Product Update: Diligence Insights

Robust time-saving measures that shortcut the process of contracting with SaaS vendors

Joel Windels | MAR 28, 2023

5 min read

The SaaS purchasing marketplace focuses a lot on pricing. In a deflated market where budgets are scrutinized, it’s no surprise that cash rules supreme. But while it’s possible to significantly reduce your overall spending by negotiating better pricing and streamlining the process, there is, however, a hidden cost when it comes to buying and renewing SaaS products.

One that can’t easily be measured in dollars and pounds, but instead takes up calendars and inboxes.

Ultimately, the process of purchasing SaaS often requires a huge amount of effort. In fact, it takes an average of three meetings and 33 emails to select and acquire a new product, with the numbers remaining high even when it comes to renewing software you already use.

Vertice’s new Diligence Insights functionality is built to reduce this burden, shortcutting and streamlining a lot of the work involved in SaaS purchasing.

Here’s what you need to know.

Tackling the organization-wide challenges of SaaS procurement

Whether you’re purchasing or renewing SaaS, the process often involves various stakeholders from across your organization.

Legal and contracting

Even after doing comparisons, testing, rounds of negotiations, the actual act of putting digital pen to paper is more arduous than it initially sounds.

Vendors use a wide variety of techniques to protect – and even grow – their revenue. Terms in contracts include things such as auto-renewals, which ensures that you remain contractually committed to paying for the product if you don’t keep a close eye on your renewal dates. Another is automatic pricing increases, which affords the vendor the right to raise the price mid-contract, often by a specific percentage amount.

Scanning through contracts line by line takes time, and involving the in-house legal team can also add steps to the process. With Diligence Insights, Vertice sifts through your contracts to help you rapidly identify the parts that matter, making this significantly swifter to navigate.

More importantly, perhaps, is the ability to benchmark this with other customers of that vendor. The platform will show how many other organizations have a particular clause in their contracts too, signposting how likely it might be to get it removed during negotiations.

Security and compliance

Contracting SaaS products takes more than just documentation and review. Security considerations and ensuring compliance are also both important but time consuming as well. Diligence Insights has been designed to help with these areas too. CIOs and CISOs are frequently engaged in the onboarding, rollout and assessment of SaaS, and will typically require information on compliance with particular regulations before approving new software.

Vertice can now provide you with easy access to all of the most useful materials for every major vendor.

As a user, you are able to quickly see which certifications a tool might have, including their compliance with frameworks such as GDPR, ISO27001 or SOC2. You can also get links to privacy policies and information on uptime, saving your IT team the hassle of tracking down a dozen different documents to investigate compliance concerns.

Many customers wish to go a step further, and instead request that vendors complete more detailed security questionnaires to give more detailed information on specific issues.

Once again, Vertice is built to optimize this part of the process too. You can take advantage of pre-filled security questionnaires for each SaaS product, helping to quickly address more granular issues without the need for a back and forth with the vendor. If a particular concern is not addressed in the available documentation, you can request and expedite customized responses directly within the Vertice platform.

Start streamlining your SaaS purchasing process with Diligence Insights

With the release of Diligence Insights, you will be able to purchase software with the absolute minimum resource, but with maximum conviction that you are not only getting the best possible price, but also a secure, compliant product that meets the requirements of both your IT and legal departments.

At every step of the contracting cycle, Vertice takes care of the small stuff so that you can focus on the big picture.

  • Vendor contracts are automatically codified and summarized, allowing you to rapidly review the most important terms.
  • Compare your contract terms with industry benchmarks, helping you use data-backed knowledge to inform your negotiation tactics.
  • Streamlined resources for specific vendors are available within the platform, granting you access to security and compliance information in a heartbeat.
  • Instantly obtain pre-filled security questionnaires from each vendor, or upload custom requirements to send for completion.

For Vertice customers wanting to learn more about how to start using these features, please speak with your account manager.

If you are not currently using Vertice and would like to understand how it may benefit your organization, start by telling us about your SaaS stack.

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