Procurement

“Things like price optimization, things like procurement, these are very natural sort of business loops that occur that can be fully automated by these models.”

“Send a word document. Do not send a PDF. Cause they're going to always red line. Always send a word document of your paper”

“When we go through the regular routes, especially as a startups, through our, The bureaucracies of the entire large organization to the procurement, legal, it is very, very difficult for, it's a maze difficult for startups to navigate through. Whereas when an …”

“Their biggest issue in deploying AI is actually just getting through procurement.”

“And getting stuck in procurement is usually because you're not speaking to a senior enough person and they don't know how to navigate it, which is why, like, that executive needs to be involved. Because as soon as the executive picks up a phone and tries to ge…”

“So that's why the hundred K is such a safe zone because even for 10 K, you might have to go through procurement. So this is like the surest way to make sure that like you don't listen, I've seen 10 K take nine months to close.”

“For a long time, I've been saying, you know, if you have to go through procurement, 25,000 dollar minimum ACV, and now I think I'm up to about, given inflation, literally, and just how many years it's been, it's like, I think it might be 30 or 35 is kind of my…”

“One of the worst things someone can say to me is we're better than X product. Cause then I asked them to define that. And then I asked them like, okay, how do we measure that? And then I say, okay, should we give this company another year to like give them thi…”

“Another piece that's important with procurement is explaining exactly what you do and don't do. Because if you say you do a bunch of things and they can't really place you, they're going to send you to the kitchen sink of contracting and MSA. Which are, is goi…”

“The biggest mistake that I see founders make at this stage is getting surprised and discovering that what they thought was a done deal is in fact not done at all and may take weeks or months of additional back and forth or fall through completely.”

“The moment someone says procurement or custom terms of service, or I want single sign on, or I want, you know, whatever enterprise features to be able to this and that. All right, cool. Minimum, 30 grand a year. That's it. I'm not going to do, go through the p…”

“If you're in an enterprise sales cycle, people expect you to ask for money. People are paying for a premium service. They're paying for a premium ELA. They expect it to be higher. Ah, and the insidious thing is that they also expect it to go to procurement and…”

“My rule of thumb is charge a lot because enterprise customers are a pain to deal with in terms of procurement and all that. So I think minimum 25 K 35 K on the bottom end for these types of deals.”

“Most of the work, if not all of the important work it's done before stuff turns into a contract. So gathering your requirements, deciding which suppliers to invite, deciding which internal stakeholders to involve in a process that all gets done manually, proba…”

“And the mistake people sometimes do. Is take that commodity low criticality scenario and apply the more complex type or acquisition method to it.”

“Typically what I've seen are procurement organizations can be relevant in some way, shape, form or fashion. As you start managing expenses, For suppliers in the 50 to one hundred million dollar range, right?”

“I would say that the biggest thing really is the high risk and no reward for change. You know, like if you have an IT in any government purchasing decision, you're not gonna have one buyer. You're gonna have multiple buyers from each department.”

“Expecting suppliers to come to a bunch of portals just didn't happen. And so you end up having software would not create data. No way of really connecting this information together. And so a large enterprise were really operating blindly, not having a lot of v…”

“Procurement is exceptionally good at pricing a certain kind of thing, which is labor per hour. So I've seen very large software contract orders and procurement will actually pick on the labor per hour because that has a near comparable. And so when you start t…”

“Go to that meeting, expect there to be many more people that you need to deal with, and ultimately when they say yes, it actually doesn't mean they're ready to go. It might mean like, yes, we want to buy it, and it'll take six more months to go through procure…”