How Vertice became Greylock’s trusted, long-term procurement partner

The Challenge

Greylock Partners, a boutique and lean venture-capital firm, was keenly aware that they lacked transparency into their SaaS spend, imminent renewal dates and the suitability of their contract terms. 

With SaaS spend routinely increasing with every contract renewal, and large numbers of licences - and even some whole contracts - being underused, the situation became untenable.  

But while the problem was clear, Greylock needed guidance on the best next steps, and to save time on renewal and purchasing processes.

“We didn’t have the resources to look into it. What is the current status of our environment? Where should we start? It was a bit overwhelming just to get to the discovery phase.”
Manuel Bernal, VP Technology at Greylock Partners

The Solution 

Greylock was introduced to Vertice through a third party, and initially focused Vertice in supporting their investigation into the true size and scope of its SaaS environment - and to then build a plan to fine-tune it. 

“As I read through the Vertice website and did some back channel research, it became clear this is something we should really look into. Not knowing where to start felt monumental, but Vertice made me feel like we can engage with them and really help us”.
Manuel Bernal, VP Technology at Greylock Partners

Vertice began by auditing all of Greylock’s existing contracts and uploading them to the Vertice platform - creating a single-pane-of-glass area for viewing and managing its software contracts. 

In fewer than 10 days, Greylock had total visibility of its entire software environment - including spend, renewal timelines, contract documentation, vendor risk audits, and underutilized and unused tools.  

“This was one of the first times outside of a spreadsheet or an annual review where we could see the real time amount of spend, and any overlapping services we had been spending on. I could see all our contracts, the owners and the approvers, and the timelines for terms. And the portal tracks ROI too, helping us see if we are achieving our goals.”
Manuel Bernal, VP Technology at Greylock Partners.

Vertice then introduced in-house expert buyers to rationalize Greylock’s tech stack - advising on what to renew, what to purchase, and what to let expire to create a right-sized, lean and efficient tech stack. They could then negotiate on Greylock’s behalf to achieve this.

Vertice’s experts also provide ongoing strategic guidance, using Vertice’s category-leading global dataset to provide unparalleled insights into benchmarking, peer analysis, and potential duplications, as well as making recommendations based on future business needs.

“The Vertice experts understood our business - asking questions about our strategy, identifying modifications to contracts that would favor us and ensuring we targeted the best-fit solutions.”
‍Manuel Bernal, VP Technology at Greylock Partners

The Results 

The results were immediate, obvious and exceeded expectations. Vertice helped Greylock identify and achieve significant savings -  including a 50% reduction on a key data and intel provider without impacting performance.

Greylock was also claiming back large amounts of time from negotiations, procurement processes and vendor research - something the leadership team saw as invaluable.

“Back-and-forth emails, doing our own due diligence and understanding what we should be asking and requiring and paying for - we didn’t realize how valuable saving so much time on all of these would be”.
Manuel Bernal, VP Technology at Greylock Partners

Greylock now has total visibility over its tech stack, contracts and software usage in a single-pane-of-glass contract management portal - giving its key SaaS decision makers all of the information and awareness they need to stay on top of everything without much effort. This has enabled negotiated savings per month to skyrocket by 66%.

Greylock now sees Vertice as a trusted, long-term procurement partner - able to consistently offer expert guidance and vendor recommendations teamed with data-backed negotiations to realize ROI and time savings on every contract.