141–150 of 172 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard a better plan for failure. "Hey $10B company, I'm gonna need you to modernize your purchasing department before we go any further."
I don't think it's a plan for failure at all. I think it's entirely within Atlassian's rights to consider these customers to be more trouble than they're worth and pursue customers who don't have such braindead internal processes.
Nice idea - but ... His argument is "I could buy any SaaS service I liked by simply clicking 'Subscribe to Foo-SaaS for 99 / mth' on my AWS dashboard." This is true - it would solve his needs immediately and would yes lead to thousands of sales. For about a week. Then every purchasing dept in the Fortune 500 would collectively spray their coffee over their monitors, and suddenly one of two things would happen a) AWS…
I half disagree. I'm not trying to avoid financial controls or any of that. What most people that don't do this stuff don't realize is that just working the process to i.e. create vendors in your ERP are incredibly time consuming. This is even if you have full support of the business. We always had 100% support from everyone and it was still a nightmare.
I have been through (many) purchase processes and they have always been painful. Especially true the first time you try and make a purchase at any large org.
I call this "Director Hazing". Being promoted to Director (US company designation) usually involves a year of administrative hell as you have to learn all the horrific systems that have grown up in the company over time. There is a sort of "sink or swim" mentality and once a director gets through it they are selected for being the sort of person who can operate this system (ie responds to emails quickly) - and that tends to work against promoting people who will fix it.
Anyway, as I say I reckon 25% of the time management thinks it should fix the problem and 75% of the time "I can work the system and so can anyone else at a certain level - everyone else has not been promoted and so should not get to spend the cash"
I still remain convinced the system works as intended.
A side note - there was some study I read about a major supermarket chain that used cameras and POS data to rank their checkout workers - and a small revolt from store managers killed the project. The store managers knew who performed best and worst at that part of the job - but that ranking did not fit the ranking for the other intangible parts of the job. And they wanted the flexibility to decide who to fire / keep / promote. And a clear metric would have got in the way.
Similarly management can if they want make sure your vendor is set up, your licenses paid for. If it is high enough up their priority tree. And if it is not having a widely hated terrible system is a good excuse to avoid saying no to subordinates...
I own a SaaS and 99% of our customers are huge international corporations. They only buy with PO, and every sale is a massive bureaucratic effort. I hired a freelance account manager to deal with incredible requirements like: - anti money laundering declarations - mandatory company stamp + hand written signatures - supplier enrollment forms (excel+macros) - notary apostilles for incorporation certificates sent across…
The worst is when. We deal with the vendor negotiate a price the procurement people who have no idea about what it is their purchasing have a kpi on saving big co x % off every piece of paper that passes their desk so they go in at the last mile after pretty much everything is set and pull your pants down (don’t forget to leave fat for this )
And good luck.
I'm about to just see if we can charge the card for the full three months so we can manually flag the invoices as paid. Terms are net 18 usually.
The PO process is awful. We have to fill out forms as a vendor, submit tax information. It's completely unneeded.
If your company requires POs for SaaS you need to take a step out of the 20th century.
Sounds more like certain purchasing departments need to modernize, not the other way around. IMHO. Not being able to use the right tools for the job, because some bean counters don't like complexity, is silly and shortsighted.
That's pretty much not going to happen. That said, what you can do is: - Provide a plan that fit within common purchasing card limits/tiers, to enable those who want to bypass the internal controls of their purchasing department and just slip it in on an expense report and be done with it. - Provide a plan that adds several zeros, to make it worth the hassle when you get a customer that does try to go through the off…
Strongly agree with you although what "common" means here is tricky.
I imagine "common" in Local Government is different from tech giants ... and geography brings another whole dimension into it.
Less of a problem if your product is strongly focused on one country and one industry.
"Provide a plan that adds several zeros"
I think this is ideal but I've noticed that this isn't generally how it's done. The third tier of pricing is generally "Talk to us" and the first part of "Talk to us" is the supplier working out how much they can get and so requires the sort of sales management skills which many tech startups don't have.
In passing there's a lot of sense about pricing in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
I own a SaaS and 99% of our customers are huge international corporations. They only buy with PO, and every sale is a massive bureaucratic effort. I hired a freelance account manager to deal with incredible requirements like: - anti money laundering declarations - mandatory company stamp + hand written signatures - supplier enrollment forms (excel+macros) - notary apostilles for incorporation certificates sent across…
Actually, AWS Marketplace is trying to do exactly this.
I own a SaaS and 99% of our customers are huge international corporations. They only buy with PO, and every sale is a massive bureaucratic effort. I hired a freelance account manager to deal with incredible requirements like: - anti money laundering declarations - mandatory company stamp + hand written signatures - supplier enrollment forms (excel+macros) - notary apostilles for incorporation certificates sent across…
I own a SaaS and 99% of our customers are huge international corporations. They only buy with PO, and every sale is a massive bureaucratic effort. I hired a freelance account manager to deal with incredible requirements like: - anti money laundering declarations - mandatory company stamp + hand written signatures - supplier enrollment forms (excel+macros) - notary apostilles for incorporation certificates sent across…
What does PO mean?
More important than the PO form is the entire rest of the corporate purchasing process it entails. You send them a quote, they try haggle you down, they might make their internal team send the bid out to multiple vendors for quotes and try to play you all off against each other (and how well you meet the requirements for the actual end user is not a a part of this process, just their checklist which is three degrees removed) they decide what quantities they want to buy, you confirm the price, send an invoice, they'll pay net 30 or net 90 or whatever their purchasing department decides via whatever payment method their department decides and you'll do it because with the bulk order amount and the markup you'll decide is justified for this hassle, the money is too much to refuse.