Building Procurement at Tech Companies

Michiel de Bruijn: Who’s Michiel? My name is Michiel. I am originally from the Netherlands. I’m currently based in Dubai. I’m currently in the role of procurement lead for Bloomreach, which is a tech company mainly based in the US, but also based in Europe. I’m 34 years old. Yeah, anything else you want to add or?

Rohit Agarwal: What’s behind this kind of truly global cosmosis of Netherlands, Dubai, US based company? How did that come about?

Michiel de Bruijn: Mainly sheer coincidence to be honest. Like I kind of got lured and I’m kind of the mentality of when the train passes by you either jump on it or let it pass by and I jumped on it a couple times. So I’ve been in Dubai for eight years now because of that. And I guess it’s practically home for as much as it can feel like home. So yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: All right, awesome. Can we talk a little bit about your early years? Where did you do your undergraduation? And then how did that shape you and get you into the profession that you are in right now?

Michiel de Bruijn: Sure. So I initially, actually I started doing a law degree, which after one year of law, I decided that wasn’t for me. Maybe I would have liked the actual profession, but just didn’t like the theoretical side of it. I then strangely ended up in facilities management and I did a bachelor’s in facilities management. Facilities management sort of has a natural connection to procurement actually. So if you study facilities management in a lot of internships, you have the option to either really become a facilities manager in a basement somewhere and work on events management or things like that. Or the other side of things, which is the more contractual side and the services side. I ended up on the services side. So my first internship was actually in London with Jones Lang LaSalle, where I did the procurement internship, mainly working for accounts like Intel. And there I had a pretty tough boss that was really into procurement. So it felt more like a job, I guess, than an internship, but it worked really well for me. And I think because of that, I had a great learning opportunity. I think after that moment, I never really let procurement go. And I very quickly went into it as a profession. So I knew fairly soon. Post that, I did my master’s in Sweden. So I did a master’s in global management. And when I finished that degree, I eventually moved to London and moved into procurement consulting. So then I guess the decision was officially made that this was going to happen and I was going to stick with it. At the beginning also mainly focused on kind of like facilities management because of a natural connection of understanding how facilities management works plus procurement, so that combination. But then eventually growing out to kind of cross multiple categories, manufacturing, FMCG. Yeah, so I really loved that. Post that situation, I got headhunted to come to the UAE. So it’s basically… change or look at the supplier base for Emirates NBD, which is one of the largest local banks, set up and look at their processes for procurement, how it works, what works well, what doesn’t work well. So kind of like a very standard type of consulting engagement, but that in-house, which I really liked the idea of, did that. Then, strangely kind of got stuck into the strategy side of things. So day by day, slightly moved further away from procurement, got more stuck in regular strategy, and then eventually grew my way up to becoming the head of strategy for the back office operations for three shared banks, which was great and I really enjoyed very much focused on project management, got the opportunity to deal with a lot of like early AI implementations, early machine learning, a lot of automation in that sense, which was great. But then after a while, I realized that I really wasn’t doing any procurement anymore and that itch got more and more intense. And then I got approached for a role that was more of a greenfield role. So a startup at that time about a thousand people that didn’t have anyone doing procurement so that really got me interested. Especially because procurement traditionally deals with a lot of legacy systems, a lot of legacy policies and normally when you join a company in procurement everything’s already laid out you just have to follow it. Making changes then is quite difficult. So I decided like, okay, if I set it up myself, at least if something’s wrong, it’s my own fault, you know, and I’ve got no one else to blame. So that really motivated me to go like, okay, let’s go do this. Which is very nice because I moved from managing an extended team of probably 20, 25 people to moving back to going solo, which I’ll be very honest at the beginning, I was like, okay, is this the right career move? But yeah, I think being able to set up those processes and really start from scratch and build everything myself was super motivating. And to this day, still enjoy. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: When did you really connect with this profession of procurement? You mentioned in your internship, you kind of knew - what was it that you liked so much about it and you felt like, huh, I can do this and I can excel at this.

Michiel de Bruijn: Sounds kind of silly and maybe a bit petty, but I think at the beginning it was also like, I think during my internship I was fairly good at it. So just having something like maybe coming from the law degree where it didn’t really feel like it was my thing, then doing facilities management and enjoying it, but not really exactly knowing if I wanted that as a career. So then running into something that was just like, okay, I’m actually, I think I’m quite good at this. I’m getting the results and it was very practical, human-based. So, like for example, when during an internship I would used to go into a negotiation, then my boss at the time would be like, okay, make sure you eat before you go into the conversation, do this and that. Like it was very much like prepping you for those type of style, which really connected for me. And just, it always sounds super tacky, but… The great thing about the profession is that everything I do is with people, for people, and yeah, so it’s very people-oriented. And if you like that, it’s great. If you don’t like that, it can be quite a struggle, I kind of mentioned. But for me, during the internship, that really connected, and then I decided, like, okay, this is definitely going to be my future, and then I already sort of knew. Yeah.

Inside Bloomreach — procurement at a remote-first SaaS company#

Rohit Agarwal: make sense. Can you take a minute to introduce Bloomreach and what all does your role as a leader of procurement involve at this company?

Michiel de Bruijn: Sure. So Bloomreach is a digital platform focused around personalizing e-commerce experiences. So we basically have a data engine that unifies real-time customer and product data so that businesses understand what their customers really want at what point in time. So basically connecting customer need with having the data to understand what they need and when and marrying those two into one product. And then these days, we’ve also have an AI component introduced on top of that which basically suggests like, okay, let’s say Rohit is looking for a specific product, you can ask the exact right questions in your language and in your terms and phrasing that will then direct you to the right product. So it’s all about making sure that you get directed and have the easiest, smoothest shopping experience. And obviously for the e-commerce platform, it’s changing that into additional sales by making sure you don’t miss a product that you’d actually want or get directed to the wrong thing. Think of the past also and many a case, I think specifically, like even until 10 years ago, it was very normal for every website to look the same for every person. Like he would send out the same advertising email to everyone, even though Rohit might love black sneakers, but Michiel might hate black sneakers, but we’re going to do the same email, which is kind of strange if you think about it. So that’s kind of what Bloomreach is focused on changing. And we’ve been doing that quite successfully. So right now I think Bloomreach has over 1,400 global brands. And those are customers like, you know, like the Bosch and Puma, some Marks & Spencer, those type of retailers. Yeah. My role as procurement lead in there is basically, well, I’d say being a procurement lead is frankly kind of the same across every company. Obviously it does change and your scope changes by what type of business you run. So for example, we’re mainly, a digital platform. So we’re like a very, from a procurement standpoint, very clear SaaS product, which means that our spend base and the way we spend money is very similar to what our SaaS products. So that means we have a lot of cloud spent. We have a lot of digital tools that are being used, like software that helps coders and our software engineers building our product. But also what’s pretty unique to us is we’re a remote-first company, which means that the majority of our employees work from home. We do have offices, but that means that the infrastructure behind that is also different. That means we have certain pieces of software in place to make sure people are affected from home. But it also means that in a more traditional business, it could be that up to 20% of my cost could be in real estate. Whereas for us, that’s absolutely not the case. And it’s more towards our own SaaS stack, our own data platforms. But there’s also a big overlap in products that are still the same for everyone across the board. That’s things like insurance companies. We have often companies have lease cars. So I think that’s one of the reasons why I really enjoy jumping into this role is that I think in the past procurement was quite divided into categories and it was very normal that you had a very specific subcategory looked at and it does feel like more and more it’s becoming a bit wider and there are more and more generalists that are expected to deal with SaaS but are also expected to look at a cleaning contract in Amsterdam the next day. So that’s a part of the job that I personally really enjoy.

Rohit Agarwal: When you moved from Emirates to Bloomreach, were there any specific shifts that you had to do based on just they being very different companies and if I might say also different cultures perhaps, right?

Michiel de Bruijn: Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think maybe I had a few preconceived notions about what it would be like in a startup. So I think maybe I romanticized it a little bit. Like in my head, it was like, we’re going to get everything done, you know, snap of a button. That’s probably a bit too romanticized, but I will say the speed at which we can take decisions in a startup, that’s just definitely true. Like if you have the right business case and you present this, you might only need one or two people to approve it and then you can get going. So that whole, you know, implement fast, fail fast type of situation, that’s true. And that really does change things. Like I look at, for example, like, A bank tender, so if I’m purely looking at procurement, if a bank is looking at a new piece of software, that process can take on average more than a year before they make a decision on what vendor to go with. Whereas in a startup situation, if we know the right area, we know the right stakeholders internally, you can probably make something happen within a month and a half, two months. So that decision period is way shorter and it moves way faster. So I think that’s definitely a big difference. And then also culturally, I think when I was in university, I always used to kind of like, I don’t want to say mock, but when I had those intercultural classes, always we’d be like, yeah, sure. Okay. But yeah, that stuff is real. So definitely now in Emirates NBD, it was more of like the nationalities working in Dubai are just very different compared to the now mainly American and European colleagues that we have today. So that dynamic is definitely different. People have different expectations. People look at time off differently. People look at deliverables differently. That definitely comes into play into my field as well and which stakeholder I internally deal with. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: How large is your team? And given you guys are anyways remote-first, is your team also distributed globally? And is that kind of, like, is there a deliberate decision in terms of having people across different geographies? Given, I would imagine, you are also procuring, whether it’s software services or other things globally as well.

Michiel de Bruijn: Yeah, no, completely fair. So right now our structure we currently have is that. Basically, we follow the methodology of like when I joined the company, first you build infrastructure, you get basic policies in place, then you’re trying to understand the spend, and then you start looking at negotiations. So at the beginning, I was really cherry-picking negotiations because you want to bring in money, show the value of procurement, et cetera. And then you move on to make sure that all the other contracts are competitive. Over time, you’re starting to look at smaller and smaller contracts. And then I think after eight months of time, we did an internal transfer where the first person also become part of the procurement team. So we have a two-man team. And then I think actually eight months after that, we added the third member, kind of showing that like, hey, if we have more hands, we can do more work from a compliance perspective, cost perspective. So this is what it looked like. So today we’re a team of three. We’re indeed globally divided. So the main core hubs of Bloomreach are US-based, Amsterdam we have a hub, and we have a hub in Slovakia. We also do have an office in India. But we don’t have the direct procurement representation there. I guess I’m very close to the Indian times than actually. But no, we did specifically make the decision to say like, okay, we have one American based in the US to represent that time zone. And also, it’s important that there is a cultural difference. And if you do want to speak to someone that speaks, let’s say the same lingo or has the complete same frame of mind when you’re buying something, then there is someone that understands that. Then I’m obviously Dutch, so I sort of indirectly represent the Amsterdam office, I guess. And then now we have a colleague who’s based in the Czech Republic, which is the same time zone as Slovakia, who also speaks Slovakian. So that everyone can theoretically find someone in procurement that can speak in their native language inside their time zone to deal with. But yeah, that was definitely a conscious decision. Yeah.

The spend, the day-to-day, and what procurement actually does#

Rohit Agarwal: Make sense. How much of a spend, if you’re open to sharing that, how much of a spend are you managing on an annual basis today?

Michiel de Bruijn: I can’t really give exact figures because we’re not a public company but ballpark like the moment you’re a SaaS company of a thousand people upwards then in terms of recurring SaaS spend most companies will be anywhere from four to seven and a half million in annual SaaS spend that’s probably the main category. Their marketing budgets would obviously differ per year, but I’d expect the marketing category for most startups our size to probably be their largest expense. And then you’ll have a lot of indirect spend, which would be offices and literally from the cleaning companies to the lease guards to insurances to all of that type of stuff that would probably fall in the last bucket. That might be slightly higher if you’re not fully remote and you do, let’s say if we do have offices, but they’re very small offices in comparison to the size of our company. If those were significant offices and everyone was working from premises, definitely that picture would probably look slightly different. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: So is it safe to say we are looking at anywhere around 15 to 25 million kind of overall that a company of thousand plus people might be looking into?

Michiel de Bruijn: No, I’d say it’s definitely more than that. I would say it would definitely be more that range.

Rohit Agarwal: 25 to 40. Perfect. How does your day to day look like? Like any average day, what all is Michiel doing from morning till evening?

Michiel de Bruijn: It’s really, I can genuinely say that there’s not day that’s the same. It really depends on what active deals are happening, what renewals we have in place. But so normally to connect with the team, because obviously we are remote and for example, my US colleague, we don’t have that many hours of overlap. We do try to meet up at least once a week. So once a week we do a team meeting where we run through, hey, these are the active deals this week that are in the pipeline. We then track them and what state they are. So are they in negotiation? Are they in defining the scope? Who’s the stakeholder? Are you struggling with something? So that’s quite a recurring theme. There’s always, every day, there’s a part of PO management, which means that, hey, we have X amount of open POs. We’re missing this. There’s these invoices coming in that we’re still, obviously, we’re still at the early stages of PO management, because we literally moved to POs across the last year. So hopefully over time that is sort of established itself as well. But that’s actually one. Then there’s a lot of items with internal stakeholders. So that could be either escalations, problem with vendors, for trying to do terminations, like legal challenges, things like that. So probably, I wouldn’t say daily, but definitely quite a lot of challenges where we get at least asked to give input on the contract. Aside from that, yeah, there’s the usual, there’s like the optimizing the flows for every department, meaning that we customize the approvals we need or the approvals we don’t need based on the product, the specific category, what’s required, etc. So that might mean that legal will come and have a question about like, okay, why are we taking the decision? Why did this come to legal, for example? And then we talk about that or why did this not come to legal? And we do the same thing with privacy teams, we do the same thing with accounting, etc. So definitely a big part of our our weak is optimization. Then we have the core of our business, which is meeting with suppliers. That could be just quarterly meetings to talk about, hey, what do you feel about the relationship? This is the way we’re moving towards. This is what we’re expecting in terms of our growth. This is what we’re expecting in terms of contract size. And the other side things that could also mean that we have conversation about, hey, we’re not using all of our licenses. At any given time, we normally have about 18 supplier engagements that are active, meaning that’s either a renewal or an active negotiation or a full on RFP. So that might be, we’re trying to… get a new podcast platform. So we have to compare three podcast platforms and we need to do the full cycle, which is a bit more intensive in terms of like the amount of procurement effort it takes. And lastly, like obviously long -term, we’re not a public company yet. So making sure that we meet all the standards we need to meet to eventually be SOX compliant is a big one. That’s not something you actively work on every day, but it’s an overall topic that definitely works its way into every week for sure. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: how many new, net new vendors you might be working on at any given point in time versus existing vendors.

Michiel de Bruijn: That’s a good question. So I know market-wise, I think the data is like on average, I think it’s like 65, 35 for companies, like 65% that they’re doing is renewals versus only 35% is new. That does mean that most cases, I think that’s fairly representative for us as well. The only cases in which that percentage will be higher is if we’re moving away from a supplier because either we’re not getting the right service or the expectations weren’t met or it might be the cost has been inflated and now we have to go look for an alternative. That’s obviously a topic we see more and more often. We get inflation requests ranging anywhere from 3% up to 45%. So then like yeah, if it is indeed like a 40-45 % increase in terms of cost, you do have to make the decision on, okay, even if the product was fit for purpose, is it still fit for purpose at that price point? So that’s definitely a change we’ve seen. But yeah, the majority are definitely renewals that we do. It does depend, like you have one, two, three year engagements, sometimes you have five year contracts. The majority of renewals are probably in that one year bucket. So that’s probably the majority of the work comes from that. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: Are you okay doing 3 to 5 year contracts?

Michiel de Bruijn: It depends. We do have an internal standard of what our expectation is if we move a two-year contract from a three-year contract. Now it does change from year to year. So for example, let’s say 2022, if you move from a one-year contract to a two-year contract, generally we’d expect a 7 % discount. And if it’s more than that, great, we’d most likely take it. If it’s less than that, then it might not be worth it. The cost of cash then versus what we would get on that in terms of interest, first, versus the risk of paying upfront just isn’t generally worth it. Slightly different for every company, but we do try and look at it very mathematically. So it’s not like Michiel feels that it’s a good deal, but it’s like, hey, if you do this on average, probably you’re 1 % better off. Is that worth the commitment to you? And then obviously there’s also the decision saying that like, if it’s a product that’s really ingrained into our own product, for example, let’s say it’s a sub-processor, generally we’re less hesitant to do a longer term contract because the odds that a major shift is going to happen, just less likely. Or if it’s a supplier where we have a generally good relationship and we’ve seen that they’ve been fair on pricing, they’ve treated the internal business stakeholders well. Contractually, we’ve not had any issues. Then if we get to a point of renewal and someone poaches at that time and says, hey, actually, if you move to a three-year contract, this is something you could get, then that’s definitely an option we’d entertain way more than if it’s, let’s say, a first-time engagement with a supplier. And we’ve never worked with them before. And they tell us, hey, we also have a three-year option. We’d probably be way more hesitant because we haven’t experienced the product before or service.

Rohit Agarwal: make sense. What part of your role do you like the most?

Michiel de Bruijn: It’s kind of what I touched upon at the beginning, also when I went into the profession. The main thing is, because I generally do like interacting with people, like I get a scope from someone who has an image with their scope, helping them define what they might actually need versus what they feel they need. I really enjoyed that part. So like there’s definitely like strategic inputs you can give versus just taking it and running with it. Also sharing other things that are possible for them. So for example, you might feel like you need XYZ platform, XYZ service. In reality, you might be looking for something different that can also fill your need. So being able to provide those alternatives and kind of keep the mirror up and giving a fresh pair of eyes. And often it also really requires for me to deep dive into the specific products. So if I’m working with engineering and I’m buying an engineering product, I really need to know and understand what they’re doing, why they’re buying it, how what they’re buying impacts the actual Bloomreach product. Because if I don’t know that, then I can’t have a proper conversation and I can’t advise them the way I want to advise them. So it really forces me to genuinely learn, look up and understand what that product is doing, what that market is doing, why does that market exist. Let’s say they say it makes software engineering more efficient. Why is that the case? What’s happening in software engineering that it’s inefficient without? Like it makes things really interesting. You kind of become like, yeah, you have to know a little bit, a lot about a lot of topics to be able to support that. And I really enjoy that. And yeah, the fact that even from a supplier side, I’m dealing with people that all have their own perspectives and have their own opinions and their own culture. So in the morning, I can have a call with someone in India about a specific product or issue they’re facing. In the afternoon, I might be speaking to someone in Slovakia about what they’re facing. And in the evening, I might be speaking with someone in the US about what they’re facing. And that whole combination, it’s very motivating to me, and I find that super engaging. And also I love negotiating. Some people hate talking about finances. It’s not like I don’t feel any shame or any like it’s a lot of people feel like it’s going to be a negative conversation when you talk about money. The moment like dollars get mentioned, you can see people’s faces change. It’s like, we just had a completely normal conversation and now it’s, it changed into like, there’s like a, there’s something in the air and yeah, yeah, I enjoy it.

Rohit Agarwal: Makes sense. I think, of course, the breadth of exposure that you get, I’m sure that’s quite appealing. And also on the negotiating part, I think most people just end up feeling kind of the negativity, as you said, around it, and just aren’t comfortable with the confrontation. They just feel like it’s a confrontation rather than a win -win situation that is possible.

Michiel de Bruijn: Yeah, look, win-win isn’t always possible, right? There’s a lot of different schools of thought around like if win-win is even a thing that should happen type of deal. Other people say win -win is the only way to win. So, I don’t really have a very strict opinion there, but I’ll say that like last year we actively started with procurement working with our sales team to understand, hey, what experiences are you having with procurement teams when you’re selling the product? And what are they telling you? And what’s working on you? What’s not working? Like what elements of the procurement process do you experience as negative? Are we doing the same things? And vice versa, trying to explain to them, this is why procurement teams do this. This is why they do this. This is where we come from, this is why we make those decisions. So sometimes it might seem to you like we’re just pulling a trick, actually it’s because of this compliance thing or a process thing. And also kind of giving them in some way ammunition to deal with that and kind of meet procurement in their own language and their own way of working. But that was super interesting because like when you hear a sales team talk about procurement, like it’s really like genuinely holding a mirror up to myself. I mean, like, I do that actually. I’m fairly certain that’s how I’m potentially being experienced. Yeah. So it’s funny how that works.

Aligning procurement with business strategy#

Rohit Agarwal: Tell us what can procurement teams do to align strategy with the overall business goals of their organizations?

Michiel de Bruijn: So it really does depend on what type of company you work in, how long the procurement team has existed inside that team. And like in some companies, the complexity will be a lot different than for other companies. But I’d say nine out of 10 times the procurement targets will sort of be directly aligned with the company’s objectives. Meaning that if you’re in a stage of growth, generally you’re more focused on making sure that the business has the right products directly and as fast as possible. Generally, in a very big stage of growth, cost will be definitely a factor, but less of a factor than getting it there at the right place at the right time so we can go ahead, you know, ride the tide whereas for I guess companies that have been established for a longer period of time, for example, you’re on fast moving consumer goods, you’re on manufacturing, and your margins are way smaller than, for example, in tech, then if you’re doing procurements for a cleaning company and your margins are very small, like we’re talking about percentage points in terms of margin, now you have to drive cost as an extreme priority, otherwise you can’t be competitive in that marketplace. So they don’t even have the luxury to say, okay, we’re willing to pay premium but then we get it today so we can give our customers more that’s not an option. So it really does depend on the overall company their size and their objective but I would say… across the board, the common topics in procurement are always the same. That’s making sure there’s, you’re getting the right product at the right price and making sure you’re covered by the right terms and conditions. You’re not accepting any risk that is not tolerable for the organization. And you make sure that the entire process is well-oiled and transparent and ethical. I’d say like those are kind of like common across every organization, the things on top kind of depends on the direction of the organization. But again, the differences in procurement aren’t that massive. Like, some way I would say, but if I would be working for a different tech company, my objectives would be 99% the same. Like it’s just because procurement that at nature and the type of work we do and the type of compliance that’s required is just extremely similar. It does make it easier in some way. It means that I can have a conversation with someone who works in manufacturing procurement and we can still share best practices. There’s not a lot of fields that can sort of do that because the nature of the business will be so different, the type of work that it will be so different. But in procurement, it’s like the key core components of the business are close to identical.

Rohit Agarwal: Makes sense. You mentioned objectives. Can you talk about what kind of OKRs should a procurement team have?

Michiel de Bruijn: Sure. There’s a few standard targets that kind of exists all the time. So like the main ones would be cost reductions, the ROI of the team often gets measured in startups, maybe not as much in traditional businesses. You have turnaround time, that’s both turnaround times for purchase orders, but sometimes I could also be held responsible for the turnaround time for how quickly documents are reviewed. So in some way we’re… we’re put together in a bundle with everyone that eventually reviews a document, right? Even though I own the process, there’s privacy in there, there’s legal in there, maybe IT needs to approve, maybe HR needs to approve. So that means that I’m dependent on them approving it on time to meet my turnaround time. So that’s like a sticky point that always exists, but that’s a very common OKR. Then we have cost under management, it’s a very common one. So that means like the percentage of respect that’s actively gone through review and deliberation. Potentially you can look at the amount of quarterly reviews you have with suppliers, the amount of reviews with tier one vendors or like high risk vendors versus low risk vendors. So more like category management goals that you can set. And also that maybe the amount of PO, maybe the amount of spent that have gone without the PO or the amount of POs that have gone out for specific spent categories or amount of POs that have gone out for specific type of value. So for example, that could be which invoices have we paid without PO above a certain level? What was the reasoning? What? Or why did we give exceptional approval measuring those type of criteria? But all of those are fairly common across the board. I’d only say like in a startup environment, it is definitely slightly different. Like the first two, three years in a startup environment, like your team ROI is just absurd. You know, you’re turning yourself more than 80 times versus where in a normal environment we have an established long -term procurement team that doesn’t exist anymore. Now after two and a half, three years, we’re getting to the point where we can see us normalizing and you can see a natural transition towards compliance, PO management.

Rohit Agarwal: As you think about technology companies, it’s certainly we have and we still are in some ways kind of in a funding winter and profitability is something that has really risen up in terms of mind share at the management teams, board of directors and so on. What kind of impact does that have for a procurement leader? Do you need to switch strategies in some ways? What do you need to change to attune to the times that you are in?

Michiel de Bruijn: Yeah, 100%. So I think most procurement people that you talk to right now will tell you that the focus on cost is way higher than it probably was two, three years ago. And that’s purely because less chance of funding means more focus on tight finances and also means you’re probably being more diligently checked or managed by your investors that you are looking at that cost. So definitely. Ironically, it’s like in this profession, it’s like every crisis for procurement is a good one because like suddenly procurement gets a voice, you know? Whereas if everything is going well and like everyone’s spending money, like it’s all fine and you know, like procurement sitting in the corner and then like when there is some natural crisis, we get to sit at the table. It is sadly a bit like that, but that’s also like, you know, just part of the job. Definitely a more core focus on cost. You notice that, we actively try and engage teams to know and let them know like, hey, we’re a free tool for you to utilize as an internal partner if you want to, X, Y, Z. So it’s definitely a good way for procurement now to approach businesses and use yourself as a tool for them because they probably have gotten budget challenges that you can actually help with directly. So that’s been like a definite finding. Post that, I think it’s every industry. Every procurement person I speak to will tell you that right now, it’s more difficult to make business cases. That means that they have more focus on renewals versus new vendors by default. So you’ll see that trend as well. So two years ago, the amount of new vendors, let’s say the 65, 35 I mentioned before, would probably have been different in that time versus now. Like now it’s probably gotten more conservative. You see a trend where people are accepting less long -term contracts now. That’s most likely indirectly that tells you that CFOs and financial people involved, as well as legal are more difficult about approving multiple year contracts. most likely because of financial implications. So, okay, let’s test the product first and then we’ll see. Maybe we don’t need this expense after two years. It’s just more diligent. And the average deal times have gone up. So the amount of time during negotiations on average has gone up, I think it was like 20 % or something in a year’s time. So that means that could mean multiple things, it’s hard to say. On average, it probably means that people are doing more renewals, but maybe taking more time for their renewals, most likely also because the procurement teams might have slightly more time because they’re doing less new products and new products normally take more time, means that they’ll have more focus on the renewals because there’s less new products being added to the tech stack. But yeah, definitely an implication and that those type of financial policies that we see, especially in the startup world but also normal companies, it’s like directly gets slowed down to procurement, 100%.

Cloud and software procurement, demystified#

Rohit Agarwal: Makes sense. Why don’t we move to talk a little about cloud and software procurement in specific. Can you tell us what are the key difficulties in software procurement?

Michiel de Bruijn: Software in general, cloud is a whole different animal altogether, right? Because cloud really requires you to have a deeper understanding of not just stack stack, but also because let’s say you’re a platform like ours that means that you have to understand the customers that are being put in your cloud network, why that’s resulting into cost, how that’s being used, growth on those costs are generally linked to new customer acquisition. So you need to have an understanding of what are we expecting in terms of new customers to expect future growth. But the complexity of cloud is generally not to be underestimated. I would always advise someone that if you’re doing cloud procurement, most cloud providers provide free trainings. Normally it’s for engineers, but you can just take that as a procurement person as well. That will run you through, okay, what are all the dashboards that you have? And this is like AWS, Google, all of them offer this. And the moment you understand all the dashboarding, the criteria, the measurements, the metrics, then it’s like, okay, this is how they’re being measured. Some of them even provide you training as in like, this is a real thing, like they provide you training in terms of how you can best buy cloud on their platform. So obviously, there’s always be a bit skewed in their favor. So I take it with a grain of salt. But it is a good way to understand how their product is built up, because all cloud products are slightly different in the way they’re built up in their criteria. And the difference in cloud specifically is that it’s way more about utilization and optimizing utilization and infrastructure versus the actual negotiation. Like if I’m talking about a normal SaaS product, negotiation can have a genuinely big impact. Whereas for cloud, like you have to imagine that like getting one percentage point in discount extra is a massive shift and often requires you to go to either a new spent band or XYZ. Whereas, the utilization can have, if you have a legacy utilization or optimization, you could theoretically say 30 % upwards by optimizing that. You could never get that out of a pure straight up negotiation there. So that by default makes it way more engineering-focused. You need way more dedication as we change that and way longer timeframes to change that. You asked about the difficulty of software in general. I’d say the main challenge, and again, like I’m not the Oracle, so this is hard to say, right? But for me, it probably, I would say one is apples-to-apples comparison. So software tools are more and more diversified and actually finding like for like products that you can compare to has become way more difficult. It’s also like the one top comment we get from account managers, it’s like, wow, you can’t compare us. It’s like, OK, OK. Which, to one extent, is true, if you agree with it or not.

Rohit Agarwal: Next time you are on a call with a salesperson, they’re going to quote this and say, you only said that it’s hard to compare.

Michiel de Bruijn: It is hard. So that’s why I would say like benchmarks are 100 % key. If we don’t have benchmarks, then we just cannot confirm if we get a good price at this point in time. You know, like if we go to having done cleaning contracts in the past, for example, like a lot of them. I can do the exact calculation and Rohit, you too can do the calculation and say, okay, well, you need cleaning materials, which if I go to a reseller with costs about this, I need this, I need a new vacuum cleaner. Let’s say we spread out that cost over two years. Then we have this, this amount of square meters, the average cost of the individual plus insurances and costs is this. Okay, I should pay about this amount of USD per square feet that I’m actually cleaning. So everyone can directly do this. And software, this just doesn’t exist. It’s all intangible costs. So you don’t know if what they’re charging you is a 20 % margin or it’s 150%. You do not know what margin is being run on you. So it makes it genuinely difficult. And that’s why I’d say without benchmarks, you’re just kind of standing out in the street naked. So you really need to make sure that… For us internally, every vendor software vendor above, obviously above like a threshold, but I’d seriously say above every $2,000 that we spend, we try and get a benchmark. And that could be either through an aggregator that provides benchmarking data or that could be through procurement networks where people share data or they share insights with one another, or former procurement colleagues that you know are dealing with the same vendor and you discuss, hey, I’ve got the next XYZ, is this sort of in the right ballpark I’m looking at? But definitely benchmarks is 100% key to understand. And also to prove to the business that, hey, this is where you’re at. Because… You also don’t want to punish a supplier that’s being a hundred percent transparent, meaning that we’ve had software suppliers that will come to us, give us a pricing, we benchmark it and it shows us that it’s a competitive rate. And they’ll come back and say like, you can see them entering the negotiation like, here we go. We say, okay, fine. And they’re like, okay. It’s like, yeah, you gave us a competitive price. They’re like, yeah, I did. But I like, yeah, we benchmarked it and it’s competitive. So no need for us to have any further conversations. We commercially agree. So there’s definite upsides to it. You don’t have to see benchmarks completely as your enemy if you’re a software provider either. If you are playing ball and you’re fairly quoting us, then 100 % we can reciprocate it. I can say that every procurement person will do the same. So it might be that even though they see that you’re competitive, they might still push you. That can always happen. But yeah, it does really cut into our turnaround time because we know exactly which contracts we need to spend time on versus which contracts we don’t want to spend time on. Yeah. And it does, if I can get benchmark from a specific supplier, I no longer need to compare apples to apples to compare you to a different product to then challenge your price point. And that’s really changing now. The entire market seems to be changing that direction for sure.

Procuring AI applications without benchmarks#

Rohit Agarwal: I’m curious though, how are you dealing with all of these AI applications that are coming in? There is kind of no precedence, no benchmark for these AI apps. How do you think about pricing and ROI on those things?

Michiel de Bruijn: It is, I think in the beginning, like the first six months post OpenAI, it was definitely like the AI gold rush seemed to have happened. You know, so like every product, like I think from our SaaS tech stack, I think literally 60 % came with a new AI functionality they were trying to pitch. Some of them including in the product, some not including in the product. I think the first thing is from a procurement perspective, it’s like massive privacy and compliance implications. So if we have a very simple tool and they’re introducing AI and it doesn’t directly benefit us, now I might have a potential compliance issue because they might be using our data for training. They might be, you know, like, so we now have to re-review all of this. And if it’s a… not necessarily a strategic supplier for us. So let’s say it’s like a tool that helps you with spelling in email. So it’s a tool, you know, like something more basic. If they now start introducing AI implication, now suddenly for something that we might be paying $50 for, we have to have a whole privacy review and potentially legal review for the implications because we at Bloomreach are a data business. It means that we can’t afford to have any data breaches or data impact on our customers. So now it’s like, okay, so it might actually impact the company, because we might have to say goodbye to that relationship because they now introduce an AI application that we might not necessarily want or might not necessarily benefit off that now triggers compliance risk. So that’s definitely a major shift. Even in our intake process, like legal and privacy, we now have a separate question that asks if you select software as a category, it specifically asks you, is there an AI implication or element to this product? Yes, no. And that then means that if you say yes, it’s always privacy and compliance and potentially legal review because of the way those products are handled. Definitely difficulty from a pricing perspective, I’d say we’ve seen two streams. We’ve seen either they added as a free functionality to kind of out market other competitors in the market. And I will say this works because we do notice that sometimes we’re reviewing our own internal products that we’re using. And then the stakeholder might say, well, their competitor is using this AI module in there and they don’t have this anymore. And then, you know, so definitely this works and we heard this multiple times. And the other side of things is like, yeah, we have an AI module, but it’s gonna cost you x, y, z dollars extra a month and, you know, and they try and pitch it as an upsell. So we definitely see those two streams, yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: When someone is coming with an AI pitch, what is resonating with you the most? I’m sure every B2B software pitch has some kind of an ROI equation baked into it, either specifically or in an implied way. What do you think from an AI app perspective someone can do or say or assert that would make you comfortable and that will stick with you?

Michiel de Bruijn: I’d say one for sure is like beat me to the questions. So someone coming out, let’s we do a pitch and immediately say, we don’t use your data for training purposes. We keep it on a private instance, which means you’re not affected by X, Y, Z. So that’s one, right? So immediately I know 90 % chance that privacy is going to be a lot happier than before you made that comment. And then same thing with an ROI, immediately come out and make it specific to us as a business. So sometimes the ROI calculation that companies will show us doesn’t really work for our application or how we’re going to going to use it. So they’ll say, let’s say we’re going to use something for improving spelling or something like that. And the ROI calculation that they give us is for, yeah, but you can reduce the time engineers spend on. And I’m looking at it, and I’m kind of on the edge of, do I need to comment on it? Because clearly, they either haven’t even looked up our application, or they don’t have a clear understanding of what we’re using the product for. Yeah, or they’re just using that example every time, but that’s really definitely an element where it has a negative impact. And the other way around is if you specifically link it to our use case, if you say, let’s say it’s a procurement use case, you specifically tell me, look, we have had other customers that when they introduced this for their purchase orders, they reduced the turnaround time by x, y, z. Here is the reference business case. It’s a similar company also with a thousand employees and in the same market. And actually they also have an office in Amsterdam and Slovakia, so they’re very comparable. Now I’m like, okay, like, you know, this is, very relatable, this use case could work on our use case as well as the ROI that they’re referring to actually has a lot of overlap. That’s a very specific example, but even if you have two, three points of overlap, even the same size, same industry, also SaaS, then we know like, okay, this could work for us. Because for example, they might use make their business case on engineers based in the US in terms of ROI, but then our engineers might be based in India or Slovakia. And then the whole calculation doesn’t add up for us because there’s lower cost of labor. So it’s like, make sure you know who you’re talking to and use their specific context for your ROI calculation. Yeah.

Process, compliance, and contract optimization#

Rohit Agarwal: There seems to be a bunch of different functions or sub -functions who are part of a procurement process. How do you ensure that a timely delivery of whatever needs to be procured happens while dealing or managing such multifunctional process?

Michiel de Bruijn: Yeah, that’s fair. It’s probably one of the main challenges we have because eventually reviews or approvals are being done by people and people forget, people miss things, people take more time, people de-prioritize even though that’s something that you might feel needs to be prioritized. So I don’t know if it’s ever going to be truly fixed or manageable, but… say compared to let’s say what the industry was like 10 years ago, it’s a massive difference in terms of like the tools we can use, how quickly they reply, the amount of possibilities to inside requests, make comments, tag people, pull people in from a different department. We are completely conditional based means that if someone’s requesting $100 pen through the procurement system, then legal won’t be triggered and compliance won’t be triggered. It will not go for privacy review. It will only go for one level of approval. So there’s multiple eyes on it. For the rest, it’s just it goes through the process. Whereas if it’s a larger software purchase and indeed it’s AI and indeed it XYZ, then we know, okay, we need to send a notification to this person. There might be an integration with another system. So that means IT needs to be involved. That needs to be the stakeholder or the owner of the product might need a notification. So then it gets a lot more intense. So I’d say definitely prioritize real risks. So decide as a business what your risk profile is and what you consider risks. So for example, for Bloomreach, that’s data is 100 % key for us, just like the way our business is organized and what our product is. On top of that, it’s like larger spent, so larger spent items. That’s a common one for most companies. So if you know exactly what your risk profile is and what risk you’re willing to accept, so for example, in marketing, let’s say simply that could be… marketing deals often have contracts that are quite extensive. So it could be if you missed the event, you might have to pay half of the amount back, or you can only cancel this period of time. Then you have to make the internal decision saying, are we going to send all of those for a legal review because we want to look at all of those? Or are we going to say, there’s a good chance once a year an event may be canceled and will incur a cost. Are we going to now say, hey, we’ll accept that risk but for doing so we’re going to do no legal reviews which calculation wise like will it actually save us money by not doing that and focusing legal efforts on those high -risk contracts. So I’d say define your risk profile what fits inside of that and then customize your process underneath to sort of match that and make sure it’s like you know bulletproof ironclad on paper so it’s not Michiel thinks it’s low risk. It’s like now this category, this amount of money, these questions answered in this way triggers this review. So it’s all automated from that sense.

Rohit Agarwal: Is there any point in time where you would take a temporary risk. Maybe let’s say a company has not done some SOC2 compliance or any kind of other privacy compliances and so on. If you are getting a better price or Bloomreach is at a stage now where you have to have a check on the risk and compliance side and there is just no way to get past that.

Michiel de Bruijn: I’d say for cost, no, like, it’s just such a difficult way to make, right? Like if you’d say, you can save 20%, but then you’d be put at risk of getting a GDPR fine later in the year because of the data breach, it’s just genuinely like, it’s just not worth it. It’s kind of like a… Yeah, penny rich, pound foolish type of thing. It just really isn’t worth it over time, specifically with the amount of fines you can get, the non -compliance. Specifically, if your log revision is eventually going for an IPO, then it’s not worth the risk, I’d say. The only thing I could imagine is let’s say you have a product that doesn’t have their SOC 2 compliance yet, but it’s a great product with add value and… It takes all the privacy boxes, but it doesn’t have that specific qualification. What might happen is that we ask specific additional questions to then try and vet them around of that. And then even then still, we could still potentially request a business risk acceptance to say, hey, we document that the business accepts the risk either contractually or specifically in the product that it’s noted and that we have outed proof that yes, we acknowledge the risk. This is the risk we track is. And then eventually the goal is that like from a compliance perspective, we also track all of these risks that are accepted or risks that are not accepted and that potentially in the future might change. So then later go to the supplier and say, okay, do you have your SOC 2 compliance now? And if they say, yes, we do have it, then we can mark it. And okay, we covered that risk fully now. That I can see happen, but I’ve never seen it happen from a cost perspective. And like I’m procurement, I’m all about getting the right deal, but even I ethically would have definitely a problem with that about short selling ourselves for, while putting ourselves at risk.

Rohit Agarwal: makes a ton of sense. How do you get to the most optimized software contract?

Michiel de Bruijn: Purely contractual TNCs or like overall deal?

Rohit Agarwal: Overall deal.

Michiel de Bruijn: So if I’m talking about theoretically, theoretically all sourcing process sort of have the same general line and steps and process. So that’s basically. First, you do your spent analysis to understand what the total picture looks like, where’s the money actually going? And that could also mean like, is it on a monthly basis? What’s the payment terms, et cetera, for the product, or what are you expecting? Then afterwards, you go into like more market research. So that’s like what products are available that could either be, I have a current vendor, I’m looking at others, or it could be like, we have a business case to solve an issue, and these are the vendors that can solve it. And the next step would be the more traditional RFQ, RFX. That’s like we’re getting a request for a quotation to understand basis, our scope specifications. What would you quote us to solve that really? And then cross comparison. That normally goes into. a short listing, you end up in a negotiation cycle. They have a period of negotiation and then eventually one party is left and you end up in contracting. And then contracting is purely the legal aspect of getting to the view. And then eventually that moves into onboarding. Onboarding is really like adding them to your tech stack. So meaning that could be integrations, that could be a project, that could be a… And for some deals that could be a year implementation cycle, other deals that say, Hey, you have access now, you know, so there’s a very big gap and so on. And then eventually long -term that would go into performance management. So that’s like the cycle of we have a renewal. quarterly reviews, that could be procurement speaking to Roit, are you happy about the platform you’re using, are you being approached the right way, what’s the turnaround time in case you have any issues, when you had down time, how did it affect you, those kind of things. So yeah, that’s kind of like the overall cycle. I’ll say, do you need to use it all the time? Definitely not, it’s just not efficient. Honestly, if we would do it for all deals, we just couldn’t. Like… just from a sheer number of amount of suppliers, like it’d be ineffective. So you kind of have to pick whichever ones you want to prioritize, either based on the spend or the level of service or the risk associated. But in terms of step approved, I’d say that’s the general sense of it. The most difficult one inside that would probably be one and two. Understanding what you’re spending, why you’re spending it, what the logic was behind it. Maybe someone bought this product five years ago, they’re no longer with the business, they weren’t, the decision makers are all gone. Is that product still the same product it was when we bought it? When we bought it at one module, now we have five modules. Like where did these come from? Like were all of these required? You know, so things develop and change over time and they might no longer fit you the right way. You know, like the same way, I don’t know, like you, you might have a two seater car, but now you have a four people family. Like, you know, it’s no longer fit for purpose that people’s requirements changes. So, getting a very clear picture or in your scope and documenting that scope is very difficult. It sounds silly but… you as Rohit might have a very clear idea of what type of car you want But then actually when you start writing it down and you go into the nitty -gritty and you start actually asking like, okay Well, there were rains in the UE like fairly recently. Before that wasn’t on my requirements list that the car has to be higher up to go faster rain, right? But now suddenly I’m like, I kind of want an SUV because if water gets up to a meter you know, so requirements change so actually putting it down on paper and making sure everything is there is actually like a it’s like a genuine art.

The future of procurement#

Rohit Agarwal: All right, makes a ton of sense. Why don’t we move to talk a little about the future of procurement. What are the biggest challenges facing procurement today? And how can organizations prepare to tackle them?

Michiel de Bruijn: I’d say from a SaaS type of business or talking general.

Rohit Agarwal: You can talk about it from a SaaS kind of business perspective. Michiel de Bruijn ( Sure. I’d probably say risk and tech management. I’d say like AI being the perfect example, how quickly that changed all of our review processes and the implication from a data perspective, GDPR perspective, the privacy perspective. Like the impact is like felt throughout, kind of. So I’d say definitely those type of changes will happen more and more. We also see more and more companies expanding their portfolio. So you might have bought a product for one specific purpose but now suddenly you might have a module that has a completely different implication, even though you’re not using it. It’s in your tech stack. So keeping track of all of that on top of additionally which users have access to it, it’s just very time -consumely and definitely, I don’t think that problem’s going to decrease in difficulty over time. I think it will get more difficult over time. probably overwhelming tech stacks, just like amount of software. Like we’ve gotten to the point where every issue that we have, there’s a piece of software that’s trying to solve it, right? But it will get to a point where it’s like, can I accept this inconvenience or is it genuinely worth the piece of software? Because it’s not just, it might just be a $20 license. It is now part of our software environment and purchasing environment. And we’re responsible for it being there. Which means that in the past it was like, if you’re a company of our size, you might have had 100 suppliers and that could be sufficient. Whereas these days, I think it’s fairly normal for companies our size to have 2000 upward suppliers globally for all these different types of things. So. Yeah, so you just have to be careful of that level of SaaS bloating, license bloating, users adding licenses because there’s a new user, not switching off older users, things like that. All becomes more difficult the moment your tech stack changes. And lastly, I’d say things are definitely becoming more global. We see our suppliers definitely all transitioning to becoming more global managed businesses. Global is not always better. So it might mean that if I’m dealing with a global tech supplier and the account manager in Slovakia is amazing and I’m getting the best service, now it might be that they’re saying like, okay, well your head office is in the US, so we want you to move to a US product. And suddenly, like the service over there is run like a completely different business. We’re no longer response time, and they might even tell us, you have to go to sales at general .com to, you know, without joking, like we have certain companies where we’re trying to buy a product and we can’t find an account manager. And we email their general email ID and we don’t get a response. There’s no point of contact. And it’s like, okay, like what’s the solution here? So I think all of this is like sort of like a impact of globalization. It’s products that do very well grow extremely fast. And I don’t think they can necessarily keep up with local requirements. So that’s difficult sometimes. And we see the same thing. We have users that are in India that have to wait for a US based customer service to wake up for them to ask their question. And that’s not really like a sign of the times. Yeah. Interesting. What do you see as the next big tech innovation in the field of procurement?

Michiel de Bruijn: I’d probably say in terms of procurement specifically, direct access to data would be a big one. And it’s definitely already going into that direction. So that means I want… negotiate with XYZ party and I want to buy 10 licenses, I can directly see the price this is what other people are paying. I see more and more maybe this is not innovation but more of more like sort of like community platform for people to share experiences which in the past was… it’s kind of crazy because it’s super normal for individual consumers to give feedback, but companies don’t really provide public feedback. So I go on Amazon and before I buy anything, like obviously I look at like, you know, what the reviews are a product and I want to see at least 500 reviews. But for some SaaS items, it can still be completely normal for them to have one referral company. You go have a conversation and you’re like, this is great. Whereas personally, you’d never do that for one review, you know, which is provided by the company. So I see these community feedback is happening more and more. post that, I’d probably say right now there’s a lot of companies moving into digitizing the RFQ journeys, potentially like data ownership is becoming a big thing. So how do I optimize my own data to do proper procurement analysis? And that means contracts data, but that also means spends data. And that means like sort of automating tracking savings and how you calculate those in, sharing those with your FP&A departments, things like that. And lastly, definitely a trend we see, which I expect also to go into the future, is more aggregator platform selling products. So right in the past, you had, for example, the AWS and the Google marketplace. Now you have independent marketplaces that sort of will tell you, if you buy through them, they have a standardized price, which might be more competitive because they have a larger pool of services and you get the standardized contract, which are better contract terms and conditions than you would get on your own. If you buy through them, you can pay every 30 days instead of annual upfront. And… we make sure it’s SOC 2 and GDPR compliance so that your compliance and privacy etc. won’t have any issues with it. That’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing. In the past, that was mainly done in indirect services. That would be, I’m trying to buy bolts for a factory. you can’t just buy bolts here. You can buy bolts and you can buy belts and you can buy this. And that’s sort of moving into software now. So I’m kind of excited to see where that’s gonna go. Does that mean that in the future, I don’t need even benchmarking data anymore, etc. I just go to an aggregator and tell them I want that product for X amount of periods and this is what I’m willing to pay. I don’t necessarily know, but yeah, pretty excited to see it.

Career advice and a negotiation framework#

Rohit Agarwal: All right, very cool. Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self starting a career in procurement?

Michiel de Bruijn: I’d say procurement is still such an undersold profession. I know it sounds silly because clearly someone’s willing to make a podcast about it. But you know, like, they didn’t used to be any university degrees on procurement. All of those are starting now. You can actually take courses to do so. However, I don’t think many people come out of high school and think like, I want to… Like, you know, it’s not a very natural profession. You know, it’s not like there’s no Suits television show about procurement that makes you think, this might be okay. So I hope it gets more attention over time and people will do more internships, kind of is the way to get in touch with procurement and see the profession. I think if you really enjoy people and you’re kind of savvy and you like… different types of technology and you like some like the complexity of the subject matter that you have to deal with that changes every day. I think it’s a great profession to get into. So I really hope it gets more attention that way. What I’d probably say is these days you don’t necessarily have to go the traditional way anymore, which used to be you joined somewhere as a junior buyer and then you become a media buyer. And then you might go into strategic sourcing. I think startups are a great way to get involved. I think most startups, probably the size of 200 FTEs, at a starting point, most likely don’t have anyone dedicated to procurement. If you message them and ask for your own internship, I’m fairly confident that they’d be more than fine if someone wants to go and map out when their contract ends dates are, because they probably don’t even know. So something like that would definitely be. Outside that, speak to people. I feel like, obviously I’m prejudiced because I’m in procurement, but I feel like every procurement person that I’ve messaged in my career, even when I was still a student and I messaged heads of procurement. about, hey, I’m interested in the field. I don’t know it’s because they’re not used to people reaching out because procurement isn’t that sexy yet. But they always replied, always told me, hey, sure, we can have a conversation. And they might not be able to give you a job, but they’ll definitely give you a sense of like, within your local industry or within the country or you live in. That’s why I said, these are generally the opportunities I’d go for, this is what I would go into. In the past, I was told, go into IT procurement. I didn’t actively do but sort of ended up in it and I think we’re now all in it. Yeah but I’d say that. I think it’s a great career and people definitely should consider it for sure.

Rohit Agarwal: What does a successful career look like to you?

Michiel de Bruijn: Oof. Success is hard to define, I guess, and it’s different to everyone. For me, I’d probably say I probably had a slight change of heart in terms of how I define a successful career. I think if I’m very honest, I think in the past, I was like, if I’m not gonna end up being the head of procurement for Shell, then I see that as a failed career type of thing. Now… my perspective has kind of changed. I think when I did make the step from managing a larger team and maybe, yeah, it sounds silly, but being in a job where maybe I felt more important to now go into like managing a smaller team and focusing on very different subject matter, I think I’ve realized that making small daily impacts really makes me feel good. Like I really enjoy training people, like for example, taking someone in who’s not necessarily had a procurement background and teaching them and working them up and seeing them become like a genuinely good negotiator. That’s probably my favorite moment of the year type of thing. Whereas in the past, I was mainly focused on a successful career is a specific type of title. Now it’s more like, I don’t know, like. If eventually Bloomreach goes IPO, having brought them from a procurement standpoint to IPO, that’s definitely something I’d be proud of. Long, long term, really enjoying what I do and being able to say that there’s not many days where I open up my laptop and I go, here we go again, genuinely is my goal. I’d say if I get to keep learning and I get to keep experiencing new things while simultaneously delivering value, we’re working with new business partners and doing that in a pleasant manner. That’s all I want. Yeah.

Rohit Agarwal: What’s your framework for negotiations? How do you go about it?

Michiel de Bruijn: I don’t think there’s one framework really for sure there’s not like every negotiation is different and I personally think the sign of a good negotiator is someone who can sense when to push which buttons, when to not play any games, just straight up say I have this budget is this going to work? So yeah, I don’t think I generally believe there’s a framework. I do believe there’s don’t change too far away from your personality. So if you are, if you feel uncomfortable pushing hard, don’t push hard because it don’t think it would necessarily work for you. So if you’re more soft spoken and you’re just a real people’s person, remain exactly the same way in negotiations and I’m going to convince you can probably just be successful that way as well. Eventually, you’re not negotiating with another company, you’re negotiating with a person. So if that person doesn’t like you, or they feel like you’re not on the same page, they’re just not going to fight as hard for you as they would if you are on the same page and you are being truthful and you are being straight up. Obviously, that’s not always the case. And again, every negotiation is different. But yeah, understand where you stand, understand what levers you have. Understand what actual pie there is to divide, if anything. Understand if a win -win is an option or if it’s not an option in your situation. And I would say have very clear communication with your business about what their expectations are. So once you enter that negotiation conversation, you know, this is a go, this is a no -go. This would be considered a win. This would be considered a loss. and be very clear about what you can do, what your parameters are. Because if you don’t know, it’s going to be very difficult to be successful.