How to negotiate with top suppliers: Pricing variability data

View profile for Russell Lester

SaaS President, CFO and Advisor

Every CFO needs to bookmark this data right now. Pricing variability for some of the top suppliers. In other words: 1. How much wiggle room there is to negotiate on price 2. Which suppliers are worth your attention and effort to negotiate with Chances are, your team uses one, few, or many of these suppliers to run your business. Very useful as you engage in year-end budgeting and planning right now. Justin Etkin always says, “Many successful negotiations are actually mediocre deals in disguise.” Don’t let a done deal make you think you got a good deal. Reliable benchmark data is a nonnegotiable for doing financial stewardship in 2025 and beyond.

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CJ Gustafson

mostly metrics | run the numbers | mostly growth

4d

Some of these spreads are NUTS!!!! You're flying blind without benchmarks. You don't know the pressure points and where to push. Kudos to DDOG for their ability to command such pricing power. Speaks to the product quality.

Michael Shields

Vice President of Procurement @ Tropic | Spend Management Enthusiast | Speaker | Advisor | Professor. On a mission to change the perception of Procurement. In tech and beyond.

4d

Agree. But also realize that you’ll still meet some resistance (even those with broad bands) unless you have a strong BATNA

Karan Sood

Something pricing. Be a part of PricingTribe.

3d

Is this normalized for size of deals ?

Thomas AUDIBERT

Co-founder & CEO @ OnSource | 5x more supplier options. 0 extra effort

4d

Russell Lester Most these players have a gross margins around 80% so they have little economic reason to reject a “closeable” deal - once CAC is spent, every $$$ of ARR is ~ margin. That’s why I’m curious about this dataset: if these ranges reflect actual deal-to-deal variance, not list-to-discount, it would contradict basic SaaS economics. How exactly were these numbers calculated?

Joel Hereth

Simplifying SaaS Sprawl and Eliminating Wasted Technology Spend

4d

Docusign is wilding out with these price variations lol!

Caroline Lartigolle

B2B Growth Companion | Profit Clarity & Strategic Decision-Making | Fast enough to prove · Deep enough to matter

3d

Great insights! When I see spreads like this, I don’t think “negotiation room.” I think “system under stress.” Pushing harder on it won’t fix the root cause. And might just accelerate the disappearance of a supplier.

Parker Begale

Business Development Leader

3d

That Docusign line extends the horizontal length of the chart by at least 30% lol HubSpot one concerns me 👻 What a spooky post

Houston Itzen

Deal Desk I Pricing Strategy Expert I Complex Products, Deals & Transformations I Extensive experience spanning I Negotiations I B2B Pricing Strategy through Deal Signing. QTC Navigator

4d

CFO's also need to know where they have buying power. A $1,000 purchase versus a $1M enterprise deal will likely lead to some bigger swings. Even better would be to segment the customer base to determine the value being delivered to that specific segment. Would be interesting to see the demarcation between negotiated agreements and those bought retail online.

Rasmus Areskoug

CEO & co-founder || former CFO & VC

4d

Wow Docusign!

Gaurav Thorat

CISA, CRISC, CISM | Cyber Security, Risk Management & Data Privacy | Singapore Permanent Resident (SPR)

2d
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