The Future of SaaS Spend Management - with Ryan Neu, Founder and CEO Vendr

**Ray Reich** (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 that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Ryan Neu, the co-founder and CEO of Vendr. We'll be covering three main topic areas with Ryan today. First, his definition of and vision for SaaS spend management, the top ideas for implementing a SaaS spend management program in 2023, and the top ideas and recommendations for SaaS companies and SaaS professionals who are selling into companies with a SaaS spend management program in place. Ryan, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Ryan Neu** (1:16)
Yes, Ray, absolutely. I'm happy to be here. My background in a nutshell, born in Michigan, raised in Ohio, moved to Boston after college, and I've been in Boston ever since. Ohio native slash Bostonian is what I've become.
Out of school, I spent my early career as a public accountant, as I worked for KPMG and quickly realized I was not a good or passionate public accountant, so I ended up leaving and venturing into software sales. I've never looked back ever since. I spent about five and a half, six years at HubSpot here in Boston, where I got to see pretty much the birth of inbound marketing and started at HubSpot when there about 200 people saw it through IPO and ended up running some sales organizations for HubSpot.
What I learned selling was actually the whole idea for Vendr came about, which is why the heck is it so hard to sell these amazing products? Think a lot about what we'll talk about today is really the inefficiencies of the distribution which panel of SaaS.
As a seller myself, I always felt the challenges of selling a great product. It would take a really long time from a sales cycle perspective, and I had low close rates. Even the best sales orgs in the world are still spending the majority of their time with non-buyers of software. I've really been passionate about SaaS and software sales more specifically ever since. In 2018, I founded Vendr to create a new way to buy and sell software. That has led me on this journey and here on the podcast today.

**Ray Reich** (2:55)
All right. Well, I always love to try to find points of connection, right? Something I was trained early in my career when I went from engineer to sales. We're both from Ohio. You worked at HubSpot with a recent guest of mine on the Metrics of Measure Up podcast, Mark Roberge, right?

**Ryan Neu** (3:11)
Mark Roberge hired me. It was funny. I'll tell a quick, funny Mark Roberge story. In my final round interview, I was in a conference room. I remember like it was yesterday. I was in the conference room with Mark, and I asked the classic closing interview question. When you find around the screen, I said, Mark, is there any reason why you wouldn't hire me? He said, there's only one, and that reason is, I think you will quit HubSpot and start your own company. I laugh thinking about that because I don't know if Mark remembers ever saying that.
I ended up spending six years at HubSpot, so it was longer than expected for probably in Mark's eyes, but he was exactly correct. I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and he sensed that in our 15-minute final round screen back in 2011

**Ray Reich** (4:01)
Well, that was foretold what he did next, which now he forms Stage 2 Capital, and he's funding entrepreneurs like you. But let's take a step back and start with something I think is important, and that is laying the foundation. My first question is, Ryan, how do you define this evolving category of SaaS spend management? Since, quite frankly, you help create the category. Yeah.

**Ryan Neu** (4:25)
I mean, I would define SaaS spend management as a back office tool to track visibility in terms of where are you spending money today, where have you spent it in the past, and then insights to help potentially drive savings for tomorrow. So SaaS spend management, I think it's an ever evolving category. I actually think it's more of a reactive category in the sense that it's tracking what has already happened versus a predictive category of guessing or predicting what happens next. And one of the things that when I think about those words of SaaS spend management, and whether vendors bucket it is that or not, I personally don't relate to it. I personally don't identify our company with SaaS spend management, because I actually think that that's covering one side of the coin, not two, which is the buyer of software. I think there's another side of the coin, which is the seller of software. And I think an effective approach to SaaS spend management is really one that connects buyers and sellers together, because at the end of the day, we're talking about transactions and partnerships being formed, not just tracking what's already happened in the past.