Commercial operations, partnerships and procurement

Start with an owner and a list

Not a procurement function, and not a policy. One named person and one list: every recurring vendor, what it costs annually, who sponsors it, what it is for, and the renewal date. Pull it from the card statement and the bank feed rather than from what people tell you — the gap between those two is usually where the answer is.

Nearly every company we do this with finds something on the first afternoon. Not through negligence, but because no single person had ever seen the whole list on one page.

The three costs nobody sees

• Seats for a team that has changed shape. Licences are provisioned generously and reclaimed almost never.
• Overlap. Two tools doing one job, bought by two teams six months apart, both genuinely in use. Nobody is wrong and the company pays twice.
• Auto-renewals nobody diarised. The expensive one: a contract renews at list price with an uplift because the notice window passed, and the leverage that existed for three weeks is gone for a year.

Cloud spend behaves identically and is usually the largest line — environments raised for a test that ended, capacity provisioned for a launch that has passed, and no owner whose job it is to notice.

Renewals are the negotiation

A vendor's willingness to move is largely a function of where you sit in their quarter and how close you are to your notice date. A conversation started ninety days out, with usage data in hand and a credible alternative named, is a different conversation from one started the week before the renewal fires. Same vendor, same product, materially different outcome — and the difference is preparation, not toughness.

Partnerships that earn their place

Partnerships get signed with enthusiasm and reviewed almost never. The useful discipline is unglamorous: what this partnership is supposed to produce, who owns it internally, what it costs in engineering and management time as well as in money, and when we will decide whether it is working. A short list of partnerships that are actually managed beats a long list nobody has looked at since the announcement.

Revenue operations

For early-stage B2B companies this is less about tooling than about definitions: what counts as a qualified opportunity, what a stage in the pipeline actually means, what happens at handover from sales to delivery, and which numbers the company will run on. Get those agreed and the reporting becomes a by-product. Buy the platform first and you get expensive disagreement rendered in dashboards.

Procurement light enough to survive

The end state is not an approval board. It is one lightweight step before a new recurring commitment — does something we already pay for do this, who owns it, when does it renew — that takes ten minutes and is enforced because it is obviously reasonable. Anything heavier gets routed around by people trying to do their jobs, which is how most procurement policies die.

Whether this is the right fit

How a commercial sprint runs

Deliberately short. The first pass finds the obvious money; the discipline afterwards is what stops it coming back.

Common questions