scheduling training notebooks, automatic tracking, etc.). We also adopted a plugin architecture for product so we can plug functionality and, more importantly, remove functionality to allow clients to discard what they don't need and avoid a product with 2000 buttons and menu items.
Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Resellers are very hands on and high touch. I'm talking about something more like a pass-through payment processor than a reseller. Quotes in this case are as trivial as a PDF generator that just inserts the fixed price into a commercial offer template. As it stands, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to pry something like that out of a typical SaaS vendor.
I literally wrote “I’m begging on my knees” to a LastPass sales person recently. I’ll make sure to have another solution in place before next year’s renewal.
> “I’m begging on my knees”
I feel your pain