The hardest part of buying enterprise software isn’t finding it—discovery is basically solved. You can find thousands of enterprise software options in an afternoon. The hard part is everything that happens between finding the right solution and actually having access to it.
Who owns the procurement motion? How does pricing get negotiated? Who handles the contract? What about tax, invoicing, and payment? Which team tracks approvals? And once it’s signed, how does it fit into existing contracts and renewal cycles?
Most of these previously mentioned challenges occur in e-mail chains, spreadsheets, and conversations that no one fully documents. Seventy-three percent of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach—they’ve already done their research by the time they engage. But the internal process of actually completing a purchase remains as manual as it was a decade ago. Research, shortlist, evaluate, and then hand it off to a process that moves at a completely different speed.
This is especially true for organizations with existing SAP investments. Expanding a software landscape that’s already complex—adding new capabilities, aligning contracts, managing co-term timing across multiple products—adds layers of coordination that can slow even straightforward decisions to a crawl. Every new solution that doesn’t co-term with an existing contract means another renewal date to track, another negotiation cycle to manage, and another piece of the landscape that runs on its own timeline.
