SaaS Spend Management Trends - with Eric Christopher, Founder and CEO Zylo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We are joined today by Eric Christopher, the founder and CEO of Zylo. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Eric. First, his definition of, and his vision for, SaaS spend management. Second, the top ideas of when and how to implement a SaaS spend management program in your company. And third, some of the top ideas for controlling a SaaS spend in fast growing early stage companies. Eric, with that, could you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast?

**Eric Christopher** (1:16)
Yeah, certainly. Hi Ray, thanks for having me. I appreciate you inviting me to participate in this. We've been building our own large proprietary set of SaaS metrics. So I feel like this is just a perfect opportunity for us to share what we're learning and bring that into your collective mission of benchmarking broader SaaS benchmarking data. Right now, SaaS spend is a very, very important area for CFOs, as you might imagine. So excited to chat about it today.

**Ray Rike** (1:45)
Well, I'm going to start at the beginning, at least what I'm going to call the beginning right now. As I was doing the research for the podcast, I thought it was really interesting. You were an executive revenue leader at two social media platform companies. Then you founded Zylo in 2016 What was the catalyst of founding Zylo?

**Eric Christopher** (2:05)
Yeah, great question. Well, the product-led growth movement of SaaS and my experience, particularly most recently in the social media management space, really it heightened and gave me some awareness of some challenges in SaaS. The company like Sprout Social and others, they're built on free trial models. You start going into organizations through business units, and you start to realize as a buyer of SaaS, how do you manage that complexity when you're having new solutions come into your business every single day in various departments and not have centralized visibility and controls, but also knowing that your employees need the best tools to do their jobs. I think it's just a challenging complex environment, and one advisor of mine said, when you have a business idea that has complexity about it, it's worth pursuing, and that's high-level how Zylo came about. Also, I grew up in the prior to those social media management days. I was also in MarTech in the early post-SalesForce launching prior to 2010 I saw even then with enterprise selling changing and with the SaaS model, so it's the PLG plus enterprise selling. There's a lot of inefficiencies between buyers and users and customers of SaaS.

**Ray Rike** (3:28)
Well, we're going to double click on that a little bit later because I found one of the beautiful things about SaaS on the revenue leader side was you could enter departmentally, you could get some of that discretionary budget, and then you could just grow virally, right?

**Eric Christopher** (3:42)
It's like the old saying, what is the old phrase? I guess I'm going to butcher it here, but all good deeds don't go unpunished or something like that. Good deed goes unpunished. There you go. Yes, thank you.

**Ray Rike** (3:54)
Before we double click on that, though, I'm going to pull us back and ask you, Eric, how do you define this category of SaaS spend management?

**Eric Christopher** (4:04)
That's a great question. I was thinking about spend management in general and how SaaS has really disrupted what that term is for even spend management because of the complexity and some of the things we just talked about with SaaS. I think I'll give you a few points. Number one, since it's so easy to adopt and nearly any employee can be a buyer, controlling spend is much more difficult and sometimes impossible for a lot of companies. Then also think about what other category exists in the world with thousands of vendors that are dynamic, price differently, have comparative services, but most are not really a commodity.
They're all very different and there's a lot of challenges with, how do you get all of those to work together? If you add one, should you remove one? Then the last piece is that it's not about price necessarily as to what you're trying to control. You're really trying to get the most value out of those applications. Arguably, using a strategic vendor that you may actually invest a lot of money with, you could be getting extreme value. Measuring value is complex as well. I like to think about our definition of spend management for SaaS, is aligned to our mission, which is really to help companies manage and measure, and then maximize the value you're getting out of every single SaaS application.