Mattermost saves time on every deal—and $280,000 total—with Vendr.

Every day, Mattermost technology helps organizations such as NASA, Bosch, and AIG communicate and manage workflows securely. So, when the company needed an organized workflow and support around buying its own SaaS, it began looking for procurement solutions.

At the time, stakeholders across the company each handled purchases on their own. That scattered approach left Daniel Sischy, Mattermost’s newly joined IT Manager, in the dark on whether they were checking all critical steps and getting the best deals. Sischy related:

“When you have 50 managers and a hundred-something platforms, it's really difficult to ensure that each person is properly negotiating on behalf of the company.”

{{speaker1}}

One spot, all contract details

Sischy quickly set out to centralize the procurement process. For help, the company's VP of Legal recommended a solution she had found valuable in a previous organization, the Vendr buying platform.

Vendr gave Mattermost access to its database of billions in SaaS deals to steer purchases, along with a platform to track all purchases, plus support on every purchase and renewal.

At the beginning, Vendr facilitated the integration of existing contracts and details into the platform. As a result, every new deal or renewal is recorded in Vendr, offering the company a consolidated system of record and a clear overview of its SaaS landscape.

“Vendr makes it easier to find usage, deal sizes or anything else across our entire SaaS stack. The ability to see everything we need within a platform rather than having to run around and dig for it has been a time saver.”

When requests come in for information, a look at Vendr averts what could be days of emailing or searching. If the company has multiple contracts with one supplier, for example, they find it all organized under that name.

Such data access also cuts the time to deliver weekly updates to the CFO on upcoming renewals and purchases.

Finding the right solution faster - with dynamic market insights

An experienced negotiator, Sischy prefers to handle vendor discussions directly. For guidance, he turns to Explore to compare industry pricing and terms against prospective deals.

Explore includes more than 22,000 SaaS products. For many of those products, Vendr provides Vestimates, dynamic market insights from proprietary data that give buyers a sense of how much they can expect to pay. Vestimates also offer estimated popularity and predicted time to close, plus critical compliance details to help meet companies’ standards.

During the negotiation process, Sischy also consults Vendr SaaS consultants as another set of eyes on a deal. The expert SaaS consultants help his team understand the nuances behind a vendor’s pricing and terms, both now and historically.

Sischy has found his Vendr support team a major part of the platform’s value. Out of the hundreds of vendors and salespeople he interacts with, his Vendr relationships stand out.

“My Vendr support team is always quick and willing to work with me on any issues or questions. That’s the experience I have had with everybody that I've spoken to at Vendr.”

As the platform evolves, Sischy finds Vendr even more critical to keeping him organized. Workflows keep deals moving from intake form to final contract and allow him to keep track of the status depending on type.

He customized workflows for high and low contract value deals and new purchases and renewals, with Vendr ensuring that the correct people are looped in at each stage.

$2.3M in managed spend

Currently, Mattermost manages $2.3 million in SaaS spend in the platform. Since partnering with Vendr, the company has saved approximately $281,000 on SaaS purchases for a 2.7 times return on its investment. Sischy sums up Vendr's value with laser clarity:

“Vendr helps us manage all our vendors and ensures we don’t go into deals blind, which saves us money.

Time and cost savings, and the addition of new capabilities, have led Mattermost to renew for a third year.

“When I ask for functionality, it often appears a couple of months later, so it feels like Vendr is going in the right direction,” Sischy said. “That’s a big part of why we’ve stayed with Vendr.”