James Sinclair explains why CFOs now control more B2B SaaS buying decisions and prefer consolidating vendors. To win deals, founders need one clear metric showing net business impact: revenue gained, productivity improved, or costs saved. That number is what justifies the purchase to finance.
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If you're in B2B SaaS, there is a change that has occurred already that you need to be aware of if you're coming into the market in terms of how you're going to position your product, or if you're already in the market, how you're going to sustain and stay in that market and scale and grow and not churn, most importantly. So the first is the CFO has now a broader role in all purchasing. It's not just going through acquisitions and procurement teams. It's not just the, the VP has a sign off, you know, at a certain dollar amount that he or she can sign off on. Instead, the CFO is implementing a couple of restrictions and requirements. A, lowering the amount of money that people can sign off on and B, even with that amount lowered, they have to meet certain qualifications. So the first what you're seeing is that a lot of CFOs are saying, if you need something, do we have an existing vendor that can deliver that service? It may not be as amazing as this new point solution, this startup, this other vendor, but we want less vendors in our system. We want less paperwork, less MSAs, less implementation, less learning. We want quicker time to productivity, quicker time to value. We would rather a 70% solution from an existing vendor than 100% solution from a new vendor. We also, with an existing vendor can negotiate price. We're going to have more bargaining power, more opportunity. And so the delta of how amazing your technology has to be to compete with Suite at this point is much, much higher. The second thing, and I think by the way, that's a great play opportunity for if you're existing in the market or coming into the market of joining ecosystems, as in most of these big companies, even if you're a point solution, you can do single click integration through their marketplace or their app store. If you're an hr, you've got Workday, you've got adp, you've got SAP, you've got Oracle, where you can implement directly and a customer can buy your solution without having to file new paperwork. And so you can be part of that sweet solution if you're in there at Marketplace. So you might want to consider that as a way to penetrate the market. I also happen to love that play. Just in general, the second thing you're seeing if you're existing in the market is CFOs are going line by line through every single kind of billing vendor they have and they are asking the department, not the individual user, so very often not the person who's stuck using good or bad, the department or the department head. What is the impact if you don't have this solution if we turn it off tomorrow? Show me or tell me what the net impact impact is on our business, on our bottom line, on our productivity, on our operations. Show me the numbers, show me the metrics that move. And I think that's really, really important to think about. You know even if you're going into the market is that stickiness, that customer success, that customer value and having that metric so that when they're called into the CFO's office they can give an answer. And so anything you can do to showcase and highlight and prove that value to your customer, forget the fact that we're going into a recession already in a recession, whatever you want to call it, you should always be doing that anyway. But now more than ever you need to be able to quantify the value of your technology. Good luck.
