To see you. Nice to see everyone. Welcome.
Yeah. So we'll give everyone a chance to join here, but I always like to ask, if you can throw it in the chat, tell us where you're dialing in from.
I am in, Scottsdale, Arizona.
Recently relocated from the Denver area. How about you guys?
And, Russell, where I think you oh, we've got Diane, Toronto, Canada. Oh, hi again, Diane. Yeah. Welcome. Oh, Melissa Boulder. Yep. I'm a CU Boulder alum.
Russell, Acworth, and Villanova.
Well, thanks, guys.
Yeah. So tell us why you're oh, yeah, Jordan. You're Brooklyn. So, yeah, tell us where you're dialing in from.
We'll give everyone a minute to join, then we'll get going here. As usual, no fluff webinar series. We'll get right to the point, give you some great actionable advice here. Yeah.
Jen in in Boston. Love Boston. So, we've got Toronto. Usually a pretty global audience here.
So we'll see. Oh, Philippines.
Yeah. So we'll see where everyone joins in. So while we wait for everyone to join, we'll start with a little intro here. Welcome to the no fluff webinar series.
Today, talking data and insights to save big, leveraging that data that's trapped in our business. We talk about this all the time, but how can we actually do this? And, again, if we haven't met, my name is Ben Murray. I'm a fractional SaaS CFO, was an in house SaaS CFO, and I'll talk all things kinda b to b SaaS finance.
So thanks for joining. That's my email right there, ben at sas c f o dot com, guys. If you need anything, feel free to reach out and email me. And then we have a q and a box.
So we wanna make this interactive. Make sure you post any questions, comments in that q and a box. If you post it in chat, I can convert that over to a question as well. So feel free to ask questions along the way.
We'll open it up, for questions at the end as well.
So and as a thanks for joining today, I've got a ton of metrics. I'll have a download at the end of the webinar today. I'll share a link, and you can download forty plus SaaS metrics templates plus my forecast model, which will help you get going fast with your metrics and, forecast.
And then I'd like to run a quick poll, guys. So if you can go to your chat right now and tell me about your role.
Would love to hear. Are you a CFO, FP and A, controller, finance and accounting, general service provider, others? So take a moment, go to the chat, and we'd love to hear your role today. Just helps us kinda, you know, format the the content a bit, and I'll watch that.
And hey. Anne Marie, senior pricing director. Diane, CFO. Yep. And we've got, guys, CFOs in the house.
We've got controllers, and we've got finance and accounting and a few other roles right now. So so thanks for letting me know. Raymond, CTO. Perfect.
Kim, controller. So thanks guys for letting me know. And with that, Jordana, I'm going to stop sharing, and, we'll kick this off.
Amazing. Well, it's really nice to meet everyone here. We're we're really stoked to have you, in this session today. I am Jordana Greenberg.
I am our VP of solutions here at Tropic. And with me, I brought the one and only Russell Lester. He is a four time CFO, leads and spearheads our finance team. And so I thought he was a perfect person to bring to this demo day to speak to his firsthand experience both using Tropic, but also being in a lot of your shoes in the past.
Can speak to how he's sort of tackling a lot of the problems you all are probably facing.
So why are we here? We're gonna talk a lot about data. I wanna start from the top.
And I you know, please put this in the chat. I would love to know if this resonates with any of you all.
We have talked to dozens, hundreds of finance leaders, and the the common theme that we're hearing from a lot of them is that their role as a strategic, resource to the CEO is increasing. A lot of them are being asked to build strategic plans to fuel efficient growth.
They're having to drive financial discipline, but the kicker is that they're being asked to do that with less resources.
Of course, AI plays a big part in that. And so what we're seeing because of this is many organizations are actually struggling to make fast, smart, data driven decisions.
And this is becoming increasingly important. Right? Why why is it hard to do that? One, I don't know. Again, please put this in the chat if if any of this resonates with you.
A lot of the time, financial data and spend data is disparate, and spread across multiple systems. Other times, there is very little data. Other times, you do have the data, but it's requiring one of you to actually manually track it in spreadsheets and bring it to your boss or, or your counterparts, and that's definitely potentially prone to human error.
And the truth is when you're operating without data, small moments, things as simple as, like, missing an auto renewal or potentially renewing a tool you intended to renew but not looking into any negotiation tactics. Those small moments that seem like paper cuts can actually add up. And what we have found is that companies that invest in good reliable spend data with solutions like Tropic can actually, on average, cut around twenty one percent of wasted spend just by ensuring that every single spend decision they make is what's best for the business, and freeing up that capital. So we'll explore that in this session today.
We'll hear again from Russell. And, again, please, if you have questions along the way, drop them in the chat. So, Russell, let's start from the top. We we talk about this idea of data a lot. I'm curious what does data actually mean to you?
Great great question. I feel like if if CFOs were to give out swag, it would say data is life. Right?
I mean, data is like the lifeblood of what we do.
And and, incidentally, I made my way into the office of CFO by way of various data related roles that were called a variety of different things over the past several decades. And and, really, it's neat to see how data has evolved and and proliferated. It's everywhere. It's omnipresent.
It's it's accelerating at a pace that we can hardly even consume, almost in a in an astonishing pace. And data is really democratized at the fingertips of every user, and so everybody's chomping at the bit and knocking on the door of the house of finance and asking, what does all this data mean? And I have a mission statement that every team that I've managed as CFO, we live by, and that's about delivering timely, accurate, relevant, and proactively persuasive insights that drive growth and unlock efficiency. So to me, data is not for data's sake. It's to accomplish that. And to do that, you've gotta pull it from multiple sources. Gotta make sure it's living and breathing and that it stays current.
Hundred percent.
And I I resonate with that a ton. That is a big part. I saw a question in the chat from Anne Marie around what is Tropic, and we'll we'll talk a lot about that in this session.
What is Tropic? Very simply, we are an intelligent spend management platform, and our goal is to help folks like yourselves get the data you need to make decision making. So we aggregate all of your data. We layer in our own third party proprietary benchmarking data. We'll talk more about our dataset, and then we help ensure that when you're looped in to make spend decisions, you can approve and make decisions with confidence.
And I'm curious, Russell, from your perspective, like, why is that more important than ever right now, as a CFO or or potentially how you're thinking about that with your your broader team?
Sure. I mean, read the Wall Street Journal, the news headlines, wherever. Fear is abounding.
Uncertainty is high.
The the desire for this hot IPO market is paused or on hold, and so markets are very, the word I use is frothy.
And so we also have AI accelerating at a very fast pace.
And so CFOs like me across the board, we're trying to figure out how do we flex operationally, how do we wear these multiple hats that we're being asked to wear every day, how do we make the judgment calls sometimes in real time using data and insights like like never before. And to be able to do that at scale is hard, if not impossible, if there's no tool. If you're trying to do this through spreadsheets or emails or just task list, things are gonna fall through the cracks because we're inundated with data, and the business is calling upon the house of finance and CFOs to guide them through how to make heads or tails of all of it. And so it's now more critical than ever that you get your arms around this ever increasing complex dataset, which is the spend management dataset.
I I that resonates a ton. And, like, from customers we talk about a lot of the time, we'll talk to finance leaders who are maybe new to an organization or maybe their organization is maturing to a point where spend is starting to it's starting to creep up. Right? We all know how it goes.
Employees go like this and spend goes like this. And and so, a lot of companies will come to us and they're like, look, we know we don't have the right data. It's like some version potentially of the wild west Or maybe they do have some systems, but they but they ask us, like, I'll be honest. I don't have visibility, like but it feels daunting.
Right? That first step of having to get all your data cleaned up. And I'm curious, like, what advice would you give to someone as step one? And then we could talk about how how traffic helps there too.
Yeah. I mean, if you're if you're lacking data at all, you just have to use the force.
No. You know, it's it's a rinse and this is a Empire Strikes Back poster signed by all the original cast members. Pretty cool.
That's nice. That's nice for Star Wars fans out there, which I'm sure they're plenty.
My son gave me that as a as a gift. No. We you know, there's the manual route of of doing all this. If there's no visibility, you've gotta aggregate all your your spend data, all your suppliers, figure out who owns it, who's responsible, when's the contract up, chase down all the contracts, try to stay on top of them. It's it's, it's a mess. So to do it in the organized way, step one would be get a full picture of all your historic spend by supplier, layer in the right metadata, contract owners, end dates, pricing.
But the higher order of magnitude thing you need to first do is to acknowledge that a holistic approach to spend management matters, that it can make a difference, that it's not just about saving money on one contract. You're actually transforming the culture of your business when you get them all to think about how are we spending our scarce resources, how are we deploying capital. And so zooming that aperture out about how you think about spend management and guide the business towards the future versus just reacting is where it begins.
And, Jordana, we have some couple couple questions in the chat if if I don't know if you wanna pause here or take some questions.
But I was kinda curious, this too. Melissa has a question. What stage, IE series a, b, etcetera, are TROPICS clients typically? So, like, at what point does the data become so overwhelming, you know, that you just surpass that threshold where it's like, boy, this is out of hand and we need some help?
Absolutely. So, of course, it it varies by industry. We typically will find that software because software is a spend category that by nature is a decentralized buying process. Right?
You in an old world, you could have a procurement person or one individual sort of be the sole buyer of hardware or physical goods. That doesn't exist with software. So we typically will benchmark based off of software data, and we'll find that, like, generally around five hundred thousand dollars plus of software data annually is when companies start realizing the SaaS for all effect, and they've realized, like, oh, no. I need to I need to rein this back in.
But we work with companies of all sizes and stages. Right? I would say there's companies we work with that have hundreds of millions plus dollars of spend. And, look, they're they're sort of tackling the problem, reactively, and I think they would all say to us, like, I wish we did this sooner.
Because the truth is once you go out and you sort of lock in potentially average rates, it's much harder to back track that and change behaviors within an organization. So it's so important that you're making smart purchasing decisions upfront.
Yeah. No. Appreciate that. And one maybe one more question before we get roll keep rolling here. But, Anne Marie, appreciate the question here. Can you also use this to see the pricing data for your clients?
Yeah. So that's, exactly it. So there's two components to Tropic, and I think that's a perfect if if everyone's good with it, I'll jump into, some of the platform a little bit now.
There's two components to Tropic. Right? To exactly what Russell said. Step one is cleaning up your own data.
Right? We need your own first party data so you can have clarity into your historicals, what you're actually spending. And I'll admit that task feels daunting. And so what's really important to Tropic in our belief is that software is software.
If you really want to do this well, it it requires people, and that's where we come in. We offer a full service implementation.
Let me get my screen share. I'm terrible at talking and clicking buttons, apparently.
So hopefully, everyone can see my screen right now. Yep.
So we we fundamentally believe that you need people to help. Right? So our job, you're gonna have a dedicated implementation consultant who is actually, the team is led by a, Katie Efrick. She's amazing, and she actually comes from a p to p ERP implementation world.
So she fully understands the spend management world, and her job is to consult you and then actually execute on building the foundation. We make it so simple. First, connect to your ERP or your accounting system. All of the data does have to live there.
Right? It has to be in your GL. And so by connecting to your ERP, it takes all of five, ten minutes. And then using AI, we can automatically match your ERP data to suppliers.
So within the first couple of days, you can actually get a clear picture, almost like a catalog into all of your suppliers.
Next, that's step one. It's now also getting the contract data. And so that's the piece again where Tropic is going to be a great resource for you. You know, show of hands, some people here probably have maybe a contract management solution, but it's isolated on an island.
Others might have it in Google Drive, some in inboxes. It's a mix, and that's okay. All we ask is that you drag and drop what you have, and it's on our team to help you bridge that gap. So at the end of this, you have complete visibility into what you know you've committed to spend with vendors and what you're actually spending.
And, again, it takes from your time all of an hour or two a week for around a month, and we'll be up and running within thirty days.
Very nice. Appreciate that.
The power of this, right, when you build this foundation, this is where the fun part comes. Right? And then the next and we'll talk about this more as the third party data, but a lot of companies are relying on ERP data and spreadsheets to actually do really basic analysis of where are our lowest hanging fruit spend optimization opportunities. And so that's what Tropic's gonna give you right out of the gate is clear visibility into all the variances between what you thought you were going to spend and where potentially are you leaking or bleeding due to variable cost contracts or usage based consumption based agreements, and how can we ensure that you wrangle that in so you don't veer too far from your path to your plan?
Perfect.
Question for you, Russell. Obviously, you know, anything I wanna wanna open up to you, anything you wanna add. Obviously, your team is using this, a ton. I'm curious.
How have you seen having this combined dataset? I think it's, you know, unique to Tropic combining contracted data with actual expense data. How have you seen that, influence the way your team is working?
Great question. I mean, it's made us much more efficient. But stepping back, every financial cycle, any part of the year for any company, there's this inevitable need to find what I call levers and leakages. And levers are things that can help multiply the efforts of the business and help us improve better.
Leakages are things that kill momentum. And so when you combine contract data with the actual spend data from the ERP, you can identify those leakages, and you can identify cases where you've allocated investment that never came to fruition. You're setting aside dollars. You've got them allocated, and nobody's spending against it.
Or you didn't allocate dollars and they're spending against something and is that aligned to the company goal. So it really uplevels that visibility for the finance team and helps them be a more strategic adviser to the business. It also speeds up our monthly close process because with integration to the ERP, the ability to match transactions and the ones that don't match, they really stand out. And so you can begin to zero in and and talk to those purchasers.
And so as a CFO, I can operate with much more confidence knowing proper approval protocols are being followed, that we're, adhering to our own guardrails, all in accordance with our delegation of authorities. And, PS, that also makes audits much easier because it's essentially self documenting the audit trail.
Yeah. And we love easy audits. I know that. And and, Jordana, I have another question here if we wanna take it. And, Raymond, I think, Raymond, right, you're a CTO, but Raymond says, I see a sentiment column. How is that determined, and what is it based on?
Yeah. So all of this data is is it's a marrying of your data and ours. So we what we do during implementation is we learn what are the things that you want to be tracking, what are your unique needs. And so sentiment scoring, that's something that's obviously driven by your employees. So something like that is powered by your team. And there's other types of data that Tropic can provide, and we'll get more into our third party dataset. But all of this is entirely customizable and configurable to meet your business needs.
Perfect.
One thing I wanna I sort of to to add to what you said, Russell, right, I wanna bring attention here. This, this actually just happened with a customer, and I think it it it's so interesting. Right? By merging these two datasets, the one of our customers was able to catch shadow spend.
Right? That is a huge value of these two datasets living together. And what do I mean by that? Right?
In this for this customer, they were a Microsoft shop. They were previously using Zoom, and they intended to cancel their Zoom licenses. Right? They were moving all the way over to Microsoft Teams.
In their mind, they went through that transition. No questions asked. What they didn't realize was that someone at the company had put a bunch of Zoom licenses for their organization on a corporate card. That's really hard to catch. I'm sure everyone here has sort of, like, felt the pain of trying to dig through credit card data.
With Tropic, what we're able to do is very quickly flag for you, here are all of your expenses that have no associated contract. And so for this customer, they realized they had a twenty thousand dollar contract with Zoom that quickly they were able to cancel. Thankfully for them, it was one where, their renewal was coming up. But that could have been pretty unfortunate. Right? Twenty thousand dollars, again, it feels like a paper cut, but those small misses can continuously add up. And catching shadow spend, ensuring that you have full controls and visibility into everything you're buying is key to success here.
And then the other piece, by leveraging an AI, what you can now do is actually use this dataset, and get all the reporting you need. Right? So we have customers no more having to dig through spreadsheets or use tables, filters to build the data at analysis you need. You can simply come in here and say, hey. What renewals do I have coming up? And we'll provide you the list since we're living on a complete accurate view into all of your spend data.
Great. Any other questions? I'm just monitoring the chat here.
Yeah. There was one question, just around your pricing. Is it subscription based or per employee?
Yes. We are, a flat rate based off of number of employees. And I will prop my email at the end, and I'm happy to chat more about that and share all of our pricing page and details at the end of this.
Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Alright. If there are any other questions, post them in in the chat. We'll we'll watch that as we go here. Thanks.
Cool. Let's talk about the second part of this then. So we just talked about getting and cleaning up first party data. Now the next part is third party data.
And I'm curious. We'll talk about how Tropic provides our own third party data. Russell, how do you think about that? Like, what does third party data mean to you, and how have you seen that influenced, how your your team operates?
Yeah. I mean, I as I mentioned early on, data is proliferating everywhere, but how do you know which data is accurate? How do you know which data is biased or not biased?
Many people in the CFO role are tasked to figure out, are we getting a good price? Is this the best vendor? What are the ratings? And so general Google searches, and that's the old way, calling up peers, right, joining communities and asking questions.
That way, it's a brute force effort. It takes a lot of time. It's not efficient. And so wouldn't it be great if there were a platform that can bring all that third party data forward in a non biased manner?
And after I joined Tropic as CFO, I learned there is, and it's fantastic, and it saves my team a ton of time and a ton of money.
Yeah.
We I I think that's that's so correct. The the you know, data is so interesting because especially in a world now with AI, we're seeing more and more, like, the importance of just having access to good reliable data. And historically, we all relied on Google search. I'm sure everyone here has at one point or even read it, searched like, what is the right price I should be getting on my Salesforce contract?
And the truth is I'm even seeing I, was recently actually at a conference, where we were talking about AI use cases in finance, in procurement, and something a lot of folks were saying was how they were using AI to try to figure out pricing. And, you know, previously, they were ping friends, ping networks. Now they were trying AI. But the truth is, AI is only as powerful as the data it sits on. And so that is where Tropic is uniquely positioned. We started our business six years ago, seven years ago, building a software database that's inclusive of over ten thousand suppliers, and we provide SKU specific price benchmark and negotiation intelligence to empower finance folks like yourselves to ensure that you're getting optimal pricing.
Why we focused on software?
It is notoriously the most opaque category. I'm sure all of you have been in a conversation where you've heard from an account executive you're getting the best price they've ever seen and your, you know, your spidey senses go off. Is is that real? Is it really the best price?
And it's challenging to figure out. And even if you know you're getting a bad price, the amount of hours we see finance leaders who procurement isn't really their core responsibility, taking to try to negotiate, go back and forth. Russell, I'm sure in prior experiences, you've been on calls with a million dollar contract with ERP systems and HRIS systems where you're spending hours trying to lower the price. And the question is, is that really the best use of the CFO's time?
So we make all of this data readily accessible so you all know exactly what price you should target and how to go about getting it without all the guesswork.
And to Russell's point, it's unbiased. So I'll give you a peek into what that looks like, and let me share my screen again.
It's really simple.
We wanna make it easy for you to dig into the data, analyze it yourself, and then using AI, we'll give you any, expert advice and tailored, playbooks to ensure that we're customizing the strategy to your needs. So first, let's look here. Every for every vendor, we offer what we call price benchmarks, which allows you to actually look into our dataset. This is a anonymized aggregated view of our entire network, and you can look down to the SKU level. What are companies like yourself who are buying a similar SKU for a similar quantities? What are they paying for this tool?
So you can come in here, put your price details, put in your quantities, and see how you stack up. Right? If these were your details, you would learn very quickly. Alright.
I there's I'm in the hundredth percentile here. I have some juice to squeeze. This is probably worth spending my time on. Whereas, let's just play out a different scenario.
If you found out, for example, your price point, you're actually in the zeroth percentile, don't spend time here. This is one where you can fast track approvals and you should auto renew because you're getting some of the best data we've ever seen.
Now how do we know the data is good? That is a big question we get a lot, and that is the reason we are so confident in our data is because it is powered by our own in house negotiation, procurement services. So when we started as a business, we started as a negotiation service. We learned a lot. Right? We have the added advantage of getting to negotiate with vendors dozens of times a week.
Even a the most skilled negotiator. Right? Our director of procurement talks about this a lot where he says, I got to see Salesforce once a year, if that. Right? If we signed a multi year, I saw them once every three years.
Our team has the added advantage of talking to Salesforce on behalf of our customers weekly. And what that enables us to do is deeply understand what these businesses care about at any given time, and we're not trying to hide it. We're gonna share that with you. Right? We're gonna tell you exactly what tactics and strategies work depending on your nuance scenarios So you know out you know how to go out and actually get this optimal pricing because you can't just go to Gong or Salesforce and say, hey. My buddy's getting a better price. I want it too.
So we we give you this data. And you can know that, again, we're unbiased here. We have no incentive to push you to one vendor or the other. We take no cuts from these vendors. This is exactly what we are seeing working that's allowing us to drive optimal pricing for our customers.
So this it's a lot of small detail here, and I I forgot my readers. So but, like, what so this is giving you negotiating tactics or just how to enter that conversation, say, we know Salesforce, that bill gets big. NetSuite, the bill gets big. Others, not to pick on them, but you hear that a lot. Yeah. So is this kinda helping you prepare for that conversation with that ERP?
Exactly. So there's two ways to think about it. There's one scenario where some companies and it could be supplier dependent, or it could actually also just be preference dependent where they're like, hey. We just want the data.
We're gonna go. We we know we have we have the right resourcing to ensure this negotiation is covered. And here's the answer key to the test is how I like to think about it. Even better, using AI, we can actually give you a tailored recommendation here.
Right? So we know a lot. Right? Of course, the strategy and tactic that's going to work if you're increasing your license count looks different if you're trying to cut your license count in half.
So we factor that all in. And because, again, we know all of your historical spend data, we are able to give you a hyper tailored, playbook that is built specifically based off of your Nuance scenario. So knowing exactly what you historically contracted with Gong, knowing all of your, renewal details, we can tell you exactly how to run this play. Or if bandwidth is a concern, our team can actually step in and help run that negotiation before you to ensure you're getting this optimal pricing.
And I'm kinda curious either Russell and Jordana. Like, you know, CFOs, we love metrics benchmarks, and we have very detailed data here. But what I think I've seen in some of your reports, like, what are some overall benchmarks that we should be looking at? Because I saw something like software spend per FTE or things like that, to see kinda generally how we size up or even iSTAR track, like, percent of internal use software as a percent of revenue. Is that creeping up or down? Are there some high level macro numbers we should look at to see if if we need to take action here?
Yeah. I just actually dropped our twenty twenty five spend report in the chat. It's a question we get a lot, which is, like, I think my company is spending a lot for software, but how do I know?
And so this will tell you everything from, on average, what we see, companies of different sizes are paying per employee and per business on software. You'll be able to see most commonly used tools so you can actually dig into, not only are we getting the best price, but are we picking the right tech stack. Right? That's another big piece of this.
Because in a world of AI and in a world of efficiency, ensuring that you're finding all consolidation opportunities is key. Right? You need to know when you're buying four tools that potentially can actually be consolidated into one. And that is a huge part of what we offer as well is not just giving you optimal pricing details, but helping you think more holistically about how do you rationalize your your tech stack to ensure you're setting your business up for success.
And that could sometimes come at a cost. Right? Sometimes the best tool in the world is going to be more expensive, but we'll give you the data to ensure you're making these informed decisions along the way.
And I think did I see, say, average software spend per employee is maybe sixteen, seventeen, eighteen thousand range. Is that right? Exactly. On the size of the company.
Yes. It's interesting. It actually it it it's a bell curve. So for what we describe as SMB customers, it's around sixteen to seventeen k.
And then, it actually after you go through the growth stage and you go into mid market, it drops again. With enterprises, we're seeing on average around nine thousand dollars.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. And that probably is a hard number to find. Yeah. If if just the all the vendors are buried in your ERP and then the data and, so interesting.
And, I don't know, like, Jordan, if you wanna oh, here. We've got some interesting steps here so you can see that that range. Yeah.
See where I'm looking. Yeah.
Yeah. So I think that's a great I love that. That's a great benchmark right there that you can use for your business. And I don't know if, Jernan, depending on time, if you wanna take another question here, open up for q and a. But, Ann Marie has a a a great question here. How do you account for different deliverables and terms? It may not be a like for like comparison pricing depends on many factors.
Absolute number doesn't, account for these nuances plus the value investment and ROI. So it sounds like, yeah, a lot of nuances. How do we account for nuances? It sounds like.
That is a great question. And I say this to a lot of finance folks, which is data is only part of the equation. The next piece is how do you actually action on this data. And, Anne Marie, I promise I will answer your question.
I'm actually gonna open it up to you, Russell, first to talk through, how do you ensure that data gets actioned on? Because then, Anne Marie, I can show you how we agree. Right? Sometimes it is not just a commercial decision.
Sometimes there's more that goes into decision making, and we'll give you the answer key, all the details that you need, to ensure that you can make the best decision for an organization.
But, Russell, sorry. I started to talk and and hit you up hit you with a question to start. No.
That's okay. I mean, what we're after is repeatability, scalability of these things that we're talking about. And I talked about how you need to zoom out the aperture away from just one individual deal and whether or not the dynamics of that makes sense and you're getting a good price. You're changing the whole culture of your business' focus on how they spend money. And when you do that in a repeatable way with an audit trail where you know the steps are being taken the same way every time using best practices with a very large dataset way beyond what your own team could acquire on your own and in a in a way that speeds up the empowerment of that data, top of mind, accessible at your fingertips to answer, do I get a good price? Does this pass the compliance check? How does this compare to last year?
When that is all in a very no fluff forthcoming way right in front of you, it really empowers the team to operate with more confidence, and there is art and science to it. But as your team is spending less time doing the hard work that Tropic does for you and more time actually having the strategic conversations of is this the right investment, I think you're able to accomplish the best of both worlds kinda, you know, to answer Anne Marie's question around sort of the qualitative and quantitative parts of the deal. We certainly help, you know, multiply the quantitative part of it, but those, negotiation tactics and playbooks are the qualitative part of it as well.
Love that. And, Jernan, I don't know how many more questions, we have left here to put Russell on the spot. But, I wanna make sure you we have a call to action here. If they have questions about this or do you wanna I don't know if you wanna throw an email or link in the chat just if they're follow-up or they have questions after this, so they they know who to who to reach out to.
Alright. Well, perfect. So, guys, check the chat right now. Come back to the screen and Jordana has her email in there, Jordana at tropic dot io. So email her, get a bunch of emails in her inbox.
And, and I don't know if you guys, wanna take another question or wrap up with some of the the questions that you have for for Russell.
Either works for us. Yeah. I I there's one more, I think, piece to this too that I would love to to show, which is how do we actually integrate this data into the process? Because I I think that's key that's, like, key to the action piece.
Right? Because the worst thing that can happen is you build this entire strategy. Right? Ann Marie, to your point, maybe you realize that, there you have a rationalization opportunity.
You realize there's a better tool out there that better serves your business needs.
You're also realizing that from a cost perspective, oof, you're you're kind of paying way too much.
The worst thing that can happen is then your opt out date passed, and you didn't get to action on any of that. And so this is where I really believe the most important piece is the intersection of all of this data. It's your first party data with your third party data, with your process to ensure that you are making these smarter decisions. And so I'd love to give you just a quick peek, everyone, here into what that can actually look like, and how that can come to life.
Right? So within Tropic, you can actually manage your purchasing process. Right? And this process can be very simple.
Right? For smaller organizations, sometimes the end process is simply finance. Right? It's one shop one stop looping in finance, to ensure that nothing looks crazy and everything's, aligning with your plan.
In larger organizations, you're going to find that processes can can become increasingly complex. Right? Spend policies typically, have additional, layers and segmentation as an organization grows.
We can meet you wherever you're at, but most importantly is that when you start to actually manage these requests, right, your Gong renewal is coming up. How does this all intersect? First, we're gonna send you a renewal alert months in advance. So we're gonna ensure that you're not starting the conversation the day before your offer.
First, the day after. Next, we're gonna make it easy for you to collect information from stakeholders. So, Anne Marie, to your question, right, part of this is is it's not just a finance decision. You need to learn from security what, are are potential security concerns.
You need to learn from your business owner what are your business needs. Right? What are you hoping to get out of Gong in the next year? And only then, once you connect all of that, you can now actually use Tropic's AI capabilities as Tropic to, in seconds, run the compliance checks you need to ensure that you're making informed decisions.
So very simply, I can come in and ask, am I getting a fair price? Right? If I'm a finance leader with little to no time, I don't have time to dig through all of the documents, ping a bunch of people. But in seconds, I can learn that, okay, my pricing is really high here.
I'm in the seventy seventh percentile. So worthwhile for me to spend time on this request considering it is a hundred sixty six k purchase. Right? That means there is real juice on, to squeeze here.
Next, I can run a compliance check and learn that all of the scanned documents, let's say, I'm finance, I learned that I have a strong preference that we only sign annuals. Our business is evolving and changing. I don't want to agree to multi years. Very quickly using AI, Tropic will be able to confirm that the proposal the latest proposal at hand is a annual agreement, and it has your preferred net payment terms.
In addition, for security folks, I think you said, Ben, there's a a CTO here. Right? We can do a security assessment. We can confirm that it meets your SSO requirements and all of your SOC two reporting needs. So allowing you again in seconds to run the compliance, whether that's a commercial compliance check, a business alignment compliance check, a strategy check to ensure that, again, before you hit approve on this purchase, let's say, on finance, that everything looks good and you can then approve with confidence.
And there's a question from Lou, and I think you kinda addressed this earlier, like, having the software tell you, like, where should I focus? And Lou has a question. Can we see an example of how using Tropic can let us identify areas to cut spend in? So can it help us focus our efforts?
Yeah. I also realized I did all that without sharing my screen, and no one told no one told me.
Oh, man.
I was trying to show you all examples of what I'm talking about here. There were examples on my screen. I apologize.
But here's what this all looks like in practice. So, again, please send me an email. I can record everyone here in Loom of what I tried to show that I failed to show.
No problem.
And so yeah. So I think, Lou, to to see in a specific example, hopefully, this is helpful what I was trying to show, which is, like, hey. Am I getting a fair price? And on this specific request that's routed for a hundred and sixty six k dollars for Gong, we're finding that you're not. We are seeing there's a potential thirty five k in savings that, your team connection on. And then how do I negotiate?
We can provide you at that moment any expert tips for how to actually go and negotiate.
Very nice. So it is it's it's showing you, it looks like on the right, just like potential savings so you know where where to focus and maybe where to just move on to the another vendor.
Exactly. Exactly.
Perfect. Perfect. Well, that that makes a ton of sense, and I definitely see the value. And and, honestly, I probably Russell couldn't answer that at some of the software companies where I was CFO of just software spend per employee. Right? And I'm sure if if we pull the audience, I'm guessing that's just not a readily available metric that we know just because it's hard pulling that data together. So so love that metric.
So we've gone here for a while. We've we've talked about spend, how we can leverage this data. Jordana and Russell, anything else that we wanna wrap up here? We've got Jordana's email in the chat, so please email her with any questions, but anything we want to wrap up with here.
Russell, I'll look to you. You know, I think I the last final thought but also and if anyone on the group has a different question for Russell, please jump in.
What does smarter purchasing decision making actually enable for a business? Like, how have you seen this play out for Tropic firsthand?
You know, eating our own dog food, using our own tool? How has this actually played out?
Drinking our own champagne.
I like that. Own dog food. I like that better.
Yeah. This is a flywheel. It gains inertia.
The the more you do it, the smarter it gets, the better it becomes. And so it's the type of thing that, yes, you can obtain value day one, week one, month one of just having better visibility, but it's really the scale that that affords you. Because, look, In finance, we're getting pinged all the time for approval requests. We have DocuSigns flying, and sometimes there's phishing, you know, which ones are legit, which ones aren't.
We just wanna know we're guiding the business towards the best use of capital possible. And a tool like Tropic can do it like no other because, you know, any request coming through has been vetted. It's followed your protocols. It's been negotiated to your standards.
Everyone that needs to approve has had eyes on it to include your security team. The compliance check is like magic. It's crazy how fast it can come back with the variances.
The variance analysis capabilities can turn your accounting team into superheroes as they uncover leakages happening all across the business.
So, really, the equivalent number of people and types of people you would need to get pound for pound the impact out of something like Tropic is is just crazy, and it it just keeps getting better as we add more features.
And so, you know, I would say that, it's not just cost cutting. It's actually spend management transformation. It's changing how you as a business deploy your capital, and it's taking finance from being a reactive. And, really, I would add IT because we're on the same team. It's taking IT and finance and making us seat at the table strategic drivers of the business instead of just reacting all the time.
Yep. Yeah. Love that. Love that.
So, guys, everyone, appreciate you coming on today.
Jordana's email is in the chat if you'd like to follow-up with any questions, comments, or grab a report.
So really appreciate your time. My OneDrive link in this is in there if you wanna download my templates as a thanks for joining. I all our time is value valuable. And, yeah, anything else we wanna wrap up here, Jordana or Russell, before we, thank everyone?
No. I I'll I'll start off with thank you. Thanks everyone for joining sincerely. It means a lot to us.
And if you wanna keep chatting data, if you wanna see the potential impact of leveraging Tropic to help you grow efficiently and control spend, please reach out. We're happy to do an analysis to talk about the potential impact of what this could look like for your organization with your specific spend details. So definitely shoot me a note. I I would love to connect.
Alright. Likewise.
Thanks for your time. Don't put off transforming your spend management processes. Get started today.
Yeah. I've gotta start today. You'll wish you did it that months down the road. So, guys, appreciate Russell, Jornea.
Appreciate that insight. Love seeing the platform, how we can leverage that and save some money and, just have a nice spend management practice in place. So again, email Jordan with any questions. My templates are there.
And again, guys, thanks for joining today. Hope everyone has a happy Wednesday, and we'll, we'll, talk to you next time. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, everyone.
