#3 SaaS Trends and The Future of Procurement
Huge opportunity to Join our Community Inside
Hey Procurement Legend,
I’ve been researching, writing, and made some progress on my book “The Future of Procurement”. I’ll be sharing some work on that this week as I look to write a bunch of it throughout November as I’ve been procrastinating.
If any of you would be interested in spending 15 minutes with me on a zoom call so I can pepper you with a few questions, can you let me know? I’m more than happy to give you a free 1 year membership to this substack/community to say thanks :D
But for anyone who hasn’t signed up, I’ve still got the 50% off lifetime membership running until this Friday. This is the only discount I’ll be running (until by Birthday next year).
Thanks to the new paid community members - I appreciate you massively ❤️
What I'm Reading
I’m about start reading The SaaS Trends Report, by Vendr. It’s usually a solid read and gives a lot of good stats that you can use in your negotiations and strategies.
What I'm Thinking (about Procurement)
I’m seeing a clear divide in the procurement community. Areas of it are becoming petty, holding onto titles, and taking an elitist approach whilst mocking those who disagree.
I wanted to create this community so people can come together with thoughts ideas, challenge concepts, and seek help. If any of you want to lean on the community, please use this to start a conversation.
One Procurement Tech Focused Insight
A client recently told me they had 430,000 contracts stored in their contract management system. I applauded the fact that they had that many documents and they knew where they were located. A fair number of my clients don’t have a handle on where their contracts are located. Then I waited for an awkward amount of time for the client to expound on what juicy insights they had found from all those contracts. When it was clear that no more information would be forthcoming, I moved on. Somewhere my client has a dashboard counting all the contracts and showing basic metadata. This is a good example of visualizing data. Visualizations allow me to see what data I have, but they do nothing to tell me how that data influences my operations or what I could be doing differently. And to get the data out of a dashboard to influence business decisions takes multiple steps.
What I wanted this person to do was give me information about what’s in those contracts. How many are active, how many different suppliers, what are the contract clause variations, and how many are up for renewal—the basics. I’m still very curious about the answers to these questions. One need not be a data scientist or understand advanced math to get these answers.
You can be like me and have an unending curiosity for exploring data. My client was simply doing what was required—collecting and storing documents.
Elouise Epstein - from her new book which is out soon!
One Piece of Content I've Found Useful
James Meads has released a free course, Digital Procurement 101
I’ve not tried it out, but I’m sure it’s packed with value knowing how good James is.
https://store.procurementsoftware.site/digital-procurement-course
My Procurement Reading List
Check this out here - make sure you get one of these books.
How you can Support World of Procurement Elsewhere
Take our Contract Management Course for Beginners
Daniel
I’m not promising any ground-breaking insights but happy to help any time
if you would like someone to listen to you. lmk