The Most Lucrative Levers to Pull In SaaS Negotiations
‍_{For Finance and Procurement Leaders}

From the vendor's perspective, the cost of providing these benefits to an existing customer is negligible, often near zero, so these can easily be given away to help secure a deal.

While easy to obtain for customers, they don’t individually represent high value savings.

Securing “easy wins” should be the base line to any negotiation, providing reliable, almost automatic savings to your negotiation. They should not be a trade-off to concede ground to a vendor elsewhere. Viewing these as meaningful and valuable risks complacency - and missing out the concessions that represent true value.

However, they shouldn't be dismissed.

Buyers should still actively pursue these concessions. Aside from their obvious benefits, they offer budget certainty, some nominal cost savings, and broader internal platform adoption. Plus - free additional credit / tickets / data can often help avoid significant rate card costs.

With SaaS inflation at a year-on-year average of 12.2%, anything that can keep the overall cost of a contract down - or extract more value from it - is crucial for software spend efficiency.

But to deliver the most impact, you need to target the opportunities that give you higher savings.

The most substantial concessions-per-contract can potentially save tens of thousands of dollars per deal, according to Vertice data.

This is an immediate uptick to procurement’s ROI if achieved, releasing substantial cash reserves that can be reinvested elsewhere across the tech stack or the wider business.

However, vendors are naturally resistant to granting them.

These high value concessions tend to incur substantial costs or revenue sacrifice for vendors, and are only usually allowed in exceptional circumstances - such as for big contract values, longstanding customers or early adopters.

This makes them extremely hard to secure. To do so would distract effort and focus from concessions that are more easily achievable, strategically more important, and that still provide good value.

Also, since these will be viewed as a major concession by the vendors, it will likely prevent other concessions not being considered - meaning the question always has to be asked:

"Is pushing hard for this win worth the effort, the benefit and the lost opportunities elsewhere?"