Empower Your Business with Sales Proposal Automation Software in Vendor Negotiations

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so I've been a lot of meetings lately customers that have renewals coming up with some of their major Cloud vendors specifically on that SAS side right whether that's Salesforce coming up in January servicenow coming up at the end of the year you got work day you got sap Oracle Microsoft like let's not forget about Microsoft the thing is this every single one of these conversations that I'm having they're always laser focused these customers are focused on pricing what are they paying are they paying too much and then if there's anything net new is it the right price I need to understand this before I go pen to paper and that's all well and good of course you need to have that information of course that's vitally important you don't want to leave any dollars on the table that's obvious but here's the problem too many customers right no matter how much content I put out there now how many times I tell them this even customers I've worked with five six seven ten years ago they still are losing the opportunity to ensure they have everything that they actually need in this environment right now as part of these renewal negotiations to ensure success moving forward so when I talk about success I mean the right contractual Arrangement the right flexibility protections Investments to ensure you're getting the value expect but also are protected against Downstream risk exposure and that's coming so the first thing flexibility I just mentioned it swap rights right exchanging products that are in your bill of materials ideally Cloud vendors true Partners would expand the base of products that you can expand in and out on but pay attention when you get those swap rights pay attention there isn't too many limiting conditions the second amount of flexibility reduction of volume the world changes is your Cloud vendor going to keep you at a number to keep you at an ACV number that's telling ability to reduce you may not get it in term but push forward at renewal okay so if you're renewal's in three years or five years that or maybe have to have that but pay attention to that language again when it comes to Renewal protections I'll get to that in a minute the other amount of flexibility and I always go back and forth whether this is flexibility of price protections future product pricing not just list price push your Cloud vendors servicenow Salesforce so forth and so on push them to give you price certainty not list discounted pricing for products you may adopt in term now that's critically important it's also critic it's difficult to achieve you have to have a true story there for vendors to go get approvals to have that in your contracts but this is critical it also removes friction from the sales cycle if you want to try to help them think of it that way now let's move to protections intern price protections that should be obvious unfortunately those are starting to go away customers are getting this great price which usually isn't as good as it could have been that's a different story for a different day but the problem is is that as the term is happening they add more they're actually paying more those interim price protections make sure you have them in fact you should be pushing for volume discount structures make sure those thresholds though are actually relevant so you don't have to double volume to get two points renewal term price protection you may have gotten a great price or you think you did what's going to happen at next renewal in today's environment all these big cloud vendors they are offering some compelling pricing and they're not being as aggressive at renewals around price increases although they're still being more aggressive than they should be the point is they're setting it up they've all given themselves air cover relative to their earnings but two years three years from now if you listen to these CFOs listen to these product leaders at these companies the CEOs they're telling the market don't worry about it the land and expand machine is in full effect we're gonna make up and we're gonna get more later so reason why Salesforce can put 50 billion dollar targets out there renewal term price protections you have to have a cap and you got to make sure there's no conditions in there that effectively removes the cap last thing Investments push your Cloud vendor to give more funding credits resources things to make the products of value because otherwise you're buying air a lot of these vendors are talking about taking money from the cat the balance sheet and putting it towards these types of things hold them to it especially if you haven't gotten value out of the things you've already paid for and especially if you're considering net new push for those investment dollars they're critically important and now is the time to get them