Hi, everyone. As everyone is filing into the webinar room, we're just gonna get started. We have a lot to cover today. Just want to welcome everyone to today's webinar, Supplier Intelligence - Maximizing ROI with Commercial Intelligence. My name is Heather Quitos, and I am the moderator from the marketing team today, from Tropic. Just want to go over a couple of housekeeping details before we get started.
If you could hit the next slide, Tommy.
First, the session is being recorded, and all registrants will receive a link to the recording later this week. So watch your email for that. If you do have any questions, you can use q and a button at the bottom of your screen.
So with that said, let's get going. I am excited to introduce two of our great product leaders today from Tropic. Srinivas is Tropic's VP of product and data, and Tommy is a group product manager for Spend Intelligence. So they're here today to talk about all things supplier intelligence with everyone here on the call, and I'm excited to pass it off to you, Srinivas, whenever you're ready.
Thank you, Heather.
As Heather mentioned, I'm Srinivas, and I have the privilege of of leading our product and data teams. And I wanna thank you all for spending your precious time with us and lending your ears to learn about how Tropic is aiming to maximize ROI with our commercial intelligence.
Just to kick it off, I wanted to give you guys a little bit of background on Tropic and and what we're aiming to do and deep dive into our notion around intelligent spend management and then partner with Tommy on taking you through our supplier intelligence journey.
Tropic is on a mission to make technology a buyer's market. And how do we do that? It's really our intelligent spend management proposition, and it's how we level the playing field to make technology a buyer's market. And I firmly believe the time is now. Right? Why do I believe that? Ease of SaaS software distribution is resulting in so much proliferation that's making managing that software and the corresponding spend harder and harder?
And just to show you what that actually means and looks like in your day to day, I guarantee you've all encountered one or all of these situations, and they end up being costly and inefficient.
You might have missed a renewal.
You over-purchased licenses relative to what's actually needed or used. You've made a purchase without the proper approvals or the proper visibility and or you end up paying fifteen percent more relative to your peers just with the asymmetry of information.
So our proposition in solving and and helping you solve all these problems is what we refer to as our intelligent spend management, which is basically putting data driven decision making powered by supplier intelligence at the center of managing that spend to effectively maximize your purchase value, enhancing that spend efficiency, and ultimately improving your bottom line. And we've been doing this for five hundred plus customers, saving them over a hundred and fifty thousand hours to date for the spend management of nearly ten billion plus dollars.
And as we look at, you know, double clicking how we actually achieve these outcomes for our customers, I firmly believe that spend efficiency is a process and not an outcome.
And we wanna make sure our customers have better visibility, are able to enforce the right controls, and the data and intelligence to enable them to have leverage in purchasing the software to be able to achieve these impeccable business outcomes.
And it's the combination of our intake to procure platform, as well as our proprietary data and our service offerings that we've been able to deliver these outcomes. And I'm really excited to partner with Tommy in showing you all specifically, the critical part of all of this, which is our supplier intelligence product.
So with that, let's actually get into it. Let's shift gears and talk about supplier intelligence. So throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to partner with CFOs and and teams within a CFO's office in various capacities.
And three things have been very clear to me amongst many things in working with CFOs.
One, everybody in the CFO's office thoroughly enjoys being a strategic business partner, but spend a disproportionate amount of time in the business versus on the business. They're focused too much on tactical things and are desiring to be better strategic partners with all the functions that they, partner with.
Number two, forecasting, budgeting, and planning diligence is paramount in sort of driving growth efficiency, and outcomes for the business. And they wanna be able to do that effectively by thinking about planning for and acting on all the different possible outcomes so they can still do something about those things, but they're not always able to plan ahead and don't have the data to support them. And, ultimately, the my favorite question from everybody from the office of the CFO is, do you have any benchmarks or data to help me decide, plan, and, or forecast? And, ultimately, data centricity above all, they want better information to make better decisions.
And it's these imperatives that served as our drivers and motivators giving rise to both our intake to procure platform as well as our supplier intelligence offering.
We really wanna prioritize your time and resources to efficiently drive outcomes and savings and support you in getting out of being too tactical and and drive better business outcomes by being better business partners.
We wanna help you improve, your spend management and planning practices by arming you with supplier pricing and negotiation intelligence data so you are able to better effectively plan ahead and and look around corners with that data and intelligence in hand. And finally, we do wanna help you power decisions with data and benchmarks to minimize any of the variances in your plans and your forecast.
And supplier intelligence is how we do that combined with our overall intelligent spend management proposition.
So really excited to partner with Tommy on this story, and and thank you again for joining the webinar.
And I'm gonna turn it over to Tommy to talk us through supplier intelligence in more depth.
Awesome. Thank you, Sherry. I wanted to start my section with actually some personal experience that I've had as a contract owner.
Now in my last role, I inherited, the marketing department and its tech stack when the head of marketing abruptly left. This was in the middle of two thousand twenty two.
The the slowdown where we were trying to cut our SaaS costs by about thirty percent, like so many others were.
I did the most logical thing I could think of at the time, and I saw that our largest supplier was renewing in the next quarter. And so I figured this would be as good a place to any to start to try to reduce my SaaS costs.
Now what I quickly found is that I was very outmatched.
I was missing the actual contract document that was signed with things like Lyft and opt out dates and everything I would need to actually effectively negotiate.
I was missing the knowledge that the price we were paying for this contract was actually already very good. The rep truly couldn't do anything to work with me because our pricing was already in a great place.
And lastly, you know, I didn't have any knowledge on what negotiation tactics were actually expected to work with the supplier.
I continued over and over again just saying that we were having internal company challenges, budget issues. You know, I'm sure nobody else was telling the supplier that in twenty twenty two. And it ended up with me spending about a month of my time putting heavy pressure on a supplier, not really getting anywhere, kind of burning our relationship going forward.
And maybe most importantly, taking me away from running a product and now a marketing team for the first time through a challenging macroeconomic environment.
So if you're listening, you're probably not too surprised that I was feeling outmatched.
I couldn't even find a contract document.
But I've talked to a lot of very sophisticated tech buyers over the past year, and, you know, whether they're using Tropic or another solution, they're they're always telling me the same things. They say, I don't have enough coverage.
They say, I can only focus on two of the next eight renewals that I have.
They say, every time I pick up the phone, I have no real leverage against any of my SaaS providers.
And so how these different problems manifest themselves is that these companies are prioritizing their time, kinda similar to I was. They're looking at the size of the renewals or the new purchases coming up on the calendar.
Unfortunately, when you do that, you may find yourself negotiating against the supplier that just doesn't negotiate.
You may renew a contract that's entirely overlapping with another contract you have because it doesn't rise to the price threshold that reaches your scrutiny.
You may also do what I was doing and try to negotiate against the supplier when you already had a great play price. There was no real opportunity.
And then lastly, let's assume the stars align, you actually find yourself with a real savings opportunity on a contract. You could use a negotiation tactic that the supplier just simply doesn't care about, kind of wasting your your opportunity to save.
And so when we hear all this, we were forming the opinion that, hey. Maybe a sophisticated intake to procure platform, professional negotiation services aren't enough to give buyers both the opportunities that exist in their tech stack and the ability to actually efficiently, capitalize on them. What they needed was data as leverage or supplier intelligence to be able to effectively reduce their costs.
This was exciting to me as a product manager because this was data that we had solely because we were conducting those thousands of first party negotiations.
We had billions of dollars of spend under management in our intake to procure platform. And with recent advances in AI, we can now efficiently analyze all those negotiations, all of those contracts, and be able to efficiently package that up for customers in ways that allow them to find those opportunities and execute on them.
This is the data that would have helped me as a contract owner focus on my inbound marketing platform where I was paying ninetieth percentile in price or my analytics platform that was entirely duplicative with something that our operations team was using.
So if you found yourself or your company struggling in some of these issues, I'm really excited to show off kind of how we envision this coming together in Tropic's intelligent spin management platform.
Awesome. So jumping over to the product in our demo section here, I am gonna put myself in the shoes of a contract owner that's just submitted a request for a contract renewal for Calendly.
Now one of the first things that I might want to do as a contract owner will be to create a price benchmark for this contract. Just understand where am I starting from. Is there an opportunity for savings here?
So by creating the price benchmark, so by creating the price benchmark, Tropic is automatically gonna analyze that previous contract and pulling in all of those important details that I'm gonna need to be able to create an apples to apples comparison of data versus the Tropic database.
By creating the price benchmark, I can quickly see, you know, easily that I am paying, you know, in the red. This is a high price, and that there's a real savings opportunity here. You know, Tropic is suggesting I could be saving fifteen thousand dollars against the expected price.
This information on its own could drive a number of different actions by me as a contract owner. Maybe that tells me I should hand this off to the procurement team so that they might efficiently be able to realize this potential savings here. But in this instance, let's say that I wanna, you know, tackle this one on my own, and I'm gonna try to negotiate this to a better price.
So let me go ahead and save this to a request, and I'm gonna jump over to our supplier insights that Tropic has about Calendly, and then access the negotiation playbook. So if price benchmarks can help you kind of understand and uncover where those opportunities for savings are, negotiation playbooks are the piece that actually help you execute on it. How do you actually bring a price that's in the red down to the yellow or to the green? A lot of times, you simply can't just say, I need a better price.
So this is made up of a couple different sections here. Up at the top, we have the willingness to negotiate with the supplier. This can be extremely important if you run across a supplier that just simply doesn't negotiate on renewals or is very challenging. You know, that might that information might lead you to prioritize your time on some potentially easier, opportunities even if they're slightly smaller.
On the negotiation strategy side, we have some information about just high level pricing model itself as that can be helpful in just making sure that you're strategically engaging with the supplier in the correct way, but we also have some general strategy.
Now we have some LLMs that are constantly analyzing all of the negotiations that our professional negotiators are committing out into the field, and they're always looking for things of, like, when specific tactics or strategy against the supplier is changing that might material affect our strategy so that we can automatically propose kind of those updates in real time as they're happening with all of our, expert negotiators in the field. Now these are also reviewed on a quarterly basis just to ensure, that our, you know, professional negotiators can add any of their own personal color into these kind of general strategies.
And on top of that, they're also writing very specific step by step guides of custom strategies of what specifically to do if you find yourself in these common situations with any given supplier. Maybe that's you're trying to renew flat like this one here. Maybe that's your upgrading from business to enterprise tier, and it'll give you some very specific steps that you can take to navigate that correctly.
The last thing I wanted to mention here are the negotiation tactics. So, again, we're using AI to constantly analyze, what tactics are, agents in the field are using, how often they're being used, how successful are they in driving, positive outcomes for the the companies they're negotiating on behalf of. And so me as a contract owner can come in and quickly see how those are ranked from high, medium to low, understand what a specific tactic is, when to use it, and how to use it. And so, hopefully, they don't find themselves like me in my previous story example where I'm just using one tactic that doesn't work and probably not even using it very well.
Now we recently just spoke to a large AI lead generation company that said that they follow this exact workflow here, price benchmark to negotiation playbook, to knock off forty five thousand dollars on their last SaaS renewal. So very excited with some of the kind of complete workflow this is offering to some of our customers.
Awesome.
So jumping back over to our request here, you know, the procurement process doesn't end with someone submitting a request.
Approvers are also a very large stakeholder and making sure we're getting the right data leverage too.
If I'm coming to this request as an approver, I can immediately see the price benchmark and that a tie that the requester had left earlier.
This can be helpful in and of itself. I've talked to one finance leader at a mid market ecom tech company that said that they used to have to meet with the CFO every month to approve every spend over twenty five thousand dollars in SaaS. It was kind of both of their least favorite meetings. It was ambiguous.
It was, slowing down, buying cycles, etcetera.
Now that he could show pricing benchmarks for the tools that they were wanting to buy, that became now a one line meeting in Slack, and kinda speaks to Srinivas' point on, you know, taking time away from the strategic things to do, you know, some of these very, nuts and bolts, pieces that, you know, doesn't necessarily excite a lot of people.
Awesome. So aside from the pricing benchmark, I might engage with the supplier insights of the supplier in, you know, an entirely different way that the, the requester does.
This is, like, your thirty thousand foot view on a supplier, and all of it is grouped based on companies that are similar to you. So we're looking at, you know, companies with fifty to two hundred and fifty employees.
Some of the really interesting information that can help approvers are, a, you know, how many people in the tropic network are contracted with this company, or how many people are contracted with this company or something similar.
You might also find a lot of value in the competitive landscape, being able to see, you know, how popular is this company versus its competitors, or how much does this company cost on average versus its competitors. When I talk to different finance and procurement leaders, they're always telling me, you know, I get a lot of purchase requests for something in DevOps or maybe if it's a procurement leader, some accounting software that they might not have a lot of background on. This allows them to quickly get, like, a high level view of, you know, what what the supplier is, and then it allows them to ask much more meaningful diligence questions, you know, let alone with the supplier themselves, but with their own actual contract requester.
You might ask questions like, hey, you've told me that this is a super important service for your department. Why are you going with, you know, the third most popular supplier instead of the market leader? Or, hey. It looks like people our size aren't actually, you know, investing in this category. What makes you think that we're gonna get a good ROI from it?
And so in general, when I when I hear people talk about this, you know, they mentioned that they're really able to now engage more strategically both with their contract requesters and the suppliers themselves. They felt like they had the answer key to the test.
And while I focus mostly on this kind of intake to procure to, supplier intelligence, talk track, and demo so far, I did wanna mention that, you know, we we certainly have supplier intelligence that's able to be accessed, you know, outside of an intake to procure process.
We firmly believe in the three pillars of professional negotiation, intake to procure, and the supplier intelligence data in order to truly drive those intelligence spend management decisions.
But if you come to us for, you know, simply a slice, like the data in this instance, we still have an interface for you to look for a specific tool that you might be researching.
Or, you know, maybe it's a, category, in general that, you know, your company is considering purchasing.
Awesome. So thanks everyone, for attending.
This was definitely an awesome project to work on, and I can't tell you how excited I am for what iterations we have planned over the course of the next twelve months.
Thanks, Tommy. Thanks, Sri, for for this peek into supplier intelligence. I hope everyone on this call leaving here got some context into how supplier intelligence can give you the data and the insights you need so you can focus on the right activities, in your in your day to day role. So, we have a few minutes left. We're gonna open it up for a few questions. If you have any questions, again, use that q and a box, to submit them, and we'll review and and get them as we can.
I think one question that came in that was answered already, via chat, but I will share it here. If you are a current customer of Tropic and you're looking to get involved with, supplier intelligence, it's a brand new offering from Tropic. So reach out to your account team. They're able to jump in, give you a little more in-depth, walk through specific to your organization and have that conversation on how you can get, get involved with, supplier intelligence and take advantage of it.
One question I think, a a number of people have had, Tommy, maybe I'll throw it over to you, is about the data behind supplier intelligence. So, you shared a little bit more about, or you shared about how the data kinda drives some of the negotiation insights, supplier insights. Can you talk a little bit more about the breadth and maybe the depth of, the the data that we have here at Tropic?
Yeah. No. The, the the the product itself, you know, can only be as good as the underlying data that's backing it, and we take that very seriously and make a lot of investments in our data infrastructure.
A couple of the things that I'd like to mention is just a, the dataset itself is, you know, entirely driven based off of buyers like our customers. We don't take any kickbacks from suppliers or have any partnerships and suppliers that might potentially color or bias, you know, what the actual data set is, which is a very important point.
The second piece is we've made a lot of investments. You know, SaaS contracts can be very tricky. While some involve, you know, just the number of seats for a product, there are a lot of different ways, you know, SaaS companies will bill and charge their, their their customers. So we're very happy about some of the investments we've made and just how flexible our data model can be and which allows us to collect and store more data than potentially we could have last year. So I I think a stat that I, was looking at last week is that we're we're doubling the size of our data based on some investments that we made earlier this year, that we'll start to action on over the course of the next couple months, as well as, you know, making, I think we have about three hundred suppliers that are available for our pricing benchmarks today and, you know, constantly analyzing and working on how do we bring more online in a the most efficient way possible.
Yeah. And just to add on to that, I mean, we have visibility into a thousand plus suppliers, but we wanna make sure we're arming you with the most recent data, most up to date data, and relevant data points, with ample sample size.
And to double down on Tommy's point, we are maniacally focused on arming as much information about that data as well.
It's very easy to sort of look at calendar like pricing or Asana like pricing that's very per unit based or per seat based, but we're getting very sophisticated with our dataset to arm you with basically any number of what we call price drivers to give you visibility into what are all the toggles and levers in the pricing model for said supplier to give you a little more information on where it's worth it to really toggle pricing, where it's not worth it, where do you wanna focus your attention, is that meaningful to you and your growth, and so on and so forth. So to Tommy's point, you know, we're constantly evaluating the recency, the sample depth, but, you know, at current, we're at three hundred plus suppliers, but aiming to get to about five hundred in the product, here shortly.
And but you always have the opportunity to also reach out to our, professional services team to support you on any sort of manual price checks based on their expertise as well as reviewing, you know, contracts in-depth as well.
Thanks, both of you.
I think one other question that came in.
Tommy, maybe this one is for you.
Say, I think you showed on the screen kind of the different filters, for based on company size. And if you saw the the demo today, you saw it was, like, zero to, I think, two hundred fifty employees. Can you filter, the data by other larger company sizes?
Yes. Definitely. I can't remember exactly what they are off the top of my head, but we'll automatically apply the filter size based on your own company, when you go view that. So in this case, it was fifty to two fifty. I believe we also have, you know, a a two fifty to seven hundred fifty, seven hundred fifty to a thousand, a thousand to to five thousand, and and so on.
But it it's funny you mentioned that, because I I have some customers that actually filter up or down depending on their specific use case with the supplier. So if they're purchasing Asana and it's only for, you know, maybe a marketing department or operations, they might filter, you know, their thousand plus company size down to two hundred and fifty to fifty, you know, just to make sure that they're, you know, comparing as as as apples to apples as they get.
I think that's a great, use case that, you may not think. Right? Like, it's not just based on your overall company size, but your use case for that particular supplier as well.
Raquel asked a question here. Shree. I think you mentioned a little bit, but can you, just confirm how many suppliers we currently have in, our database here at Trappet?
Yeah. On, accessible via the supplier intelligence product, we'll be shooting for three hundred, and that covers about seven thousand line items, I wanna say. So line items are basically the different products and SKUs that, companies offer.
And as Tommy mentioned, we're constantly working on iterating to make sure we've got recency, depth, and so on, so getting that up to five hundred here shortly. And, again, we have full visibility into a much more number of contracts than that, but we wanna be responsible in in, you know, the right dataset in front of the right eyes, so being being cognizant of all those considerations.
Thank you.
And then, Tommy, I think this one is if you are a current Tropic customer, we we mentioned it a little bit, but as we're ramping up our supplier database, what happens if you run a price benchmark and maybe we don't have, a full report ready for you immediately? What should a customer do in that case?
Yeah.
It's, you know, one of the reasons why we believe in kind of, like, the three pillars of professional negotiators, intake to procure, and the data.
A lot of times, our customers are kicking those over to our professional negotiators. You know, while we might not have pricing benchmarks, that's kind of one tool in their tools that they would use to, successfully negotiate. They're frequently negotiating against, you know, competitors of those products in similar spaces.
And so, that is certainly, you know, one great option I recommend if you can't find yourself with the confidence of a full price check on that product.
We have plenty of resources and a great team behind it for sure.
Awesome. I think those are all the questions we have in today. If you do have any other questions, definitely, reply to, one of our reminder emails or the recording email, and we're happy to share it along with our team. But for now, I think we can wrap up for today.
So I just wanted to thank everyone for joining the webinar. Again, hope you've been able to learn a little bit more about our new offering and how it can truly help you drive efficiencies in your spend management. So if you are not a Tropic customer yet, feel free to get in touch with us, by going to tropic app dot I o slash demo, and we're happy to get or or reach out to us on LinkedIn. We're all we have a great, company page on LinkedIn that you can follow that we're sharing resources all the time.
Reach out to us, and we're happy to get our team in touch with you. If you are a current customer, reach out to your account team. We're all here ready to stand by, help you take advantage of our new offering. So thank you, Shree and Tommy, for sharing your insights and guidance today.
Watch out for your email for a link to the recording, and we'll talk soon. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.
