The Buy Side

"To win business by being human first." That's Brooke's philosophy, and it's a huge reason for her long-term success at Gainsight. Hear how she prioritizes relationship building and what's at stake, both internally with stakeholders and externally with vendors. Finally, hear about her experiences and the advice she has for women in the male-dominated industry of IT.

On this episode of The Buy Side, Sören Petsch, Head of Procurement at CommerceHub, shares his automation secrets.

We get into Sören's philosophy on learning from IT processes, his tactical approach to automation, and his journey to automate CommerceHub's procurement function, involving workflows, contract data digitization, integrations, and more.

In our fourth and final conversation with Michiel, we talk about the importance of price benchmarking for validation during negotiations and how Bloomreach utilizes Vendr for those insights, how he navigates the cultural differences working with Procurement and vendors across many different countries, and why he thinks Procurement still gets a bad rep (and ways to move away from that).

In our third conversation with Michiel, he describes why SaaS is one of the most difficult areas for procurement today (i.e. a large piece of the margin is often made up; hefty implementation costs; etc.), how he approaches SaaS buying conversations to get the fairest possible pricing and terms (i.e. always come prepared with data and always be transparent), and what he thinks the future of SaaS procurement looks like ("procurement is always going to be a social business").

In our second conversation with Michiel, we start off by talking about change management and how to overcome the "experience baggage" employees might have with procurement from past companies. We also cover the intersection between procurement and the SaaS buying process and where Michiel prioritizes his time knowing he only has 24 hours in the day.

In our first conversation with Michiel de Bruijn, Procurement Lead at Bloomreach, a Commerce Experience leader, he shares his experience building procurement capabilities in Europe and the United Arab Emirates, the differences between operational and strategic sourcing, and the in-depth processes to create cost awareness and better manage spend in a new role.

What makes a good CFO great? What defines the modern CFO? If anyone were to answer this question, it’s Steve Isom, Bloomerang’s own CFO. In our final episode with Steve, he outlines the 5 pillars of the CFO’s role, advice he’d pass on to fellow finance leaders, and last, but not least, his favorite SaaS tools right now.

In our 3rd conversation with Bloomerang’s CFO, Steve Isom, we get into the nitty gritty of Q4 planning… what he’s learned over the years and how to make the process a more collaborative and effective experience for all of leadership. And in the spirit of EOY planning, we also talk about EOY software renewals and best practices going into the next fiscal year. Let’s get started.

In our 2nd conversation with Bloomerang’s CFO, Steve Isom, we get deep and talk about the finance challenges and tribulations that keep him up at night and how he works to solve them. Risk mitigation, new competitors in the space, and managing a growing SaaS stack are just a few. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the first of four conversations with Steve Isom, CFO at Bloomerang, a CRM software company for nonprofits.

In this episode, Steve takes us through his journey to CFO at a fast-growing company after starting his career in the banking industry, what he learned from his experiences working at bootstrapped, high growth organizations, how he spun up the company’s first strategic finance function, and more.