Emergency IT Response Webinar

Foreign. Hello everyone and welcome to metrics data 360's emergency IT how it can prepare for the Recession webinar. When we launch these webinars, we always ask people sort of what are the issues that they're facing and what, what types of things are bothering them so that we can address them. And so in this one, there were quite a few things that came up around the recession that were on top of mind for people. And so things like in CURLED costs, obviously inflation. So not only are vendors increasing cost, but inflation depending on currency that you're purchasing on and inflation in general, uncontrolled costs around cloud licensing complexity, security issues. A big one that we heard was having my job eliminated, you know, budgets shrinking and then the changing FX rates so that if you're buying, you know, in different currencies around the world, that's impacting your costs and things like that. And so my goal today is I want to help, you know, IT and purchasing teams prepare for the looming recession. We know what's coming, what can we do to do that? You know, the objective really is to help save jobs and projects by finding budget to retain and talent and keep projects alive. And then also talk about what's worked in the past and what we've seen work and talk about how to go about saving or recouping money from your vendors so that you can meet budget objectives or keep those projects going or help avoid having people be laid off or whatnot. And so one of the things that I'm often asked is what do I. What, you know, Mike, what do you see software companies doing during, during the coming recession? And there's really, you know, three main things. The first is they're going to raise prices because they've set goals. They need to meet their revenue goals, otherwise their stock price gets hit. And so they're going to raise prices. And this is already happening. Mississippi has announced some price increases depending on where you are in the world around. They're calling it FX adjustments, but you know, they've raised prices. IBM's raised prices on a bunch of their Passport products and Oracle raised support chart support costs. For the first time ever, we're going to see increased audits. This is already happening. So we're seeing audit activity pick up again from, from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe and a bunch of others. And they're going to lay off staff. And we're seeing that already. Some of the layoffs I think, you know, are they pending due to economic uncertainty? Maybe. But I think these tech companies will probably use as an opportunity to right S staff where they think they have bloat. But that means that there's going to be less support right from them as they lay off people. Your account teams are getting smaller. Resources may no longer be there that you work with. The resources that they have internally work, you know, to work with are going to be scattered. And then you know, that is going to in turn become increased pressure on you. So as you're trying to save money, they're going to be trying to sell you more because the reps are going to be in worried about number three. Sorry, put number two there. But number three, they're going to be worried about getting laid off if they don't meet their revenue objectives and things like this. So this is not happening. Just besides the recession, we sort of seen some of this coming for the last little while before the recession coming. A lot of this has to do with the fact that most licenses are still based on user or seat, you know, per seat licensing. So you think about MS.360, you know, Microsoft 365 or Salesforce, you know, they're based on a number of users and like those are not growing. Companies have not been growing, you know, at their traditional rates the last 18, 24 months. And as that happens, migrations are slowing, which means net new license revenue is slowing as budgets get decreased. You know, there are conflicting reports out there. Gartner and them are saying that cloud and IT budgets will increase this year, but others are saying that they're going to be flat to decreasing. So you know, it's going to be somewhere in between. I don't think that anybody's expecting massive budget increases, but the vendors are still going to be expecting massive revenue increases. And so how does this, you know, would apply to, you know, IT or procurement professionals? You know, you can adjust your software contracts. I think that's one of the key things I want people to know is that even if in a contract you can adjust them, some of them you can do programmatically, others are you need to consider it as a negotiation. You can come out of this with stronger partnerships with your vendors. Because if we go through the approach that we're talking about, they're going to understand your business more. The types of things you're trying to accomplish, how they can actually help you, you can control the conversation. This is not about licensing. So as much as, you know, we're an organization that helps with licensing and things like that, this is not about licensing. This is all about mindset. And we're going to talk about that. And it's about data and that data that you need to help you do. These things exist. It's just hidden a lot of the time. Okay, and so who am I? You know, I'm Mike Austin. I'm the CEO and founder of Metrics Data360. You know, I worked at Microsoft in licensing for just shy of 10 years. I've negotiated a few billion dollars of contracts. I'm really passionate about helping others beat, you know, their goliaths, the software vendors. That really comes from my childhood, you know, when I was. When I was a kid. I have a really strong memory of, you know, sitting at the kitchen table one night and my mom coming home. And it was weird because she just went straight to her room. And normally she would stop and say, hey, how was your day? What are you doing? But she went to her room and I heard tears. And that's when my gut dropped and I knew what had happen. My mom was actually an IT manager in a small factory in our hometown. And that was the day that she lost her job. They closed the plant and moved it to Mexico, actually. And for months leading up to that, my mom was very stressed, Having restless nights, not being able to sleep at night. And the reason for that was she was trying to negotiate with her vendors to try and get concessions in order to save money, to hopefully help save the plant, not have it closed down. And like I said, that was the day. And it was 2008 when the recession hit that I found myself, because I went on said that was never going to happen. It was a huge impact to my family, you know, that we lived in a small town. There weren't a lot of great jobs. It just had a huge impact. And I kind of said that never happened to me. And I my job at Microsoft, and I was rising through the ranks of the licensing group. But in 2008, I found myself not being able to sleep at night. And the reason was, it was the reverse. The recession had hit. In 2008, Microsoft was asking me to sell 20% more. I'd learned all the games to play with licensing. I knew how to do it, but, you know, my clients were laying off thousands of people. I was selling into automotive at the time, the automotive companies were flying to Washington trying to get money to keep their businesses alive, yet I was being told to sell 20% more. And I knew how to do it. But at that point in time, I knew that my, you know, kind of core values were not in line with what, where I was working. And so that's when I decided to go on my own and help clients, you know, negotiate smarter contracts and help them save, save money. And so, you know, we are, what are we going to talk about today? You know, so I understand, I guess where I'm going with my story there is, I totally understand the, the pressures that are put on these software vendors and your reps, you know, based on the fact that I was there in 2008 going through it on the other side. And I understand the pressures that are put on you today. And so we're going to talk about, you know, what is an emergency response. You know, we're going to talk about budget and finance, we're going to talk about people operations and I'm going to wrap it up with some thoughts. And so, you know, let's get into IT and talk about how it and you know, I should probably say IT and procurement, you know, IT procurement or vendor management, how they can respond to the recession. And so the first thing is I like to understand words and I think the words, words themselves are very important. And you know, when you look at an emergency, the definition of emergency is a sudden, urgent U.S. unexpected occurrence or occasion requiring immediate attention or action. And a crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. So if you think about it in IT emergencies happen every day and IT is good at handling them. You think about systems going down or end users getting locked out of password resets and all the emergencies that happen in the day to day operating of an IT business. IT organizations and their partners in procurement are really good handling those sorts of things. And a crisis, a recession is a crisis is just a sustained emergency. And so you can control what's going on. You can't control that the recession is going on, but you can control how you respond. You know, no different when there's, you know, security issues or whatnot in it. You can't control that, that that's happening, but you can control how you respond to it. And so the key thing I want to get across today is, you know, don't panic. Making decisions or not making them can drive you into a further state of emergency. And so the reason I say that is a lot of the times what's going to happen. And we saw this in 2008. We saw it with, you know, the early parts of COVID is people started to panic and they just didn't do anything. They were afraid to call their vendors and have conversations with them. You know, just they, they froze in inertia. The same thing happens on on the vendor side, by the way, your vendors are afraid to call you because they know, you know, the recession's coming, budgets are getting hit, they're trying to sell you more and they don't want to have those awkward convers than you do. And so they freeze and they panic internally, which causes, you know, all kinds of roll down effect for them. And so, you know, one of the things that I like to say is we should examine the past to see what we can, can do or what will or won't work in the future. And you know, if you look at the 2008 crash, you know, the 2020 Covid, 2008 had some lessons for us. You know, the same sort of things happen. Layoffs were happening, drove less seats and true ups, you know, how the vendors react, increased prices, more audits, those sorts of things. But it's not necessarily a great proxy though, because it was a different world back then. In 2008 it was still pretty much a primarily all on premise cloud concepts. Cloud companies were just starting. I think Salesforce probably was one of the bigger ones back then, but O365 and Azure and AWS and those things weren't there. And so although it has some lessons, it might not be a great proxy because when you're talking about in the cloud, I'm in AWS or Azure and I got to cut those bills. Well, if you're running services up there, how do you cut those bills? It's not quite the same as, you know, hey, we, you know, we don't have 3,000 people anymore. Can we reduce our license counts in that conversation? Right. During COVID it was seen as a leader to get through. I think, you know, usually IT departments struggle during these times, but in Covid it actually was seen as the hero, you know, with the rapid shift to work from home and the response and things like that, you know, so I think that going into this recession it will be leaned on again, you know, digitalization program programs and deeper productivity and cost cutting can be driven from it. And so I think that it has an opportunity to, you know, continue to lean on that leadership position that they gained during COVID And if you think about the types of things that you may or may not have done with your vendors during COVID what worked, what didn't work, what type of conversations did you have and whatnot. And so the main thing that I want to talk about is that this really is a mindset. And I have a mentor, Brandon Dawson, he always says to me, Mike, what you think is what you say, what you say is what you do do. And what you do defines your outcomes. Right? And so the key thing is you want to be thinking positive about what is happening, what you can do, how, how you can do these things. Because if you get stuck in that negative, you're gonna get stuck in the inertia. And so one of the first things that I say is when, when a crisis happens and when the, you know, the recession starts to impact, impact your business, you want to ask yourself questions like these, right? You know, so what's your mindset during the cr. The crisis? Is it positive or negative? Like you said, you can't control that it's happening, but you can control how you respond to it. So can you be positive? Yes, we can get through this. Yes, we can go and find, you know, savings. We can, you know, change our contracts. We can make these changes in our architecture that will drive, you know, savings on Azure and things like that. What's the mindset of the company? What's the mindset for your direct team and boss? Because that's going to impact you. You know, if it's positive in the same alignment with you, then it's going to be much easier. If it's not, then how do you help them get to that positive mindset? Are you prepared for an emergency like this? Like I said, what did we learn in 2020? What did we learn in 2008? How can we be prepared for this? How can we get ahead of it? You know, how focused are we on outcomes that we need to drive? A lot of the times it's like we saw it during COVID we just need to save money. But they had no kind of quantitative, you know, we need to save X, it's just we need to save money. There was no real focus on what the outcomes they really wanted was, was that, you know, get out of a vendor, renegotiate a contract, consolidate whatever the, the various opportunities are, you know, how prepared are you to deal with the disruption and the challenges? Right? Because you have your day job to do and then you're going to have, you know, this responsibility on top of it. And it's going to be a challenge and it is going to be disruption. And you know, so how have we trained for this in the past? What can we take from dealing with other it emerg that we can bring into, into this? And then, you know, we've already talked about what's of the past, you know, in 2020 and 2008 taught us. But one of the key Things and we saw this again, I'm going to say talk about 2020 and I saw it in 2008 on the other side is that a lot of companies really didn't have a true handle on what I'll what I'm going to refer to as budget here, right. And the companies that do the best in a crisis are the ones that manage through the pain. So in 2020, the companies that knew their numbers, knew when all the renew the data, had it all in kind of like a master file or spreadsheet or you know, some sort of centralized system, those are the ones that did the best because they were, they were, they managed through the pain. But it was done with people. It wasn't an individual, it was done with people, teams of people. They had a strategic plan, they had their goals, they had stakeholders that owned those goals. They had prioritization of their expectations. So they knew what their gives and gets were. They knew what things had the biggest impact and the lowest impact on what they were trying to do. They understood their annual budget, what was, was renewal, what was net new, what was needed for operations capital versus opex and where they could move those things, what was necessary. They also understood that sometimes maybe they had to make trade offs, right? So could they consolidate a vendor? So for instance, if you had a security product that's coming up for renewal and he owns something from say somebody like Microsoft that you're not using, can you just get away with using that to consolidate? But the big thing is they develop KPIs key, key metrics that they were tracking. So they set goals and they measured against those and they monitored those and they talked about them frequently. You know, timely and accurate monthly reporting on the finances and on the KPIs. And so from the finances it was like, how we doing against our budgets? How are we doing against our goals of savings or objectives to cut costs? How are we doing in our renewals? Where do those things set, you know, all of that sort of thing. And so, you know, the, one of the keys to building that sort of budget is, is to build a plan for reduction. And you're going to do that by determining all your renewal dates. And so you might want to, you know, look at your biggest ones and your smallest ones and understand, you know, when are the renewals and start working on these things. You know, a lot of the times, you know, the big contracts like Microsoft renewals and things like that, most organizations plan to work on those. You know, large organizations are working on those six and 12 months out, you may need to be working on those 24 months out and looking to see what you can do in cycle now. But they will leave a lot of the smaller sort of one off renewals and maybe just do those in month. And you want to be planning those for three to six months in advance, even those smaller ones, because you're going to have to go and get data if you're going to try and cut costs on those things and things like that. You want to make sure that you understand what your monthly plan, what your monthly fixed costs are on your cloud contract. So what are you spending on ews, what are you spending on Azure? And the one thing here is I put monthly, but monthly is not the right objective. We have a whole conversation going internally about this is if I'm looking at my AWS or Azure costs on a, a month to month basis, that can fluctuate from 5 to 9% depending on the number of days in a month. Right. Or the number of weekdays in a month versus weekends. So if you got systems that are up during Monday to Friday but down on the weekends. So monthly may not be the best thing to be looking at here. And so you want to make sure that you're getting the right metric, right? It could be daily, it might be hourly rates. You want to be looking at, you know, different ways to do this because like I said, if you're, if you know we're talking about January, you go into January looking at your Azure bill and then you get your Azure bill in February, 31 days to 28 days, it's going to look smaller in February and then you're going to be shocked in March with why did it get bigger again? And so we need to have the right metrics there. We want to understand what our largest costs are. You know, so what are those categories? Where are they? Is it storage, is a compute, what is that? And then you want to determine how short you're going to be on your budget. You know, so if it's getting reduced, how short it is, how you can make that up, build a plan, where are you going to go for reductions? Can you know, is it a reduction? Can you maybe if you can't get a reduction in cost, can you negotiate a change of payments? So maybe if you're on a three year deal, maybe if it was a million, a million million, maybe you could work with the Vendor to do 700,000 1.1 and 1.3 and push it out where, you know, forecasting when things get better, you know, so there's all kinds of things that you can do. It's not necessarily just a reduction of cost. It could be cash flow and things like that. And then obviously you want to create those KPIs. And so, you know, some of those KPI' will be things like, you know, how much savings have you identified and versus how much have you realized? Right? Because those are two different things. Like if I can go and show you that in your O365, you're wasting a million dollars, but you can't get those savings until your anniversary date. You will have identified them but not realize them. Right? And so realize savings are the key one. But you want to be tracking, tracking the identified ones to figure out when you can actually realize those. You know, can you measure changes in cash flow payments? Can you measure who' implemented changes versus who hasn't? So for instance, in an Azure AWS environment, you may be able to go out and identify that certain engineers are oversizing all their workloads. And you can benchmark the engineers against each other to see who's making the recommended changes versus aren't, you know, and then benchmark those like teams, right? So there's all kinds of different KPIs. The key is going to be to figure out which ones are best for your organization and developing a system to actually be able to measure and monitor those. And you know, the obvious thing is to keep the goal in mind. Right. The results aren't going to be easy. Right? We know, we know that in Covid. We know that in 2008, going to a vendor and saying times are tough, decrease my bill. None of them want to do it. In fact, if you're in renewal situations, they're all trying to increase your price. You know, increase prices, inflation, exchange rate, all that stuff that we talked about at the beginning. But it will take time. But you must know that you're going to have to make a lot of calls. You're gonna have to have a lot of meetings both with the vendor and your team. And you need to keep track of your, your ass, right? Because a lot of times you make ass, you send them to the vendor and then they go away for days and days or weeks and months and don't get back to you. You don't. You have to let them delay. You have to put them on the spot. You have to keep pressure on them. No different than when they're trying to close a deal for month or quarter end. You're selling to them now and you have to put the pressure on Them you have to ask a lot of great questions internally and externally, right? Internal questions like why are we doing it this way? It's costing us X this month. This, you know, X a month. What if we did Y, we could save and it would cost us this. You know, a great example there might be using high cost disk in a desk and tab environment when maybe you don't need, you know, the higher end disk or storage. I'm trying to blank on the name of that right now, but you get the point, point, right? Asking those tough questions. Same with external. Why can't you do this? What can you do if you can't do that? How do we do this? How do we work together? Right. You want to educate yourself on all your inventory, on all the data, how much you know, what's deployed, what's in use, what's not in use, what licenses do we have? We want to use those stats. So for instance, if I could show Microsoft that I'm only using 22% of a Microsoft 365 E5, what sort of position will that put me in to have a conversation with, with them? Right. Collecting that data is not easy. It's out there, you can do it. But you're going to have to do that in order to get them to move on these positions. Right. And like we talked, like we said, so we're going to go out of budget into people now, you know who's on the team, right. This is so key because you can't do this yourself. It has to be a team. And you know, I, when, when I was at Microsoft I'd actually won President's Club and it was a trip to Hawaii and on one of the, the in days they had a bunch of events that you could do and my wife and I looked at it. It wasn't really anything that we were all that interested in, but the one thing that we did see was this deep sea fishing and we thought, oh well, at least we can go out and be on the water for the day. Let's do that. And immediately when we made the decision and signed up, my stomach sunk because I actually get really seasick. And so when we anyways we end up going and we get out on the boat, it was end of season so the fishing wasn't great. And we're out there for about two hours and true to form I got seasick and ended up passing out in the, in the, the cabin and I heard the skip yell fish on and it's a big one and I jumped up and Jumped into the seat and saw it jump and go down. And you know, long story short, I caught a 500 pound blue marlin and the skip had told me, he said, it's going to take, you know, all, all four of you on the boat probably about four or five hours to pull this thing in. And I happened to be able to pull it in in 45 minutes myself. Now I say myself, but it wasn't myself. It was a team effort. The was there telling me when to sort of lean forward and squat so that I could reduce the drag on the line and when to reel in. And the captain, you know, was using the fish finder to figure out where this thing was. So you think about, you know, that he was fighting where it was. He was also backing the boat up to reduce the drag on the line so it didn't snap or would pull forward to help tire out the fish. You know, my wife and team were there. They were, you know, my wife was pouring water on my head to support me because it was so hot, right. And so I bring up the story because it's very much like dealing with, with a software vendor in a situation like this, right? You need a team, you need a captain that knows how to use a fish finder to find the data. So how do I go find that data to figure out how much of M365 we're using? You need a skip that knows how to interpret that data. So he knew how to, you know, watch the waves and figure out what the fish was doing and watch the line and so watch that data, figure out how to use that. They need a supportive team to help him. You finance, legal, procurement. It, it's a whole team approach in order to beat those, you know, monsters like, you know, Microsoft and Oracle and IBM and all these software companies, right? And so the thing is, when you're doing this, it's all hands on deck, right? So you need to develop your team or teams because, you know, the team doing Microsoft may have similar people, but it might be different than the, the team that you need to do, Oracle or IBM. So you need to make sure that you develop the team and that the team sees what you're doing and know what results you're trying to, you know, you're trying to get, right? And, and are getting. And the key thing is to let them know what they need to do and how they can help. Right. Like the worst thing you can have is have somebody on the team saying to, you know, one of your vendors, oh, you know, yeah, they're just trying to get savings. We know it's not going to happen. So just, you know, just do what you need to do. Like we see that happen under teams undermining themselves internally, right? The people include your vendors, right? It's not just you, but it's people that include your vendors. So what's your account team look like? What's your relationships with executives work like? Do you know how to work up their, their chains of command in order to get things done? And you want to obsess over getting results from them, but you also want to over communicate with them, right? Like you cannot allow them to go weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks without responding. And that's one of their strategies during this will be just don't respond. Right. And so you want to schedule daily quick check ins, whether that's with the team, your internal team, whether that's with the vendors, whether that's collectively. You definitely want to have recurring team meetings. You know, if you're trying to specifically with a vendor, how often do you need to do that? Is it weekly, bi weekly, monthly, you know, internally, what's the, the frequency of that? But the most important thing is to take action. And lots and lots of action, right? We saw it in 2020, we and I saw it in 20 2008. So many people bury their head in the sand and are just trying not to do anything to rock the boat. They don't want to be seen internally. People are worried about getting laid off, so they don't want to be seen at the vendors. It's the same thing. Or they don't want to have the difficult conversation so they just don't do anything. That's the worst thing you can do. The most important thing you can do, if I could emphasize anything, is take action. And lots and lots of action. Okay. From an operation perspective, what you want to be talking to them about is partnership, right? You're selling to them now. Right. And that's a, I can't, you know, I can't emphasize that enough either is that you're actually in selling mode. Right. You want to make sure that everyone under on your team internally understands that they are a sales salesperson. You know, no matter if they're an IT analyst, a finance business analyst, a procurement team member, they are a salesperson trying to sell the vision of what your team is trying to accomplish in this, this, this emergency. Right. And you want to let your vendors know what partnership is or more importantly isn't. Right. So it's not about them increasing revenues or selling new licenses, right? They need to know that. They need to know that up front, right? It's about helping each other through tough times so that when the good times come, you can excel together again, right? It's taught. And talk about real things, not veiled threats, right? Like in 2008 companies. Liam, sorry, sorry about that. We had snow here, snow day here today. So it's about, you know, talking about real things, right? Don't, don't use build threats. So, you know, for instance, if you're on Microsoft 365, Microsoft is not going to find a threat of going to Google valid. They just aren't. So don't even talk about it, right? Unless it truly is real, you know, they're not even going to believe it. Flipping from Azure to aws, they probably won't believe it because those aren't easy things to do. And so unless you're well down a path with that, they're not going to believe that. So you have to talk about things that are real. Like things that you could easily do, right? Potentially, maybe we're in Azure, but we could easily come back to on premise, right? That might be a real threat because we still have the data center, we still have the hardware, we haven't gotten rid of it yet or whatever, right? You want to let them know that projects can be put on hold indefinitely. So things that they were expecting from a net new revenue perspective, that is net new. Those things can be put on hold indefinitely. If you guys cannot accomplish the overall goals that you're trained to do, there just won't be money. Those budgets, those budgets will be taken away. And you definitely want to create a vendor scorecard and share it with them, right? Have a process for them to understand it and you know, and to understand how you're scoring them. Some of it might be saving, some of it might be how they're helping you, some of them might be how they're supporting you. There's intangibles in these things, but you want to definitely create a vendor scorecard and make sure that they understand it, right? So you also want to understand them, right? Understand that they're going to have the same fears that you do. So layoffs was one of the biggest things that we heard. A lot of people were saying that when we asked, you know, what's your number one fear? There's a lot of people that answer that. They're a fear of losing their job or being laid off. Their vendors are having those same fears, right? They're fear that they're not going to be able to make their quota and that there's going to be no bonuses or that if they don't make the bonuses, they won't even get laid off. They don't make their quota, they may get fired. You know, there's massive pressure on them from the business to perform, but a lot of them don't know how to perform under pressure, right. They actually hide their head. And this is one of the things I'm going to go back to, to it. It is really good in the emergency. When pressure comes, it responds. They don't hide their, their, you know, hands, heads in the sand. Sales reps hide their heads in the sand, right? So they got massive pressure from the business and they're, they don't know what to do about it. And like I said, they're going to do the opposite that you do. Right? And you're going to need to know that many companies are asking for help. It's not just one, it's not just you going to them. All their clients are coming to them saying we need reductions. Right. But the thing to know is, is that few of them will be as organized as you and very few of them will actually follow up. They're going to make the ask, the vendors are going to go away for weeks and weeks and weeks and then they're just going to. I asked and I couldn't get anything right. Not you. You're going to take massive action, you're going to have plans, you're going to be talking to them every day, every week, you know, etc. Etc. They're not going to think carefully about their ass. They're not going to be related back to scorecards. They're not going to have their budgets and all the renewals and everything figured out. They're not going to have the data to have these conversations. You know, you want to consider their emotional state and how you can work with that or around it. Right. Remember, if they're in fear of having their jobs, losing their jobs or not hitting quota, you know, that's, that's real. How do you work around that? Maybe you need to escalate to somebody that has, you know, bigger quota, bigger budgets, right? So you know, for instance, if you have a sales rep and they have a 10 million dollar quota and a manager that has 100 million and a VP that has 500 million and a country manager that has, I don't know, 2 billion, you know, you trying to get a million dollars from Your rep, that's 10% and you can see the cascading effect at 2 billion. It's very small. And so their emotional state is going to be different depending on who you're talking with, right? You definitely don't want to shy away about talking about opportunity, but make sure it's real, right? So for instance, if you're looking at, you know, a reduction from a vendor, is there a consolidation that you can have or maybe you're using a competitor product that's not as strategic to you that you can say like, look, we need this reduction, but we'll start working with you on this. Doesn't necessarily mean we're going to buy, we'll start working with you on this migration. So maybe six, nine months down the road that'll bring back that revenue loss once we were able to replace that product and you've proven out that it'll work and all those sorts of things. So from an operation perspective, it's all about data, right? And there's different types of data, there's contract data, right? So quite often we've seen people that haven't even read their contracts and don't know what, what are in them, right? So I just had a conversation helping one client with this and the vendor was saying something and telling them that they owed them a bunch of money on some true ups and things like that. We read the contract, we went back and said this clause here says that you don't need to do what they're saying. And what they were saying was something that was standard. But six years ago they negotiated a non standard clause that everybody forgot about and all it took was me spending, I don't know, half an hour reading their contract to go and say they're wrong. You're right, like you don't need to do this. And then we push behind back on them, right? So data sits in contracts, it sits in that deployment data. So what's installed out there, what's actually in use, right? And then what are our product roadmaps, right? What are our roadmaps with that vendor? What are our roadmaps with other vendors that have competing products? How does that all play together? And so you want to get that data and you want to organize it and you want to use it to your advantage, right? And so how does this all come together? So you know, I talked about how Brandon says to me, what you say is what you know, what you think is what you say and what you say is what you do. And what you do do becomes your legacy, right? So you're going to be the you have the legacy of, you know, that you were the savior it budget because you went out and did these things and were able to drive savings, right? So some people think to me say to me, like, this is great, but it's kind of like, you know, kind of almost like pie in the sky stuff. How do I actually do this? So let's start talk. Let's start by talking about what value it is, okay? And so this is the conversation that you want to have with your software vendors or start of it, right? And so again, I like to go back to the definition of words because I believe words are very important, powerful, right? And so if you look at value, which most like you when you get into partner conversations, it's about value, right? We value your partnership, we value your business. We want to get value out of this partnership. And so most of the time, software vendors are talking about value in the terms of a verb, which is estimate the monetary worth of something. So, you know, you think about it, they'll say things like, well, if you buy this EA or this licensing program or this from us, that software is valued at 1.2 million. But in the EA, we're selling it at 1 million million. So there's a value of 200,000 or 20% there for you, right? Or if you purchase this bundle of products, it's at a 1550 discount to buying a la carte. The way that they talk about value is all around monetary worth, right? But there's a value equation that I found from this guy, Alex Hermosi of acquisition.com that I think is brilliant, right? Because he tried to go out and actually define what value is. And so he has a definition of value that says, says value is your dream outcome. Outcome times the likelihood of it happening divided by the time delay in order to get that. That outcome times the efforts plus the sacrifices in order to get there. So if I look at that, what this may look like to a vendor like Microsoft is that, you know, the dream outcome is you purchase what Microsoft wants you to purchase, right? So, for instance, bundles like the M365E5 or more Azure, it's not necessarily what you to need need, right? But you're buying what they want you to. The likelihood of it happening is probably 100%. We've seen people that were on lower bundles and, you know, discounts being removed. And if you're not moving to the bigger bundles or only putting, you know, concessions on the bigger bundles, not on the lower things, like they have all kinds of games that they try and play in order to get you there. Inevitably you always end up going there. Right. There's really not a time delay for Microsoft. Microsoft, right. In. In this case. Right. The reason for that is now we're actually seeing them put into their quotes that if you do not renew this by a certain date when it gets processed, our processing team can put a 2 to 5% increase on what we have in this quote, or what you've agreed to because you didn't do it on time. Right. So they're even putting pressure on you now, using language to force you to pay more if you don't renew on time. Even though they didn't answer your questions for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. What's the efforts and sacrifices on their behalf? Probably very little. Their typical way that they sell, and this is true for most of these software vendors and big renewals anyways, is, you know, they might come in and do some roadmaps and some briefings on products, mostly to try and convince you of buying the bigger bundles. Even though they haven't even talked to your technical teams to figure out what your roadmap is and what you have in place today and when you could actually consume it and things like that. They'll do some licensing updates and then the value to them is huge. It's massive. You sign a new three, your deal probably 20 to 40% more than you were paying, and you bought more software yet again that you likely aren't ready to use. Right. And so that's what value looks like to Microsoft. And I know I put that in a negative light, but that is really what they think. I mean, we've heard them say if you do not go to an E5, you are not a valued customer. You're not, you know, you're just, you're just, you're just a. You're a transactional customer. Right. So what's value look like to you? Right. The dream outcome might be something like we only want to purchase what we need. We want to reduce our cost 10 to 20%. What's the likelihood of that happening with Microsoft? Very low. Right. The reality is we have little to no leverage over Microsoft. Right. For all those reasons we just talked about the time delay, probably none, because they said they're putting pressure on us to get it done. But internally there's a lot of effort. We're going to spend a lot of time getting data that we're not sure whether is the right data or it's not organized or how do we actually use it with Microsoft building out a plan, having lots of meetings with them that, you know, they just come and say the same thing or give us the same proposals. It's really painful, right? And what's, what happens when you sign this? The value to you is less than your last year. And the reason for that is you're forcing the price increases. You bought more stuff yet again that you didn't use and you don't need it. Right. And this is the cycle that these guys get built into it. When I was at Microsoft, these programs were designed to do this. Oracle's no different, IBM is no different. You know, SAP is no different. Right. And so what is the different. What's the value when you use. Use data? Right? The value when you use data is that you purchase only what you need and reduce your cost 10 to 20%. Plus we've seen people use data that have decreased their cost 40 to 50%. Right. But most of our clients are averaging in around 22%. Right. The likelihood of it happening is high because you have data to know what you need to purchase and you know how to get it at a fair price. Right. The time delay is still none. Right. Because you still have to renew these things on time. The vendors put all that pressure on you, you. Right. But it actually might be longer. Like you could actually get it done faster. So we've had people that are like, we started working with them renewals in a year and we're done in six months. They planned on working on a year, we're done in six months because they had all the data, they could just go and get a deal done. Right. The efforts and sacrifice, they're actually a lot, lot easier because all that back and forth you have with the vendors and stuff becomes so much easier when everything is backed with data. Right. When Microsoft says, we increase the price of an E3 by 11 because we put all this new technology and we put billions of dollars R D and there we had to increase our price 11% and we put in to do and yammer and blah, blah, blah. You can go in and show them we're not using any of it. In fact, we're only using 22% of what we have. And so we're not taking that 11% and we're, you know, not doing what you say. This is what we need, this is what we want to buy. This is the value. Right? And so this becomes massive to you because you buy what you get. A deal that you want at a price that is fair, aligns with the value of what you need. And it has, it's like you hit the easy button. So often our clients when they go through this process are like, man, that was the easiest negotiation we, we had, right? I tell people all the time Microsoft and this, this slide is for a specific Microsoft presentation I do. But it's same with Oracle and IBM and all them, they have a plan with how they're going to work with you for the next three years based on your roadmap, right? This is the key thing coming out of this because you go through and you do these surveys and understand your product roadmaps and understand your usage and understand all the third party products and what the plan is around that you can go to Microsoft and say here's our plan for the next three years on how to we work together, right? How valuable is that? So many Microsoft reps couldn't tell you what competitive products you have when those are coming up, when they would renew. They just think that you can just go and buy an E5 and turn it on tomorrow and get all the value out of it. And we know that's not, not the case, right? So let's talk about a process, right? So again this is a very specific Microsoft one, but it works the same with, with everything, right? So when we work with clients around these processes and this doesn't matter whether you're in a renewal or whether you're going to try and do something, something midstream, right? Or a net new purchase, what you want to be doing is spending 65% of your time, two thirds of your time on what we refer to as setup and deal design, right? And so in other words, that's setting up the project, understanding those KPIs, understanding the milestones, understanding the team, understanding the budget, all that sort of stuff. And then you want to get into deal design, understanding the usage data, your product roadmap, how does that align to licenses, all of that, that. And then when you have that, then you get into the tactics of going to the table with the vendor and having discussions at give and takes. In a true negotiation, the way most people work is vendor comes in, tells them what they're going to renew, they try and negotiate on that. You know, so I'll just use Microsoft. An EA was $5 million a year. Microsoft comes in with a proposal at $7 million a year. With all this stuff we don't need, we end up trying to have all these meetings with them to get it out, trying just tell them that we don't need all that. We just want the 5 million? They're telling us the 5 million 6. So you should take the 7 million. They end up negotiating 7 million to 6.4. It's less than 6.5 is 30% more than they were paying. They filled the feed it and they signed that deal. When you go through this, this is how you get that 10, 20% more in terms of savings. Okay, so let's talk about data. The reality is there's so many purchasing options when it comes to licensing. It makes it so confusing. But when you know what you need need to buy, it becomes very simple because you don't care how you're buying, only what you're buying. See, the problem most people get into when it comes to licensing is that they're buying programs. I'm in a Microsoft ea, I'm buying an ea, and buying an ea, you're not buying ea. Like I have this conversation all the time with people. You're not buying any a. You're buying Microsoft 365. The EA is the vehicle. And Microsoft has told you that the premium vehicle called an EA is the bomb and that's what you should be buying. Right. But it comes with all kinds of restrictions. I gotta buy Microsoft 365. I gotta buy it for all my employees. You know, there's all kinds of things in there that maybe make it not work. And so I know this is a bit of an eye chart, but the types of things you want to be looking at is like, I, I can actually go in and organize your data to show you that 22% of your users don't even touch Microsoft technology. That's not uncommon. We see that in so many different industries and organizations, yet they're buying expensive E3s for them. Right. We had one client spending 18 of their Microsoft 365 on licenses for vehicles, actual vehicles, driving things, because they were sending email to them and they didn't know any other way to do it. Right. But when we got the data, we were able to show them to take that out, how to get rid of that 18, 15%. Right. And so you want to be able to look at your data in ways to see what you're doing with it and ways to drive out cost and the different options. Right. You want to be able to visualize it. Right. And so a lot of times people will tell me, like, Mike, I'm not a business analyst. I don't know how to go get the data. I'm not technical, I don't have access to the systems. I don't have the time required to do all the work, you know, will I really get better results? Right. So if we go back to mindset, that that's kind of, that's kind of in that you know what you think, right? You're gonna think this stuff, you're not gonna get the results, right. But the reality is we talked about people in developing a team, this is what the team is for, to fill in the gaps. So if I'm a vendor management person responsible for trying to go and drive some of these savings or procurement, you don't need to be a business analyst. You get somebody on the team that can do that. You don't need to be technical, you get somebody on the, the team that does that. You don't need to be able to have access to the systems. You get somebody on the team, you get that team marching to the same goal and objective and they will do, you know, get you what you need. Right? But you need to understand what you need to do. You need to be the captain of the fishing boat going out looking for that blue marlin in the data and figuring out where it is and how to get there. Right. So what have we covered so far? We've covered, you know, budget, we've got covered, you know, finance people, we've operations and mindset. Right. And so basically what I want to talk about today, and this is the last little bit here, is if you're struggling to do this, we have two proof of values that we're offering right now where it's basically you're at no risk, it's 100, 100% money back guarantee that we will go in and find savings on Azure or, or Office 365 and Microsoft 365 or both. So we have an Azure proof of value and we have an M365 65 proof of value. We will connect to your data and we'll go and look and we'll show you where there's opportunities to find savings. And if we don't, you don't pay us for the proof of value. Right. And so basically, if you're interested, there's a couple of, you can just hit the, take a screenshot of this. This will give you the, the sheet that talks about what the proof of value for O365 or Azure is here. But literally it is a 30 day program where we come in, we connect to your system, we're going to show you, show you that if you use our services and our systems in order to get this, that there's an ROI on our services to help you drive those costs out. And that's what this really is. And like I said, if we can't do that, then you don't have, then you know, we'll give you 100 money back guarantee. We've also included other things in here like in our O365 one we have a full like half day boot camp that I did on training on how Microsoft 365 licensing works. Usually I think we charge like 397 for that. We've included it for free. We're going to give you some of our worksheets and our modeling templates on how we model different licensing options and things like that. So it's more than just the proof of service. You get access to my team to answer questions and things like that. But here, you know, we're going to go in and we'll show you for instance on Microsoft 365 that you have a number of users in block status or you got people that you're paying for Visio, like 50% of Visio licenses by the way, aren't needed. We have data to back that statement. But we'll show you the users that aren't using Visio that have subscriptions assigned to them, show you a few of them so that you can go and clean those up and you know, like I said, show you the value here. So for instance, we might charge $5,000 for proof of value and show you that there's 50,000, you know, it's $50,000 a year for the service if you choose to move forward. But we're going to show you $500,000 in savings. And you know, if we do that, then you move forward. And so if, if you're interested in that, you can take a screenshot of this barcode here. That's QR code, sorry, that's what they're called. And that'll pull you up to a book, a meeting with one of our team members who can give you more detail our proof of value services are. And with that I think I answered a couple of questions that were PM to me during the session. If anybody's got any other questions, either drop it in the chat or put your hand up and I'll pull you up and you can ask them. Otherwise, everybody have a great rest of the day. If you've got any questions or want to have a further discussion on any of the concepts that we talked about here, I'm happy to, happy to jump on a call with anybody and discuss thanks, everybody. Have a wonderful day.