Okay, maybe COUPA’s Jason Hekl wasn’t sitting poolside besieged by a cacophony of reporters clamoring for a big story.
Joe Namath guarantees the win in Super Bowl III
Maybe Jason wasn’t getting ready to go before a packed Orange Bowl crowd and millions of television viewers.
However, and with the same moxie and a track record of successes a mile long, Hekl delivered a Joe Namath-type guarantee that should put the staid old ERP fuddy duddies on notice that the game in terms of eProcurement has changed.
For those who may be too young to remember the Namath guarantee – likely non-NFL fans because even the gridiron young have heard the Namath story, go directly to the following video, and join those of us who remember a little later in the post.
In an all too brief PI Soundbite interview, COUPA’s VP of Marketing took time out of a busy schedule to respond to my questions regarding the guaranteed savings being offered to new clients by the company.
Rather than detract from your enjoyment of listening to a great 10 minutes of meaningful conversation I will direct you to the following links which pose two very important questions.
In the first excerpt I ask Jason about his views regarding the possibility of having to deal with the usual market cynicism surrounding guarantees.
In the second excerpt we discuss the impact on one’s career if they accept COUPA’s offer of guaranteed savings.
In the meantime, please be sure to tune into the PI Window on Business on Blog Talk Radio for the complete interview which will be aired on Friday, June 3rd.
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Procurement Insights 
Smart Buyer
June 2, 2011
Wow, Coupa must think we’re really stupid. Do they really think that their theatrics are going to convince any educated software buyer to skip the evaluation process and jump in bed with them just because they can get the hosting fees back if it doesn’t work?
First of all, you’re risking much more than the hosting fees when you select an e-procurement system. If it fails (and plenty do), you’re going to have much more to worry about 6 months down the road than the relatively insignificant cost of the software itself. What about the cost of everyone’s time to implement it? What about the cost/impact on the organization, changed processes, vendor on-boarding, etc.?
Not to mention, even if successful, who’s to say that there wasn’t another system that could achieve the same results or better with additional benefits, better features, less workarounds, etc?
Thanks but no thanks. When I make my final choice for a new system, it’s going to be based on due diligence (note the “due” part) and if it fails and I have to answer to my CEO when he asks who else I looked at, I’m going to have a better answer than “uhhh, nobody…Coupa told me I didn’t have to”
So I think I’ll stick to what I was hired for (making good purchasing decisions) rather than take the word of some slick marketer that, frankly, has insulted the entire Purchasing community.
PS. I’m currently evaluating systems, so I prefer to remain anonymous.
Jason Hekl
June 8, 2011
Smart Buyer makes the expected points, but misses the intent behind our offer. Anyone who has been part of a failed software implementation or project that did not quite deliver the expected results will approach subsequent projects with skepticism, and understandably so. The process is motivated (at least in part) by fear of failure, risk mitigation, and too often, a CYA mentality. The focus is on the means to the end. Of course you should do “due diligence” to ensure you select the right vendor (or partner), but don’t think for a second that your CEO will find comfort in the fact that your failed project was backed up by a thorough 9-12 month evaluation cycle. I’ve not heard of a CEO yet who comes around to pat the project manager on the back for his or her thorough due diligence after a failed implementation. Executives want results.
This offer is not a “take our word for it” proposition. Quite the contrary, we want you to evaluate our solution. Coupa gives every prospective customer who wants one a fully-functional trial instance of the software – we can provision them in minutes. You can test every feature and function in the system, without restraint. Even better, you can use the trial to test some of your assumptions and visualize the outcome you want to achieve. Trial gives you a very effective mechanism for validating usability and adoption from your user community.
No, this offer is about aligning vendor and buyer around the “end” and empowering the buyer to act sooner – and we’re willing to customize the “end” to the needs of each customer. If you truly partner with your vendor, and both parties are rewarded on the achievement of a common goal (be it a 1% reduction in operating expenditures or otherwise), your posture changes from one of suspicion to one of collaboration. If you move from an endless list of feature/function “can you do this…” comparisons, to one of “how do we reduce spend in x category by y%”, the whole team focuses on the core problem you are trying to solve, and collectively moves faster to achieve it.
So there’s no chicanery here, just an offer designed to help our prospective customers accelerate their time to value with Coupa.