The Hidden Cost of Your Martech Stack with Gaurav Palande

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your Your host, Michael Hartmann, flying solo again, despite the last episode. All right, so today I'm joined by Gaurav Palande. Gaurav, I should have asked you how to pronounce your name. Hopefully I didn't totally butcher it, but he's the founder of Prune and he's a longtime operator with more than 15 years in marketing ops and sales ops. Gaurav has been building a framework to help companies answer a question that sounds simple, but most organizations can't clearly answer it. I know it's one that I've never really thought about, which is what is your go-to-market tech stack actually worth? Not what it costs, or not, at least not just what it costs, but what value it creates, where there's waste, where there's overlap, where revenue may be leaking because of neglected systems, poor processes, tools nobody fully understands anymore, and so on. And in a world where AI is creating even more tools, more spend, more complexity, and spend that's sometimes hidden, that question matters more than ever. So today he and I are going to unpack how ops leaders can think more strategically about their stack, Where AI fits, how to find hidden opportunities before they become expensive problems. So let's kick it off. Gaurav, welcome. How do I do on pronouncing your name?

No, you did it well, Mike. Thank you. Or if I got out, I get all kinds of names pronunciation. As long as I'm responding, you're all good.

Yeah. So for those of you listening or watching, full transparency, we have struggled with some technical challenges to get this one off the ground. And I completely forgot to do my duty of asking how to pronounce his name. So shame on me. But I'm glad we got it going. I'm glad we were able to make this work. And so, like I already mentioned in this, you've spent 15+ years in ops and you recently started this company called Prune. It's like, what was the driver behind that? What were you trying, like, what's the problem you were trying to solve? Yeah.

So first of all, thank you for having me here, Mike. Why I started Prune, I'll give you a little bit of a context. I've been in the marketing ops, sales ops space and roles for last 15+ years, and I've always been responsible for at least buying or influencing any new technology purchase, renewing it, or even cutting it for that matter. For example, before every contract renewal, my leaders would reach out and ask me, justify the investment in all this go-to-market tools. So I would be the person who they reach out. I would be the person who would justify. I would be the person who would work with finance, IT, the tool operators, and understand the value of that tool that is driving the investment. And then I would prepare that documentation. This was one of hard work that we would do. Now imagine doing it for multiple tools. I would be part of that exercise.

Sure.

Based on all this, leadership would make the decisions. Now, here's the hard part. Even when we had all this data and the roadmap to invest or phase out tools, we would hit friction. Renewals would happen last minute. There would be scramble and there would be decision fatigueness across the teams. And in all this dysfunction, the stakeholder that was winning or benefiting was the vendor.

Sure.

They were bringing their invoices and renewal contracts at the end, and what would happen, we would end up renewing, but there was a lot of last-minute activities that we would be involved in. I noticed this across different companies that I've worked at. I have noticed this across my peer group as well, that there is this at least 10 to 14 tools in their stack. That tends to be overlapping, and there is always this opportunity for being smart in the investments. And at the same time, every ops, like leaders like myself, were asked to justify the spend. On top of it, there is this AI investment, which is also creating a challenge for all these ops leaders, and they have to now not only justify the existing GTM stack, but also understand where the AI world is going and be strategic in approach. All this led me to build this methodology, which I wish it existed when I was doing all this. Now I built that framework, which I've really looking forward to giving back to the industry and the community, which can use this framework in a repeated, scalable, and documented way. And it makes them defensible in front of their leadership and finance teams. And that's why I built Rune in a long-winded answer there.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think this is gonna, this is a kind of question or challenge that I think a lot of people, you know, if they've been in this kind of role for a while, have faced, right? Is the question, sometimes it feels personal, right? Where you're like, you know, why are we spending X amount of dollars on, you know, Y product? And, you know, what are we getting from it? I mean, it's a reasonable question. It's probably one we should be asking before we're asked about it. So I know, like you, it's making me think about, there was time for an approaching renewal and we were paying attention at one of our major vendors and me, my boss, and our procurement partner, we all got together on sort of how we're going to strategize. And I mean, we'd literally had it set up where we, because we didn't, you know, it was a struggle, right? We basically said, here's, you know, procurement's role is going to be this. My boss was going to be the bad cop. I was going to be the good cop, right? And like, it's kind of ridiculous to some degree, but like, that was the reality of what we tried to, we had to do to try to maximize I don't even know that the benefit, but maximize them or minimize the cost that we knew we would have to spend because it was one where we felt like we had to have it. So it's weird.

Yeah. I mean, there is also the cost of burning calories in that process. Usually people question about your boss, yourself, and teams have to come together to plan their strategy just, and imagine just for one negotiation. Imagine having to do for multiple such vendors, which is also, I won't say distraction, but a diversion from your day-to-day operations work.

So, right. Right.

So it's definitely not a scalable approach, and that's why I've proven with the methodology and the framework that I've built, it's easy for leaders to even at middle, in the middle of the night, be able to access all this information.

Oh, because you know, we're all thinking about this stuff in the middle of the night, right?

Yeah.

So one of the things when we talked before that I thought was really interesting, and I kind of hinted at it when I introduced you, is that I think most people like me probably think about like the tech stack is a cost, you know, what's the cost? How do we manage or minimize the cost? But you brought up something that I thought was really sort of an interesting one, which is talking about what is the stack worth, right? What's the value it's generating? So, A, I guess, you know, is my understanding of what your, you know, that conversation, is it accurate? And like, what led you to think about that and how do you think about those 2 things as being different? It's a lot of layered questions there. Yeah.

So when it So before we go to the worth piece, when we talk about cost of this GTM tech, we look at black and white. How much are we spending on that tool? And when it comes to renewal, we apply a certain percentage increase or cap, which we are committed to spend next year and then renew it. So cost is very simple. Worth is what the tool earns for you. So it's a formula. Which are unused tools you are paying, plus the redundant tools you could consolidate, plus the revenue sitting in the CRM leads or opportunity or other kind of gaps, whether it be leads unworked or unbilled. So we look at all those, I would say triangulated situation or multi-prong approach that becomes the formula for your worth of the tech stack. So on an average, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars that we can find when we look at from that angle versus just a tool cost angle.

Yeah. So, like, see if I get this right. So part of the value or kind of the benefit side of a cost benefit for this is the potential cost savings of You know, reducing spend with one vendor. Is that one part of it? Am I getting it?

Yeah, that is one part of it. And I, I was gonna speak to that one is when we look at the CRM and we analyze the entire CRM lead to cash flow. In, in one example, I'll give you an example. In one example situation, we found there were around 312 leads that were not assigned to the reps and, you know, just sitting in, in the CRM. That's, you can multiply that to the average deal size and that becomes your unworked pipeline.

Yeah. Okay.

So not only is the tool cost, but then there is the unworked pipeline become one additional factor. That is just one. I look at 10 different signals and then kind of come up with the formula and the number. To inform the audience or the stakeholders that the investments across your GTM tech stack, it's not based on the cost that you're spending on the tools, but also the impact and the underlying revenue flow or leakage.

Yeah. Okay. That makes more sense. Okay. I get it. I get it. Yeah. Sorry. Just saying the 312 unfollowed up leads like made my heart rate go up. So it's the kind of thing that drives me crazy. Okay, so you said you've got a framework. Maybe walk us through, can you walk us through that framework and maybe like, where do you even start when you're doing that, you know, assessing this tech stack for an organization?

Yeah, so I look at from 5 different angles, 5 steps. First step is getting the access of all the contract information from the finance team. And I don't need like access to the actual contract, but just a spreadsheet is good enough, which tells me all the vendors, the annual cost they're spending on that vendor, the license count. And then I run it through my prune analyzer. I'm able to tell which are potentially duplicate tools, an easy candidate for cut. So that's one factor. The second factor is I look at the login information. So PSSO, or if you have an identity provider data, companies are invested in Okta, Google Workspace, whatever they're using.

Sure.

I'm able to see their login information and cross-reference with the investments on that specific tool, for example. So, for example, to give you, to elaborate further, if the company's spending, let's say, on Outreach, sorry, Salesloft, and they're spending $38,000 per year and only 12 users out of the 85 licenses are actively using it day to day, that straight up is a ghost tool, which is confirming we need to look at it differently.

Yeah.

So I look at that. The third angle is I look at all the active contracts and their renewal dates and the cancellation windows. And some contracts are also at auto-renewal. So fundamentally, the teams know that they perhaps don't need it. It's just that they're so caught up in the day-to-day activities. If they don't flag it in time, we are— the company—

Miss the window of opportunity. Yeah.

Exactly. They're locked in for another year, and that's a waste of money. The 4th angle is there is a human-in-the-loop element, which is me, working with the GTM team members to really understand how they're using different tools. And oftentimes I find out that the sales and marketing team have invested in a tool, not at all captured in the finance sheet. Perhaps they have used their credit cards or some freemium.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And are using a tool that is solving the purpose, and that's why they're not using the one from their tech stack. And that becomes a kind of a shadow tool in the making.

Yeah.

In the lower, classic example is Zapier. For example, you know, they is connecting and perhaps that's not part of the tech stack. So that's a ghost tool assessment or finding. And then I also look at the Salesforce analysis. You know, I run analysis in their CRM and as I said, each Signal that I identify, I apply a dollar value. And I'll tell you the 10 signals that I look for.

Okay.

The attribution, lead routing speed, duplicate contact rate, opportunity stage inflation, closed won field completeness, CRM adoption, contract to billing lag. In a contract to billing, there is typically 5 to 10 days of lag. And then renewal visibility. There are opportunities not created in time. that creates churn risk. So all those things I look at very closely. I also forgot to mention data enrichment. So I look at those signals and then come up with the output for those leaders and tell them that, you know, it's not just a tool cost, but this hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes in millions, which are open opportunities to grab. From your—

yeah. So, uh, you used a term there that I'm not, I don't, I don't remember I was talking about before, but you said opportunity stage inflation. What does that mean? I have a pretty good idea, but— Yeah.

So sometimes, um, the reps tend to inflate the opportunity or misrepresent where the opportunity is in the lead lifecycle.

So overly optimistic.

Overly optimistic or even under— undermining the opportunity. In either case, there is a gap which needs to be filled because it shows up in the output in the downstream.

Yeah. I mean, I would assume, like, do you, I don't think I heard you say this, but I would think one thing that would make an interesting way of evaluating that is going, what is the typical forecast versus actual as you get closer to the end of a reporting period, month, quarter, whatever. And, you know, 'cause like, I remember working at one organization where it was a non-US-based organization, but the general manager for the US finally got fed up with his actuals being so far off to, you know, global headquarters compared to his forecasts that he basically, so like, if you're not going to update the CRM, you're going to be, you have to update a spreadsheet. Which is like, now you're creating a duplicate system just to solve the problem.

Yeah.

But it was a clear indicator that they were either sandbagging or they didn't really know where things were. It's so, um, yeah, so it's, it's a real problem out there.

Yeah. So the framework is finding the tools that are, tools that are ghosts, find the systems that are broken. You know, sometimes there is no integrations between different systems and the CRM. Which is an easy question mark. You know, what's the whole point of investing when you are not able to connect the dots?

Yeah.

And then I look at the revenue cycle also and find the bad data or missing connections. Those 3 key elements matter, and then they feed into my final recommendation for the GTM readers.

Gotcha. Like one of the things that I've been seeing lately or recently, whether it's on LinkedIn or wherever, conversations, is what I'm kind of thinking of is like some of the hidden costs of AI adoption. So in particular, I'm thinking about like the cost of tokens, right? Which they show up after they've already been used, right? The cost, because it's, and so I think there's surprises that come in. Um, are you seeing, do you include that kind of stuff in your evaluation at this point, or is it still too early for that?

Yeah. So AI readiness is part of my, um, package.

Oh, okay. What I mean in terms of like evaluating the opportunities for increasing value from the stack, are you looking at like what this, what spend is happening? Because I suspect a lot of this is like you talked about, it's happening on credit cards. And not through invoices so that the finance team has more immediate access to you?

Yeah. So companies are underestimating the hidden cost of AI, and I'll tell you with an example. So let's say a company buys an AI lead scoring model. The vendor quotes them $200 a month. Simple. Yeah. But that's for 500 scored leads per month. So this is something perhaps a marketing ops leader is doing in a silo.

Yep.

And then you end up scoring your 3,000 leads. So remember, we bought $200 for 500 scored leads, but we end up scoring for $3,000 and that's $1,200 per month. And that you discover later. And this is one example of AI being used Which you didn't plan for.

Yeah.

So that's one scenario. Fast forward 6 months, you are running into 4 different AI tools like this where different teams have invested out of their credit card or out of their budget. Now that becomes your shadow AI kind of a setup.

Yeah.

Nobody sees it because it's not a line item on an invoice. It's the—

It's not in the budget. Right.

Yeah. And it's buried in the usage-based billing that it's part of their budget, like their team's budget, and nobody's tracking holistically. Yeah. So this, yeah, centralized adoption becomes a bit of a challenge in navigating. On top of it, SDRs are buying their AI prospecting tools on their credit cards also. Marketing tools are using ChatGPT, and sometimes you hit the limit, you end up subscribing for the ChatGPT Enterprise version. And you never tell anybody because that's a natural reaction to get the work done in that moment. So all these things are adding up and because there is no visibility, it only compounds and you find out later when it becomes a bit of a challenge.

Yeah. I mean, I suspect that's happening a lot and it's been quietly being dealt with. So All right. So when you do this kind of assessment, either based on data or anecdotally, like what are typically the biggest forms of waste or inefficiency or value that you uncover? You mentioned ghost tools and spending on multiple tools and things like that. What else, like what are the things that are fairly common?

Yeah, I think the one that I mentioned earlier about the 3 pieces, right? We look at the ghost tools. There are tools which are naturally, I would say, prunable. I'll give you an example. Calendly offers the calendaring option. Zoom Calendar offers calendaring option. There is Google Calendar also offering calendaring option.

Yeah. I use ZCal. They all do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you don't need a sophisticated solution, which is you don't need an integrated calendar option, which ideally should be the case, but maybe in that moment that That's not the priority, where there is no need for sophisticated team group calendaring kind of a solution, but just making sure that the reps have calendar option on their email outreach. Now that to me is an easy one to fix. Yeah, just don't need this many tools and perhaps Calendly is a cuttable or prunable solution and just focus on Zoom or Google Meet. Workspace where you have enterprise licenses.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that makes sense. In addition to that, I've also seen companies investing or over-investing in data enrichment platforms. And data enrichment platforms come with a large cost these days. Yes. And you perhaps don't need this many. It's all about optimizing, working with the vendors and challenging their capabilities. Before looking at a different platform. So it's a bit of a process change also. And what happens in most of the cases, a decision that was made a couple of years ago by somebody else to bring on a specific data enrichment platform, that person may have left and nobody has taken that decision to get rid of it because of the fear that it may impact revenue.

Right.

So you have now multiple data enrichment platforms. And the third one is, as I mentioned, it's the CRM. That's where the biggest leakages I find when you're not assessing your lead-to-cash cycle, because every team looks at things differently, meaning there is the marketing ops team, there is sales ops, there is customer success ops. So they're looking at the entire lead-to-cash cycle in their own purview. And nobody's looking at holistically at times. And then there is a gap over there as well.

Yeah.

What is also interesting, Mike, is there are API outages often with all these third-party integrations, and those API integrations outages are fixed in that moment by the IT and the operations teams, but are never brought to the extent when it comes to renewal or negotiation with the vendor. That's not a negotiation lever that has been pulled, but the outages in that moment did cost dollars to the company.

Yeah.

And those are so many important points that never get captured in, in the holistic scenario. And that's what I kind of, you know, bring it to the table to these leaders.

Yeah, it's really interesting. It's interesting, this idea of leakage in the funnel, like from lead to cash. And so I was at one organization where, and as a marketing, marketing ops person, right? I was being asked by the CMO to report on, and we had a pretty sophisticated and pretty much agreed upon model for assigning sourcing for leads, right? Whether it came from marketing or BDRs or sales teams or customer success, right? And I started looking at Salesforce data and seeing just pretty large numbers of, just in terms of like quantity of opportunities have been out there where there didn't look like there had been any activity with pretty large revenue potential out there. So even if you took it at half or a quarter, right, it was still substantial Maybe not right away. And I started bringing this up in, you know, group meetings where the sales leadership and sales ops were there. And the resistance I got on that, because I wasn't saying, hey, this is a, like, you guys aren't doing your job. I was just like, hey, did you know this was here? Like, I was trying to bring visibility to it.

Yeah.

And suggesting that the sales leaders, sales managers, They should be holding their salespeople accountable. And it was like, I felt like I was attacked more than I intended for them to feel attacked. It was bizarre. So I was like, if I'm sitting over there thinking like, why are, like, if something's actually happening, great, go put it in there. Take 2 minutes, right? And I get it, you're being measured on the next quarter or 2. And some of these were, this is long sales cycle stuff. So some of these were potential for 6, 12, 18, 24 months out. Even so, right, to get there, you still have to kind of continue to maintain a relationship. And it was just, I thought it was odd that there was that back and forth where they didn't do it. So is that a fairly common thing where you're seeing stuff like that where maybe this highlights a little bit of a break or— Lack of, I don't know, what do you call it? Lack of consistency about maintaining this stuff. And then there's like people go, that's just the way it is.

Yeah. I look at people, process, and platforms as 3 angles for running a business. And this falls in the process kind of a scenario where You have the platform, you have really smart people. It's where the governance and SLA has been put in and who is monitoring and optimizing for it. I think that falls in that category that you just mentioned.

Yeah. And the other one with like these data providers, I suspect on top of those ones that are existing vendors where you pay, I suspect there's a lot of people who are out there who are doing their own augmentation. using Clay or other tools like that to go pull this themselves. Again, leading to this hidden cost of the transaction costs that are going with that.

Yeah, I mean, nobody speaks, but the harsh reality is when you have this many different vendors, you have to spend that much energy with all those vendors. And that goes all the way from the operations team having to have this biweekly or monthly sync with those vendors. Or even quarterly. It also means the sourcing have to plan for them and negotiate and keep an eye out. The finance have to, all has to capture that in their budgeting. All these things are costs that nobody speaks of because in that moment it is all about delivery. But these are some hidden costs that, you know, that comes along with just this tech bloat that companies tend to have.

I mean, there's like, I think what you're saying is like, there's a base cost in terms of time to manage any vendor, right? It doesn't really matter how big the contract is. And that actually resonates because I feel like I've had contracts that were, you know, under $25,000 that took just as much effort to manage as one that was $1 million.

Yeah.

So I probably paid more attention to the one that was the bigger one, right? And made sure that they were consistent, but like, If you have enough of those small ones, right, they add up to something that's material.

Yep.

From a finance standpoint. And we've kind of talked a little bit about AI in this here. So one of the things I think, in fact, our last conversation that Mike and Naomi and I had, we talked a little bit about like the pressure to do AI or have a strategy around it. And in that case, we were talking a little bit more about the, like, has it been a net positive or not for people in ops roles? But there is that pressure there. How does your framework and what you're doing help organizations figure out, like, where should AI really fit into their tech stack, their strategy, and where it doesn't? Yeah.

It also kind of ties into the build versus buy. If you are hearing this often, people are struggling on making decision whether do we buy a solution with AI on top of it or do we build it in-house? So I would club that into one answer, but the way I look at it is rather than focusing on build versus buy, the focus should be what are we solving for?

Yeah.

So we are at a stage where we all know that AI works. We just need to test it in a simulated environment and scale it if the foundations are key. And so I'll give you an example. If we are solving for lead scoring, you have to buy it because there are purpose-built tools that exist. They're cheaper, faster, and someone can Easily handle the maintenance of it.

But it's not as good. It doesn't match our business.

So if it doesn't, then we, as I said, you know, going back to simulated environment, if you really want to test it out and see if it is working, meaning like building it in-house and seeing if it is working, then scale it. Of course.

Yeah. No, I was being, I was being a little sarcastic because that would be the pushback, right? Our business, our business is so unique that the out-of-the-box thing doesn't work. And I'm like, I'm a big believer, like that's a fallacy we all, a lot of us like to tell each— tell ourselves something on like lead scoring. Like I, there's a, there's a point where like the level of differentiation you might get by having a custom kind of model is probably like the, it drops off very quickly in terms of the incremental value you get from that.

You know, this is quite timely because I was talking to somebody yesterday and they went through this building of lead scoring model themselves in-house, and they came to a conclusion that they cannot beat the Clays and Apollos and ZoomInfos of the world who have built purpose-built solutions and also have data coming from all different sources. So just building it in-house does cost new resources, time, energy. You can try it, but then also be mindful of how the industry is shaping in the existing SaaS landscape who are bringing this purpose-built solution.

Yeah. Well, I feel like there's a little bit of a, I think there's just 2 things that are sort of pushing on this Buy versus build that maybe are having sort of opposing impacts. One is with all the explosion of AI and sort of vibe coding or whatever, right? Kinds of potential solutions out there. I think there's a bigger perceived risk for committing to a vendor, right? on a platform or a product or a solution. And on the other hand, because of things like vibe coding and I'll call it the quote democratization of that capability, that there's downward pressure on the cost of build. And I think both of those are a little bit, I don't want to say they're false. I think there is, I think if I was out there really spending on technology right now, I would probably be really careful about how much I committed in terms of time and be really certain about that. But I was probably doing that, I think I always do that anyway. On the build side, I think there's an underestimation about how much that actually costs in the long term because you're now signing up for maintenance, support. You know, if something breaks, like you're doing that in the middle of the night, right? And so like, do you really want to take that on even if it's faster to iterate through prototypes to production and all that?

Yeah, I think we are in an era where companies are starting to rationalize their tech stack and a lot of these vendors have built-in features in their technologies. So companies are looking at maximizing that investment. On top of it, if they are looking to build in-house, then they are really making sure the foundation is clean so that what they're building on top of it is easy to maintain. But at the same time, this is the situation that I'm seeing right now. We are not at the scalable stage. We are still at the testing era. Companies are at the belief that AI does work. It's about how they can fast rationalize it, rationalize the existing tech stack so that they can fund it for their AI initiatives. And then how they scale it further across the teams.

Yeah. Well, and I just realized there's another piece of this puzzle of the risk you take on or the liability, I guess, you take on if you're building your own stuff, which vendors take on otherwise, which is Like data security and privacy, right? If you, especially if you're talking about PII data, like you've got to consider that, right? So it may be really quick to build a prototype that does something on the database that's not truly secure.

Yeah.

And I think that's this.

That's another angle. However, I'm pro-AI. I definitely—

I am too, right? But I just, I think it's, I think this perception that it doesn't come without risks or costs.

That's something people tend to overlook and that's how first they need to rationalize and look at the holistic picture and see how their dollars are invested judiciously towards these AI initiatives.

Yeah. So I think what's interesting about this whole conversation, right? And I think you and I touched on this when we spoke, is that A part of what your work and what you're doing is trying to help ops leaders, like the people who are listening or watching this conversation, to do a better, be able to communicate better with their finance, their senior leadership executives, whatever it is, depending on the organization, which for any longtime listener of the show, like I'm a huge advocate for like understanding basics of finance because I think it's, not only is it important for you from a career standpoint, because I think it sets you up to have better conversations where you can generally have a better chance of doing things you want to do if you're essentially pitching an idea, which is all this falls into. It also, I think it, this way of thinking about the trade-offs between options and like whenever I've gone and pitched, say, a new vendor, an evaluated vendor, say if I did an RFP or something, like I'm always looking at Hey, do they match what we need and how well do they match it? But I'm always, I always have like sort of a basic financial model behind it with like one-time and ongoing costs up to, depending on how far I go out, like 3 to 5 years. And then I always include sort of a risks and change impact kind of section as well, right? Which is a little, it's not, it's less, it's a little more subjective. But I, it feels like it's important, right? And it can be often overlooked. So, and I think despite what people probably have as a perception about finance teams, I think they appreciate that more than you realize. Yeah.

So my advice is generally to approach it not structurally, I mean, approach it structurally, not opinionated that we don't want a tool for certain reason, but When I put structure, you go in with the finance angle, which is how it is going to impact your cash flow. How is it going to impact your revenue? All those elements are really helpful when you are talking to a CFO or finance leadership.

Yeah.

And how you're looking at rationalizing the tools. How is it going to fund it for other initiatives that you have? How is it gonna fund it for some resources that you plan to bring on. So, that kind of a 30, 60, 90-day action plan along with this revenue impact, it's more like a business plan and not a report anymore when you present to this kind of readers.

Yeah. No, I totally, I think so. It's like, well, I think this is a good example though. So, I call them shadow systems. I think you call them ghost tools, same kind of thing, right? These things that get There's cost that's leaking out of the organization through credit cards or whatever, or small invoices. And I think what people don't understand about how finance people see that is that's a missed opportunity potentially to capitalize the cost, which is treated differently from an accounting standpoint, right? And so, because that from a cash flow standpoint, Well, from a P&L standpoint has, and a balance sheet standpoint has different effects. And, you know, if you're in a big organization and there's lots of pockets of that kind of small stuff happening, right? When you, at the aggregate, it can have an impact.

Yeah.

But if you don't know how to, if you don't know why your finance person is getting annoyed or frustrated or upset because there's these, small, what you think of small costs, it's not necessarily because the costs are there, although that may be part of it. It's potentially because of how it affects how we report to our investors. Yep.

We report to the board, report to the investors.

Yeah.

To different audiences.

Yeah. So that's why I think, and I think, you know, when I, Some of this, like, and it's evolved over time, right? I think I always did the evaluation of vendors across, do they meet capabilities and did the financial part of it. When I added the other part about the trade-offs, right? It changed the decision-making process quite a bit. But what happened to me is at some point, and I'm going to attribute it to Thomas Sowell, because that's the first place I heard it. He's an economist. He talked about like, there are no decisions, there are no answers, they're trade-offs. And it stuck with me about how to think about these things because I may think, oh, I think actually before that I would say, oh, like, what are you like? How do you not see that this is the right answer?

Mm-hmm.

Right? And when I stopped and put myself in someone else's shoes and go like, how are they going to see this? And what are they going to think about it differently? You know, because their perspective is different. They maybe have a broader view of, you know, where our money's being allocated and how it's being invested, how much it costs us to get capital, right? All those kinds of things. It changed how I started to think about it. And I think in good ways. It's like, do you see, like, are you seeing when you do these assessments with organizations, is it helping those ops leaders?

Yeah.

Talking of trade-offs.

Can we get better? Yeah. I mean, talking of trade-offs, especially in this AI era, there are decisions that we are going to take as ops leaders around the AI elements. There are some hard trade-offs that we'll have to bring in that explanation to the stakeholders and the leaders. Meaning, going back to the earlier point about build versus buy, there is that economics that may work in the short term, but yes. And you know, it, and it can work in short term. It may be fragmented also in large degree, but how you, you know, present the picture, how is it gonna be simplified in the long term? That becomes a key part of your, you know, presentation to the stakeholders.

Yeah. It's like going in with our eyes open, right? We know that we're making a short-term decision. And here's how we see it changing over time, right?

Yeah.

That's a different conversation than we have to do this now because otherwise, just because. It's reasonable to get resistance from that. And I think a lot of people listening, if they have gone through that and gotten frustrated, it's probably because they assumed an understanding that for the other people that was similar to theirs, which is not always the case. In general, probably not.

Yeah.

So why don't we, I know we're going to have to wrap up here, so like maybe one more question for you. So you've got this framework, you're doing this work. For those people who are listening and maybe want to get a kickstart on something like this, like what is something they could do in the next 30 days to do a little bit of what you are doing with your framework?

Yeah, I think they can start with the finance spreadsheet, get the data on the spreadsheet on all the tools that they're spending on, and just going line by line, they'll be able to find some low-hanging fruits on which ones obviously can be cut or pruned. And also on top of it, cross-reference with all the logins, you know, system information through Okta or any other identity management solution, you are able to see people actually using it or not. And then combining that information along with how the impact is in your Salesforce, like just doing some easy assessment on duplicate leads, unworked leads. I think those 3 elements, when you combine them together, you'll be able to easily find $100,000 to $200,000 That you can regain just by doing this simple exercise in the first, I mean, I would say in the next 15 to 30 days itself.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think even if you're like, say you're at a smaller organization, you can find $25,000. Like I think that you'd be seen as a hero.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's not, it doesn't take a huge amount. Like it doesn't have to be a million dollar savings. Yeah.

Somebody told me every dollar saved is every dollar earned.

Well, and the way I think about this is so stupid, but there's this book that I got as part of a global marketing team meeting when I worked at a big company. And the speaker was an author. He'd written a book called How to Be a Marketing Superstar, which was a really silly name. And most of the book I don't remember, but there was one quote chapter, it was 2 facing pages that said, this is customer money. And the gist of it was, Everybody's check, theoretically, like if you were actually to get a check, it should say, this is customer money. And it's another one of those things, like it seems cheesy, but I used to have that like on my desk for multiple jobs. I just had a photocopy of that page because it was a reminder that like everything we do and everything that we spend money on is affecting my ability to get paid.

Yep.

Right? And so that was a, for me, it's a silly kind of thing. At the same time, it's a truth that was just summarized in one sentence.

Yeah.

So that's why I'm the guy, like when I have to, when I book business travel, like I don't go to the cheapest airfare, like, and I'm not going to put myself through like pain of like multiple stops if I don't have to, but I'm not going to spend twice as much for the next level, right? If I just don't think it's worth it. Or I'm not going to go spend at the nicest hotel if I can get away with one that's moderate because I know I'm like, all I'm going to do is be sleeping there.

This is quite an interesting angle because I have been a The bad guy who ended up investing in certain tools for certain features and never ended up using those.

Yeah.

So, uh, it does bite you.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you, and then when you realize like part of why you got, um, you know, a bonus or increase in compensation or you didn't get what you hoped for, right? It's a contributing factor.

Right. Yep.

Yep. It, it, it, every little bit adds up.

Yes.

So yeah, I, um, call me old man on the porch, but like, that's, uh, I think that's one thing I wish I had, I wish I had realized when I was earlier in my career. So, Gaurav, lots of fun. Thanks for powering through some of the technical challenges we had today. If folks want to continue the conversation or learn more about what you're doing with Prune or the framework, what's the best way for them to do that?

Um, they can reach out to me on gaurav@getruen.io, but before they reach out to me, perhaps they can introspect or work with their leadership and ask this question. How much of our go-to-market tech stack spend is actually measurable? And when I say measurable, it's not the cost of it, it's the worth of it.

Mm-hmm.

Once they have that kind of an angle to start with, I think the answers will start to come through the internal discussions and happy to chat with me. I mean, happy to chat with them in detail. As I said, it's gaurav@getprune.io. It's on my LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn as well. They can find me on LinkedIn and my calendar is open for a 20-minute or 30-minute chat or even longer.

Perfect. Sounds good. Again, Gaurav, thank you so much. Thank you to our longtime listeners, supporters, our new ones out there. We always appreciate you. If you have ideas for topics or guests or you want to be a guest like Gaurav, Like, please reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we will get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye everyone. Thanks, Mike.