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Written by Rob Bernshteyn | 

May 23rd, 2013

Stumbling towards transparency

In the past 30 days, Coupa did two things. The first one I’m not so proud of because it smacks of old school, outdated software business processes. The second one I’m very proud of, because I think it’s the future of the software business, or any business really. But let’s start with the first one.

In May, Coupa exhibited at SuiteWorld, NetSuite’s big user conference. Great. NetSuite is a partner of ours and together we’re working with some interesting brands to help them save money: Atlassian, Square, Blue Origin and Intermedia to name a few. No problem there—I’m proud of that.

The problem is, we sent out a press release, which I approved, that says we’re going to be at SuiteWorld. It says, in quotes: Coupa provides this type of stuff, and on the other side we have NetSuite saying, we have a common vision to help businesses save money.

Oh, I better hurry up and get a pass and go? Who cares? I don’t care, much less somebody else. It’s all wonderful, it’s all true, but if I’m a prospective customer, or an existing customer, I really don’t Companies need to embrace transparency to create authentic relationships with customers.care. Tell me about something Coupa and Netsuite have done together that’s delivered savings such that I should want to stop at that booth and see if it would work for me. That’s what’s missing for me.

What I’m struggling with is that a lot of us in software field follow norms set over decades and launch press releases announcing things that may or may not have anything to do with delivering real results. We’re all following so many processes—gotta get permission, gotta protect the brand, be careful what you say.

But what is it that people really care about if you dig underneath? They care about themselves. If we want to be heard, we should focus on real examples that are highly applicable to real people and get into that kind of dialog. This press release we sent out is not a conversation starter. This is nonsense from 1980. It’s a waste of time.

I think a lot of companies are held back because there’s no steak underneath the sizzle, and they’re scared of the transparency. They’re getting value out of the lack of transparency so they try to buffer it with PowerPoint and people and logos and press releases. They’re holding back from being exposed.

Forward thinking companies aren’t nervous about transparency. Or maybe they are nervous but they’re doing it anyway. They’re trying to make something happen, while other companies are trying to hold on to something.

Virgin America is a great example of a company that is not stuck to process. The whole airline industry is hyper-competitive and price driven, which makes it a great lens into what will happen in any industry as it gets more competitive. In the airline industry, if the price point for a particular flight is $499, you can go on any airline for that price. There’s no buffer there; there’s no fat. They’re all equal until someone does something different.

At Virgin America, they’re doing something different. They’re being more authentic, they’re being more real with everything. Take the whole food thing. Traditional airline, they have a schedule, they have a couple items, they go up and down, they block the aisle with the cart so you can’t go to the bathroom and they hand out this package with 11 peanuts in it whether you want it or not. Virgin America, you sit in your seat and look at a menu and order what you want from a touch screen and they bring it to each person when they want it, forget the cart.

The software industry still has a lot of fat, and it’s being held down by a handful of big players. These guys set up an industry where you show up with a big PowerPoint and you announce that you’re gonna do this and that, and the small companies are just channeling that, just going out and doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

It’s companies that are embracing this transparency that are going to have a chance to be successful. The challenge is that you have to expose more information about what’s really going on at accounts. If we could expose the fact that per employee operating expenses were $20,000 a year, and on our platform they went to $15,000 a year any company that’s similar ought to be interested in that.

Which brings me to the second thing we did this month, the one I’m really proud of: at the end of April, we published the Coupa Benchmark. The Benchmark is about transparency, both for procurement and for the software industry.

Part of the challenge we have in software with exposing the kind of information customers would really care about is getting it quantified to begin with. The Benchmark does that for key procurement and financial ops performance metrics across companies of different sizes and different industries. This is aggregated, sanitized data from real Coupa customers. Aggregated, so you don’t know what any one company is doing, and sanitized so you don’t know whose data it is and there’s nothing that could help you deduce that.

This is not one of these industry reports that are based on surveys and tabulated and everyone on Wall Street waits for it because it’s only published once a year. But don’t get stuck on the often. The problem with that kind of report that we’re used to is that’s a lagging indicator. It’s collecting someone’s data about something that already happened, then somebody called you, could I do a survey, then we assessed what they thought happened.  It’s like a game of telephone, and by the time it’s published the world could have already changed. It’s all lagging indicators.

Our benchmarks are leading indicators. You can see what’s going on, right now. We can tell you, this is how much people on average are spending per night on hotels. We can tell you how long it takes to get things approved at different size companies. We can tell you how quickly processes are happening at companies as it pertains to spending money. This is valuable information you can use to optimize your processes.

We’ve published 6 of what we think are the most important benchmarks for procurement and finance peope, but we actually track over 50 benchmarks and our customers that have a subscription to that part of the platform can look at that data any time they want because it’s all there in real time on our cloud platform.

We’ve been gratified to see that hundreds of people have already downloaded the benchmark, so we think we’re on the right track providing information that really matters.

Press releases, trade shows, they’re not going to go away any time soon, and I’m not saying, cancel these distribution channels. I’m saying, let's change the content that flows through them. The drive toward greater market efficiencies is affecting every part of our way of life. Companies that embrace transparency and promote information efficiency, actually exposing real, actionable information instead of hiding behind corporate approved, non-information press releases are likely to be in a better position to build lasting, successful relationships with their customers and become big businesses to boot.

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Written by Rob Bernshteyn | 

May 15th, 2013

To get maximum value from software, look for strong partnerships

In the software buying process, partnerships are often given scant consideration.  Too often, buyers don’t learn about the quality of vendor partnerships until after the deal is done. Or, they make the technology choice and then pick the consultant separately. 

That’s the wrong approach. Partnerships are like a marriage. You can’t just say, we’re gonna get the best deal on the software and we’re gonna get the consultant we happen to know, and marry them. That’s not how it works.

Partnerships should be very interesting to anybody who is deploying software because the truth is no one is a one-stop shop.

The most effective partnerships are usually based on having a lot in common.

Most software companies are good at technology. Then there are a whole bunch of consultants that bring the technology to their clients as a solution. There are ancillary products that need to snap onto the solution, and there are also systems integrators that implement the solution.  In each of these cases, you need to judge the strength of the partnership, not each individual element.

The challenge the buyer often has with a weak partnership is that it can turn into a finger point.

The consultant says, well we did an analysis, we found where the gaps are and for that we’re charging you money. Their value-add is to analyze your business, show you technology variety and tell you, you gotta build some stuff. They benefit from there being a lot of confusion because they charge by the hour.

The technology provider says, hey my technology can do whatever you want and it’s these guys who are configuring it, they have no idea what they’re doing and they’re milking you for dollars. And who

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Written by Tony Wessels | 

May 7th, 2013

3 dimensions of software usability: Relationships, relationships, relationships

Is your software hurting your relationships?

In the enterprise software market right now, everyone is talking about usability. But finding a solution that is truly easy to use is hard. If you look at the different people who use procurement software, or actually any software, the user interface, and the interaction between the employee and the software is what everyone typically talks about.

But the user interface is just a veneer. Real usability extends to the impact your software has on three key relationships: The relationship between administrators and IT, between administrators and users, and between your company and the companies and people it does business with. Software that is truly usable should complement, not complicate, these relationships.

Take the administrator/IT relationship. A good ease of use metric is, how much time do you need to spend with IT? Usually the way the software is built, it's easy for the front end. But from the administration standpoint, how easy is it to implement and configure? That's where everything starts falling apart.

 "It's not you. It's your software."

Look at backend functionality. Things like sliders, drag and drop, and the ability to easily create or change web forms are hallmarks of administrative ease of use. It shouldn’t require a degree in engineering in order to configure the product. Anyone should be able to do it.

Look at the implementation time that it takes to get the software up and running, relative to the size of the deployment. That’s a huge clue as to how complicated the software is.

IT, for their part, has other priorities, probably related to core ERP and they can’t afford to be hanging out at your desk.  So, the same ease and usability you have on the front end needs to be available from an administration standpoint. If you know your IT person really well, that’s probably a

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Written by Rob Bernshteyn | 

May 2nd, 2013

Beyond RFPs: 3 keys to finding the best software vendor

We all know how the software vendor selection process works. You do a needs analysis, call in some vendors, watch a bunch of PowerPoints, put out an RFP or an RFQ and compare and contrast. Or some version of that. It’s considered a valuable process, and a necessary one, and often the end result is you deploy the solution and then everyone celebrates.  The vendor and the consultants got paid, but it’s entirely possible no meaningful business outcome was attained.

I talked in my last blog post about the ideal customer-vendor relationship, which I believe should be a partnership focused not on technology deployment but on tangible business outcomes that move your company forward. To achieve that kind of relationship, you need to look beyond line items on an RFP or RFQ at the type of approach the vendor takes to the market.  Look for three must-have characteristics: A focus on the bigger picture, a minimal friction approach, and an orientation that favors people over process.

    Look for a vendor with a collaborative approach.Focused on the bigger picture

First and foremost, you want a vendor that is focused on making their customers successful. They are not going to be focused on time and materials, or on how much money they make up front. They are going to be focused on getting you to a mutually agreed upon result.

That means both parties need to think bigger. You need to think, is this a comprehensive solution or is it a stopgap for a certain business function? The vendor should be thinking that way too, drilling down into your business to find out whether solving this one problem is going to do it for you.

There are plenty of people that create great stopgaps for individual business functions. There aren’t too many vendors that are thinking

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Written by Ravi Thakur | 

April 30th, 2013

The Coupa Benchmark: Putting your procurement performance in perspective

If you are trying to figure out how to be successful with procurement and don’t know where to start, perhaps the best thing to do is take a look at your peers.

For example, think of someone in your field who is at the same point in their career that you are. That person is in your shoes, so exchanging ideas on career best practices can help each of you become more successful. That’s what The Coupa Benchmark report aims to do – let professionals learn from the collective performance of others.

Study the metrics in The Coupa Benchmark report and take what you learn back to your organization. Use the information to drive positive change. You might be blown away at the results you can achieve – faster PO approvals, shorter invoice payout times, and better pricing on products and services are just a few of the possibilities.

And the impact can go beyond your own department walls – you can potentially drive smarter spending across the entire company and add to the overall bottom line. Now that would make you a rock-star, wouldn’t it?

The data in the report was extrapolated from customer usage metrics on the Coupa cloud platform, which has tens of thousands of global users and 650,000 suppliers. The benchmark reports on spending across large (more than $1.5 billion), medium-sized ($250 million – $1.5 billion), and small (less than $250 million) company categories.

By the way, if you’re curious how Coupa is able to collect benchmark data in the first place, it’s

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Written by Rob Bernshteyn | 

April 17th, 2013

3 Keys to a Successful Enterprise Software Deployment

I like to say that at Coupa, we don’t care about customer satisfaction, and we don’t. As a software vendor, there about are a million things we could check off a list to satisfy you—or never satisfy you. We’re not interested in that. 

What we care about, and what we focus on with every deployment is customer success. There are three key areas we focus on: Metrics, adoption and speed. Any finance or procurement professional can use these guidelines for success with any kind of software deployment.

Metrics that matter

In a lot of software implementations, people focus on the wrong thing. They focus on automating some process, on making sure they get the right signoff and everything is technically sound, on having all the processes properly mapped.  Then they wind up having a lot of arguments with their vendors—“you didn’t build this, you didn’t do that in time.”  Eventually they go live and then it’s, “well what was the point of all that?” And it’s because they weren’t focused from the start on real metrics of outcome that matter for the project.

Instead of a vendor-to-customer kind of relationship like the one I’ve just described, the relationship should be a partnership focused on a business outcome. The business outcome could be a lot of

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Written by Rob Bernshteyn | 

April 4th, 2013

Bernshteyn: Get ready to be Inspired

Next Monday, we welcome our customers, partners and employees to San Francisco for Coupa Inspire, our first ever user conference.  I know I speak for everyone at Coupa when I say we are excited to have people from all three of these parts of the Coupa community together in one place.

We decided to call our conference Inspire because we’re hoping it will be a forum where we all come together to be inspired by one another. Inspire is not just about selling things to each other. It’s about getting aligned around how we can collectively work together to shape the future of this industry and this space with a focus on real, measurable customer success.

We all have an opportunity to make an impact helping companies optimize their spend by combining the technology that we have, and the expertise that our partners have with the collective knowledge and wisdom of our customers who work in this field every single day.

So far, I’ve been inspired by the turnout, by the number of forward-thinking customers that are coming, and the relatively large number that are presenting. I’ve been inspired by how open and willing they are to share their knowledge.

I’ve also been inspired by the support we’ve gotten from our partners in sponsoring and otherwise helping us put on this event. And, I’ve been inspired by the passion I’ve seen from our employees who have contributed their talent and energy to make this conference a success.

Coupa Inspire is an opportunity for conversation, for sharing best practices and the latest technology. We’re hoping to learn as much from our partners and customers as they do from us, to make Coupa better so we can continue to help you transform our industry. I look forward to seeing you there!

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Written by Tony Wessels | 

April 3rd, 2013

Bernshteyn Unplugged: An Open Conversation with Coupa’s CEO, Part 3 of 3

A while back, I sat down with Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn for an hour-long webinar, "Bernshteyn Unplugged". Rob and I chatted about Coupa, cloud computing, and the state of procurement today, and Rob fielded some tough questions from the audience. If you haven't gotten to know Rob yet, he's a great conversationalist and not shy about speaking his mind, so it's well worth a listen. 

We're bringing you the "best of” commentary in a three-part series here on Making Cents. In Part 1, Rob shared his unique perspective on customer success. In Part 2, we talked about Coupa’s key market differentiators. In this last post, Rob holds forth on the value the cloud is bringing to procurement.

Tony: On the cloud topic, here's a question: How is Coupa any different than all the other companies out there saying they are cloud today? Because speaking as the marketing guy, it's an awesome marketing platform to be able to say we're cloud. But, the other 60 companies we talked about, well, they're all cloud too. It's easy to slap a sticker on that. So how is Coupa any different?

Rob:  It's a great point and this is where it's very easy to differentiate Coupa. Everyone became a software-service-in-a-cloud company in the last three years by taking their existing products, and like you say, putting clouds on their website, and changing their pricing model and that's not really the what makes a company a cloud company. 

Let me give you a very, very simple example from a technology perspective and then talk about it more broadly. Let's take Gmail, which is web-based email. Now what you're using there is one multi-tenant, scalable cloud platform. They're using one code line.

Now, everyone that uses Gmail is getting the value of all the innovations that Google's putting into it. They've created a new feature in Gmail recently where you can see the most recent people that you've emailed about on a topic and you just click the button and add them to your contacts. That's innovation in an area that hasn't seen innovation since email came out. And they are able to do that because they're on one cloud platform.

But at the same time, obviously I don't see anybody's email and their inbox and they don't see mine. So what we're all doing is leveraging this one code line that Google Gmail has created for us and getting the opportunity to have all the innovation they continue to push into that platform while at the same time being able to manage our own inboxes and outboxes securely and scalably. 

That's the big difference with the cloud – platform scalability.  You can continue to get more and more innovation and capabilities from the platform over time and you know it's going to be there to support you, versus just buying based on feature/function today and realizing a few years down the road that either the company gets tucked into some other organization or just isn't supporting that platform.

But more broadly than that, a true cloud business is a software-as-a-service business. It's a business that's built on one platform and everyone in the company is working to drive customers to success on that platform. And that's exactly what we're doing here at Coupa. It's seen symptomatically in every area of the business from the pricing model to the incentives on the marketing and sales team, to the incentives on the customer success team to drive adoption, to the incentives on the implementation team to drive deployment success and real measurable value. It's seen throughout the organization and it's a completely different business because of the cloud.

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Written by Elena Anuzzi | 

March 20th, 2013

Coupa Inspire Keynote: New Procurement Ideas from Jason Busch, Part 2

Jason Busch of Spend Matters

We’re very excited to have Jason Busch of Spend Matters as one of our keynote speakers at Coupa Inspire, our first ever user conference which we’re holding April 8-10 in San Francisco. Jason has a lot on his mind and has been working away on his presentation about the top ten new ideas procurement leaders need to focus on to craft a procurement strategy that addresses finding new sources of savings and value, as well as risk avoidance. Last week in Making Cents we covered the first five, which included:

• Becoming more elegant in strategy, structure and execution.
• Finding new ways of fostering responsibility
• Instilling a performance and metrics-driven culture
• Developing “unorthodox” CFO and finance engagement techniques
• Tackling predictive buying and decision guidance support

Here’s what else is on Jason’s mind:

• Data enlightenment. It’s not enough to become data driven. How can procurement transition from information owner to knowledge and insight owner?
• Organizational stewardship of ideas. Who better than procurement to take on the role of gathering, packaging and sharing information about supplier innovation, or disruptive new product segments forming in an emerging market?
• Lassoing services spend. If you’ve heard Jason speak, you may have heard this before. He’ll talk about how the time may finally be right for procurement to finally step in and play a key role in managing spending in marketing, IT, professional services and other service spend categories.
• Disarming IT organizations and CIOs (in more ways than one). As the firewall between internal stakeholders, systems, processes and the outside world, IT organizations are poised to effectively manage interrelated company processes and systems extending outside the four walls. Who better than procurement to take this lead and to truly disarm IT organizations, become a new partner to CIOs?
• Moving beyond the cloud.  The concept of platform is important. There is no centralized platform that organizations can build on to enable new types of transactional connectivity. How platforms relate to connectivity webs, networks and cloud applications themselves is a critical question to ponder.

We hope you can join us at Inspire for Jason’s talk and many other presentations by procurement leaders at top corporations.  It’s sure to get you thinking about the evolution of procurement and how you can leverage new procurement technologies and best practices in your business.

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Written by Kelly Barner | 

March 13th, 2013

Procurement Strategy: Narrow Your Focus to Create Value Beyond Savings

At Coupa, we are always interested in understanding Kelly Barnerchallenges that CFOs and CPOs face as they think about procurement strategy.  We asked Kelly Barner of Buyers Meeting Point to share her thoughts about today's procurement challenges with our readers.  Here they are:

It is hard to be in procurement today. We still (and always will) face the primary challenge of saving money, even as our companies reduce their total spend. In addition, there is a myriad of other initiatives we are expected to implement. This extensive list includes risk management, revenue generation, sustainability, diversity, supplier rationalization, transformation, talent management, category management, financial accountability and better alignment with corporate priorities.

Effective procurement strategy requires a balance of focus and communication.Unquestionably, some of these elements are touched upon in individual projects, but in order to put broad action plans in place we must prioritize our efforts, putting our weight behind the ones that present the greatest opportunity for the right results. All of the initiatives are presented as being of the utmost importance, and in reality, each one is the highest priority to someone in the organization. It is unrealistic to think we can handle them all simultaneously, and by not picking a few to focus on, we are unlikely to accomplish any of them.

There are two reasons we need to narrow our focus. The first is that all of the initiatives present opportunities to create value beyond savings; we want to reduce risk, increase diversity, or innovate with suppliers, e.g. The second reason is that by purposefully selecting a direction for procurement strategy, we leverage our expertise and emerge as leaders in the organization.

The place procurement holds in the executive hierarchy has been discussed at length and varies by company and industry. For any individual head of procurement to get their ‘seat at the table’ they need to have a vision that can be executed to the advantage of the whole company. Looking at the corporate strategy and elevating certain initiatives over others shows an understanding of the competitive landscape. It also presents colleagues in other parts of the company with a new perspective on procurement and our potential contributions.

To the point about other colleagues: it is impossible to prioritize one initiative without putting another on the back burner. The communication that takes place before and after plans are put in place should allow for collaboration with other leaders in the organization, but the final decision must lie with the head of procurement as part of the executive leadership team. Navigating stormy seas is not new to us. The skills we have acquired in sourcing projects will be well applied in establishing higher-level strategic plans.

It is hard to be in procurement today. But the level of challenge gives us an opportunity to flex our muscles and show what we are made of. If procurement strategy was easy, not only could anyone do it, it also wouldn’t present much of a career opportunity. Visibly leading execution of a focused procurement strategy allows us to make a greater contribution to the company and to put our expertise into practice. 

What is your biggest procurement challenge? We'd love to hear from you.

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