SaaS Spend Management - with David Campbell, Founder and CEO Tropic.ai

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, 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 It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by David Campbell, the founder and CEO of Tropic. We'll be covering three main topic areas with Dave today. First, his definition of Envision for spend management, including SaaS spend management. Second, the top ideas for implementing a spend management program in 2023 for a CFO's perspective. And third, the top idea for controlling SaaS spend in fast growing B2B tech companies. David, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**David Campbell** (1:17)
Awesome. Thanks so much for the intro, Ray. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today. So my path was a little circuitous into leading a software business. I actually started out trying to make it as a novelist and a California native after graduating from Berkeley, moved up to a cabin in the woods in Northern California, and wrote a 400-page book after living with no phone or internet for about a year. The book was a dud, but that was definitely when I knew that entrepreneurship was for me.
Today, fast forward into my time at Tropic, I do get to scratch the creative edge on a daily basis while scaling the business. I came to the East Coast, advisors in my life said, if you want to lead a business, you should pursue either a sales or a product track, and you should get into tech. It's the only industry that matters, which in some ways I agree with, in some ways not. Joined a MarTech company called BounceX as their first sales hire, scaled with that organization, was promoted up to VP, grew the business from around to 80 million dollars in ARR, at which point I left and got exposure to a lot of different ways of buying software. The one common denominator being, it was very difficult and poorly executed, in my opinion, at that point in time. After that, I went to Microsoft as a global business manager, I had Purview into a 500 million dollar territory, and a big team managing that territory, banks and capital markets. What I realized from my experience at the enterprise level is that the biggest companies on the planet struggle with buying and managing software as well. I started thinking to myself, here's a commodity that has redefined everything in business, by which I mean Cloud software, that every company is starting to adopt and embrace, and yet the systems for buying and managing it seem to be totally broken. It seemed like the market was big enough and the problem interesting enough, and I quit Microsoft after tour of duty there to start Tropic. Today at Tropic, we are building purchasing paradise, and our vision is for a frictionless and streamlined purchasing and management experience for all your technology, which we believe, again, to be the only commodity that matters on a long enough time horizon. That's my journey into Tropic.

**Ray Rike** (3:24)
Well, Dave, it's the first time I've heard procurement and paradise in the same phrase. And as a long time SaaS sales organization leader, I really haven't seen those two combined, but we're going to double click on that in a few minutes. But let's start with a foundational question. How do you define SaaS spend management? What is it really?

**David Campbell** (3:46)
Well, I think that first, I would say that SaaS spend management is spend management on a long enough time horizon. Our bet at Tropic is that every business on the planet becomes a software business eventually. And what I mean by that is you may not necessarily be selling a software product, but look at COVID, we're now all in distributed teams. Those teams rely on software to operate. Many products are digitizing and becoming virtual and digital products. And not to get too trippy with it, but it's not a far cry to imagine a world in which we are spending a fair amount of time in virtual reality, buying and transacting virtual products. So, you know, I believe on a long enough time horizon, every business is a software business. Therefore, SaaS spend management is really just what spend management is today. So how do I think about that? I think when you hear spend management, you know, ordinarily, your head goes straight to a software platform, and I don't believe that that's what it is. I believe that it's actually a paradigm. A software platform can do certain things for you, it can give you visibility and it can give you workflows, but managing anything requires somebody to take agency in the process and make things happen. And what I think it means today, since our podcast episode is airing in 2023, is actually something very existential. I think that spend management is the new sales, the things that businesses like mine and all the B2B, you know, SaaS startups that are out there, the things that we used to get graded on by the investor ecosystem, by the public market, by, you know, fundraising events, by whatever our exit is, have changed fundamentally. And the number one most important thing used to be sales. And I don't believe that that's the case anymore. I think that the number one most important thing now is efficiency. And one key driver of efficiency is spend management. So to me, this is the new sales. This is the mission critical lever that you pull if you want to exit your business.