How to Use Zylo Benchmarks at Renewal

Thom McCorkle: Hi, I'm Thom McCorkle, Director of Product Marketing at Zylo. Welcome to our Customer Tips Series. Today, we're focused on what you need to do 60 days ahead of your renewal, and that's benchmarking your price. You want to get the most value out of your software, and getting the best possible price on those tools is one of the great ways to do that. In the last scenario, we talked about running a license workflow, to make sure that you're re- harvesting inactive users and not buying shelfware. Once you've done that, you're now buying fewer licenses than what you originally had. So guess what? The vendor is going to try and raise your unit price to retain that revenue and eat into your savings. That's why it's important to get a quote from the vendor at a full 60 days out with your new license quantity, so you can start to run your benchmarks and tackle your negotiations.

Thom McCorkle: Now, I'm going to go into benchmarks, into Zylo, to show you how to do that. This is not a standard platform feature, so you may or may not have this today. Chat with your team if you're interested. We have benchmarks for the most popular applications and are using anonymized and aggregated data from real agreements to generate them. Zylo benchmarks allow you to compare at the license SKU price and quantity compared to other cohort customers of a similar size or purchase size.

Thom McCorkle: So let's look at an example. I'm working on my Salesforce renewal right now. I'm going to open up Salesforce, where I can see all that great app details, and I can jump over into benchmarks. We'll talk about popular applications and the other benchmarks available in this feature at a later video. But right now, we care about the price. So I can look at the various SKUs that are available for Salesforce. There's a lot of them there, and I'm pulling in my exact quantity and actual quote unit price purchase for this quote. All right. Now, we're going to see very quickly how close we are to that average price. This spot where it says 'You' is relative to the actual average. So if you're way off to the right, you've got a lot of wiggle room. In this case, there is some room to do some negotiating here. If you're way off to the left and you're getting a great price on that specific SKU, maybe this isn't the renewal to haggle on price, but think about some of the things that you could ask for. Maybe you can look at a sandbox account or some added support credits or something along those lines. But ultimately, use this to hold your ground on your new unit price on those reduced licenses that you're going to be purchasing. In this case, it looks like we have some room to sharpen our pencils.

Thom McCorkle: So there's a few ways Zylo is going to provide benchmarks to our customers. What we're looking at here is our in- app benchmarks, where you can fully self- service and benchmark across the applications that we have available. We also offer benchmarks as a service, so if you need a little bit more detail, a little bit more handholding, you want a more bespoke and custom quote and benchmark, along with some strategies, that's probably the solution for you. And then, finally, if it's long- tail apps that you just don't have the capacity to manage or you aren't really into negotiating all of these agreements, we have negotiator services, where we can work with you to scope out what negotiations we're going to own and we can own that soup to nuts, top to bottom, and make sure that we're driving the best price on every single renewal.

Thom McCorkle: Stay tuned for our next tip, where we'll talk about how Zylo helps you finalize your renewals and you're set up for success next year or two years from now when this renewal comes back around.