How to Save 50% From Gartner

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 Welcome to the Spend Advantage podcast by Varisource Spend advantage is the competitive advantage for your spend across 100 plus vendor categories. This podcast is all about interviewing amazing people, company, and solutions that will help you ten x your top line growth as well as bottom line savings for your business. Hello everyone, this is Victor with Varisource Welcome to another episode of the Spend advantage Podcast. Today I'm super excited to have a good friend and also a partner, LV who's a CEO and co-founder of Taylor Flow with us. Taylor Flow is an AI market research platform that gives you vendor analysis and vendor comparisons at a cost effective rate. How are you doing of doing wonderful. Thank you Victor. Yeah. Great to uh great to have you super excited about the conversation today. First of all, you know, obviously we call our podcast Spin Advantage because we're all about partnering and working with companies and founders that are disrupting, um, you know, the incumbents, the old slow, expensive companies out there. And this is a category that I think the audience gonna love. If you don't mind, maybe give the audience a little bit of background about yourself and sort of the the founder story would be would be fun, of course. So I've been in a serial entrepreneur all my life. Um, I started in natural gas compressors and 3D printing and, uh, had a venture backed 3D printing business making orthotics. Um, a while back, um, I left that in 2019 and, uh, met up with my co-founder, uh, Todd a little bit before that, and we started working on various ideas. Uh, we've made a lot of pivots to get to where we are. So we started in low code integrations and then pivoted to cloud cost management and eventually landed on this current idea during the YC batch, um, which was Winter 21, which is to really help, uh, streamline the vendor selection process. We, um, uh, we'd say that, you know, between myself and my co-founder, we have a lot of experience doing enterprise sales and also, uh, selling API products. Um, whether it's in the, uh, health and, um, health space or even, uh, CPG space, um, and, uh, to be conglomerate's there. And that's a, um, that's a, I think a key thing that we have in common and that allows us to work on tail flow and of course, uh, get access to decent sized customers. We do sell to enterprise most of the time. Yeah. Uh, no amazing stuff, man. Um, you know, again, let's talk about the elephant in the room, because when you think about market research, uh, most people will think of Gartner, right? That's kind of the name brand in the market when you're talking about market research, vendor analysis. Um, so obviously that's what everybody thinks about. But just based on your experience, what challenges do you think, you know, customers face when they're using something like a Gartner? Um, firstly, uh, Gartner has, I think, um, a bit of an issue, readily tailoring their insights to any specific use case, especially on demand. So you tend to rely on Gartner to provide their analyst services, which would require you to book a call with an analyst and do what's called a inquiry. And these inquiry calls, uh, can sometimes take months to book. And it's a half hour to one hour call with an analyst, sometimes a junior analyst. And they kind of go over your use case over the phone with you to figure out what may be relevant. And the pool of vendors that they select from are, of course, very mature and things they know very well. And sometimes you don't really get the emerging vendors, um, uh, part of the analysis and, you know, it's it's, uh, it's a helpful call, I'm sure. Um, and once in a while, Gartner will then do more follow ups or documentation, reviews of any internal documents on, um, how you're doing, the your vendor selection and the priorities you're considering and, and how you're weighting vendors, um, based on fewer requirements. Uh, I would just say that, uh, Gartner primarily struggles with, um, uh, making this easily accessible to their audience, making this tailored to their use case. It's still on the customer's shoulders to figure out what's relevant to them and do a thorough analysis that's worthy of, you know, a multimillion dollar decision. So here's an interesting thing because I see the same thing. I look at Gartner and, you know, again, I think a lot of these incumbents or market leaders spin around so long they get comfortable. There's not a ton of competition, um, in the space because it's very time intensive. Like it's not easy to just go start a, you know, Gartner or research company. Uh, they've had a lot of time to do it. But now with AI, that completely changes. But I'm just curious to get your quick thoughts on, you know, why do you think companies still want to use Gartner? My personal thinking is there's just too many vendors, and there's always new vendors or solutions in the market coming to the market that are that could potentially solve a problem, but customers just don't have the time or know how to know who's the right vendor or even know about the vendor. Is that why you think people still utilize Gartner or rely on Gartner? Or what's kind of your thoughts? Or even just market research companies in general? I think we're in a transition phase. But, you know, I think Gartner has a lot of authority and they've built a great reputation. You know, from the days of Gideon founding Gartner, he built a great brand around, you know, really well done research and um, and of course, understanding all the different aspects of every market as much as he could and expanded that. Well, and, and they just have a great reputation. But you're right, now it does feel like they're a bit ripe for disruption. Um, uh, I would say in the CIO's office, uh, making a decision off of a Gartner recommendation is a bit like buying IBM 20 years ago, 30 years ago, where you could not go wrong. By doing that, you will not lose your job for doing that. However, I'm kind of seeing that sentiment change within the ranks. Uh, maybe it hasn't reached a CIO yet, but definitely in the enterprise, from the director level to the VP level. Uh, we've had so many calls where people, uh, instinctually do not trust what Gartner says anymore because there is this perception that, um, Gartner has become, uh, has is a bit behind on some things. It may not be as flexible as to, uh, what it covers. And tech has become so much more complex. We've entered practically a Cambrian explosion of tools since the AI boom. And even before that, where, uh, you know, it's almost impossible to stay on top of everything if you're just using humans. Yeah. And that's the, uh, the next couple question is really going to dive deeper into that. Um, so the next question for you is what makes you think, uh, or believe that, uh, Taylor Flow can do this market research, uh, cheaper, better, faster, easier. And those are the you know, that's why we started versus that's why we started the Spin Advantage podcast. Because, you know, I think it's it's all about the information gap company just didn't know. All they know is Gartner. Right. That was what's available. And like you said there is. But you know I think you guys have figured out a fantastic model. But why do you think, um, you can kind of achieve those four value points? Well, we have two major pillars to what makes tail feel special. The first is, of course, our ability to scale research affordably and more or less on demand. And we use a combination of novel techniques like, uh, LMS and uh, Rag, which is retrieval, augmented gen AI and of course have a very sophisticated workflow around, um, kicking certain anomalies in our research to human analysts who are leading experts in their field. So everything we do is human in the loop. And but we've made it so efficient that when a human analyst, quote unquote, you know, enters, enters, uh. Enters the chat, they're able to, um, focus their efforts where they're necessary. And so that's how we couple the best of both worlds, being able to scale all the grunt research efficiently with the latest in AI, and being able to maintain, um, authority by having experts, uh, you know, correct any drift or correct any hallucination or correct, uh, anything that may be anomalous. And we have the tools to pick up on where which areas they should focus. So it makes the workflow very efficient. The second component is our decision making framework, which uh, can be applied at practically any level of market research, whether you're just doing something in the discovery phase, trying to understand the universe of vendors that's relevant to you, or you're down to the nitty gritty of figuring out exactly which vendor you're going to POC with. Um, this is just, uh, some very sophisticated rules engines in the background and, uh, a thoroughly analyzed and, um, and developed, uh, framework for making decisions where we weight dimensions, features, requirements, uh, according to the specific use case at hand and transparently rank and rate vendors for that given use case. And that framework makes it really fast for people to figure out. Okay, based off all the research we've done, how should we pick the right vendor for us? Um, without having to resort to these monster spreadsheets or having to resort to using power BI and a bunch of other tools to run the analysis. Um, and, uh, I think we've just, uh, cracked the science to make that decision framework really useful. So one word or, uh, I guess two words, uh, that you you mentioned. I want to dive, like, you know, a minute into that. So you talked about on demand. And when I look at research and this is something, again, we have audience of, you know, executives and procurement and finance and it I think I want to kind of simplify this messaging because it's so important. Right. Because of your unique capabilities, this on demand concept. I mean, you think about a lot of these research companies spend a lot of people time, hours to do all these things, but it's very static because of the cost of doing this. Research is so high. You know, once they do it, it's not like they can do it on demand. Right? And it's very time intensive. So can you kind of talk about, um, the benefit of maybe doing this on demand or being able to do this on demand model versus, again, not just against Gartner, but maybe the older traditional way of, uh, doing Analysis there, of course, so I'd compare ourselves mostly to the desk research, the manual desk research processes that these enterprises are consulting firms have to engage in internally and do it over and over again. Even at the big four firms, they spend on average about two days of desk research, like full time days, um, to research a single vendor in an analysis. And of course, they're using very expensive, uh, talent to do this work. And, um, it's not very iterative. They keep having to go back to the drawing board once they get internal feedback and external feedback on what's important and what's not. So the beauty of table flow is, as you're creating, um, your decision document, tail flows, pulling the use cases that are most relevant to you that you've indicated, and then giving you all the tools to further refine every nuance of your use case. And so you can, within a few minutes, go from something maybe a bit generic to something extremely specific to your use case. Um, and I think that's really beneficial to the decision making process in this day and age, because things change so fast and also because, uh, you know, we're we're in an economic environment where we don't really want to assign resources to spend weeks and months, uh, researching vendors. That's not a core competency. So for enterprises of all sizes, being able to make a decision for your stack quickly is going to be a major differentiator in how fast you move and innovate. So, um, and it's a pain point that virtually every technology leader faces is, uh, I have a need. Who's going to fill that need? Are we going to build something internally? Are we going to buy something externally? And if we're going to buy something externally, how are we going to choose that? How am I going to document that decision? How am I going to have all the key I need to ratify this decision so I feel comfortable with it. Um, so. That's that's why this OnDemand piece is so important. In this day and age. We just don't have the time, uh, to do research anymore. Yeah, I, um, no, I love that. Um, so follow up question for you. Let's talk about some examples. Right. People. So people can visualize. So can you give us maybe two different examples of how companies can utilize the data and research that, uh, that you have. Of course. So I'll give one example. We had a customer, uh, mid-market company. They were, uh, making a major overhaul of their ERP systems. And uh, also were investigating whether they should use an iPads and which iPads to go with. So they were considering several vendors like MuleSoft and Microsoft and, and, uh, so on and so forth. There were a lot of vendors being considered. And this was, you know, uh, not a huge decision, but it was definitely going to be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands to a few million. And the issue for them is that they had very little internal expertise on what iPads vendors could do for them, whether the pricing was right, how they could model the ROI, or their TCO of any given iPad vendor. Um, so they, uh, basically started the process by signing up for table flow, having a quick call with our analyst, um, just to get a bit of the lay of the land and then start customizing themselves. Their decision document within dataflow and within two weeks made that that huge decision. So they went from 0 to 102 weeks, um, including signing the contract with the given vendor. And um, and still today, that decision is hugely successful. And we're almost a year later. And, uh, it saved them a bunch of money because they were able to run the financial analysis with Intel Flow to model out how much more efficient the winning vendor would be against the runner up. And that was a major deal maker for them. So that's one example. Um, and the second example I would give is uh, we had a customer, a very large, uh, fortune 100, um, type company. They had to, uh, run analyses, um, to figure out their data integration and connectivity strategy at large. So they had this huge pool of vendors they were considering, like in the somewhere between 50 to 100 vendors. And it was going to be a multi-part, um, uh, recommendation we'd have to make. It was not just about picking one vendor, it was about figuring out a strategy of multiple vendors and stitching them together. And so, um, it was really interesting for us to see that, uh, over the course of a couple of weeks, uh, their initial shortlist of about 5 to 10 vendors that they thought may be worth pursuing with none of them actually made it to the final shortlist. Um, because of all the revelations tailor made. And, uh, they were a bit shocked, of course, about, uh, how many gotchas their initial shortlist vendors had that we're going to make them wholly incompatible for their use case, and we just saved them a ton of time and implementation, a ton of time, of course, communicating the decision across the ranks of the company all the way to the CIO's office and the documentation we were able to provide to this company, again, more or less on demand, was so thorough that they're able to get sign off, um, more or less immediately because of, uh, all the CIA we provide. Every trade off is documented in the document as you make your changes, every, uh, single rating is explained. Um, so it's easy for a decision maker to go through these documents that get generated on the fly and see that. Wow. I feel comfortable with this decision. I can sign off on this because we've done our homework. Yeah. I, uh, I love these examples. Um, and I want to I mean, you know, obviously versus, uh, we have built a brand focusing on saving companies time and money across their entire vendor spend. And so I love, you know, how savings partner like yourself. Um, you know, kind of how you describe, you create the ROI for them. So I want to I want to go a little bit deeper into a couple of those examples. Uh, again, specifically talking about can you give some either examples or, you know, uh, thoughts on how can a company specifically save money? Uh, and then we'll follow up with the saving time part. But the saving money of using a platform like this, um, you know, how does that quantifiably work? So, um, there's a more exacting way to do things, and then there's a more high level way to do things. But, uh, you can imagine that when you're, uh. That you're trying to find some kind of, uh, equilibrium. Right? There's, uh, there's functionality which is really important. And then k well, how much is that functionality going to cost me? Do I go with the best vendor or do I go with the vendor that's, you know, you know, 90% there but 50% cheaper, right. So you can these are really important trade offs that you make. So pricing decisions I think are never made in isolation. Um, they're more or less made of course. Uh, alongside the um, uh, you know what? You're what? You're getting out of it. Right? So the, um, so at a high level, we understand the pricing of various vendors, uh, even in some more opaque categories, uh, where there's a lot of custom pricing, we can directionally guide, um, our users and kind of explain that, hey, relative to this vendor or relative to a vendor, a vendor be, uh, will charge more per API call by about this much or, um, relative to vendor C vendor B will be more efficient for the amount of data you're transferring. So we can provide directional advice even though um, and that is done. That can be done in the app even though, uh, pricing is is custom in certain categories, when the categories are less about custom pricing, like you go to a cloud vendor's website and, you know, C, you know, uh, down to what unit of to compute and how much you would pay for that. Uh, then we just ingest those models wholesale and provide tools where people can, uh, manipulate those, um, those, uh, usage metrics and kind of see how things would cost, um, uh, on a, on an upfront basis, on an ongoing basis. And then we have the tools where they can map out, uh, net present value, uh, over five years, uh, cumulative benefit and of course, ROI. Uh, the TCO stuff requires a bit of customization because then we have to understand more about the, uh, the, the labor requirements to get this implemented within the company. Um, but that's an additional service. And add on that we offer to our enterprise customers. So, um, we do say people money by giving them, uh, really, uh, helpful high level directional indications of what vendor's going to cost more, um, based off our knowledge in the RFPs we've seen. And then we can go really detailed, uh, with our enterprise customers where we're modeling out, um, everything from TCO to ROI and, um, and showing them, uh, of course, the net results from between vendor and vendor b over the course of one year or two years and up to five years, and we can we can do that more or less on demand as well. Yeah, I, uh, know that. That's awesome. So then if you expand that into specifically now saving companies time, you kind of gave some a couple examples before, but talk about how, uh, IT procurement, uh, can really focus on saving time by using this type of um, platform. Of course. So the amount of desk research that IT and procurement, um, have to do is maybe less than, you know, some of the, uh, the contributors on other teams that are like coming up with the suggestions that, hey, we should go buy Datadog or should buy New Relic, and here are the reasons why. But they still have to feel comfortable with the decision before they sign off. And so there's some level of of, uh, fact checking they want to do. And, um, I, I kind of sense that, uh, within the procurement team, it's difficult because naturally they might not be experts at these categories. Like, why would you expect a procurement officer to know everything about APM and observability tools or about IPA's tools or about CRMs, but they would like that knowledge so that they can feel comfortable with their signing off on so tailored flow is saves them a lot of time, because I think it eliminates the need for so much back and forth between, uh, the leaders on other teams and the procurement officers in terms of understanding why certain vendor was picked over another, because things are so well documented and the procurement team can transparently see that, hey, like table flow as a third party has validated this decision, has provided a lot of documentation around it and, um, that in a in a pretty unbiased manner and that I can see exactly why this was recommended. So if I'm willing to read the document, I'm able to understand how we got to this conclusion. So I think that says procurement officers a lot of time. And they definitely need time savings, because I believe procurement is one of the most, you know, stretched teams in any given organizations. There's too few procurement officers for how much how much procurement is going on. And this could definitely save them time and reduce their stress. Yeah, you hit it right there, man. It's, uh. It's pretty incredible. I mean, we love procurement teams. We think they're, uh, tremendous value to to every business, but, man, you're you're, you know, thinking one, two procurement people can manage a thousand vendors or be an expert on all of that. Like that's not possible. Right. Like, and but I think that's what sometimes company expect. And I think with Taylor Flow you're kind of that that secret weapon with that data behind them. Um, so as we wrap up this, uh, the I just want to I just want to add one more thing to the procurement officer thing. One very interesting use case is that the procurement officers can offer tail flow as a resource to other teams so that, you know, like, it can speed up, you know, build some favor there and speed up their research as well. So because even the ICS do not have the knowledge on everything and procurement being able to offer this to the team at large, I think it's hugely beneficial as well. I just want to touch on that. Yeah. No, I love that. Uh, idea. Um, so as we kind of wrap up on the conversation here, I got a, uh, I got $1 billion question for you to kind of close this thing out. So you you, in the beginning talked about Gartner being the name brand. They did a great job building the brand and which is trust. A lot of times brand equals trust, like that's what people think of. And so that helps with the research, right. Meaning the research that comes out the customers needs to be able to trust it. Obviously time goes on. You know, sometimes people, uh, you know, paid to be on the research that, you know, pay to play kind of thing. I think, you know, uh, definitely creates more challenges for customer using some of those bigger firms. Now, the billion dollar question of is, how can you convince a enterprise that they can trust, um, the analysis and report that you guys, you know, put together and why, how and why, of course. So the reason they trust Gartner analysis is of course, because of the methodology, but mostly because of the senior analysts or principal analysts and that are employed at Gartner who are actually experts in their field. I don't think that Gartner customers care as much about what a junior analyst thinks, because they've been 2 to 3 years in the field, out of school, potentially, and may not have all the industry knowledge necessary to ratify an expensive decision. So low flow didn't. Wholesale replace analysts, but we've replaced the junior analyst with our unique use of AI and our decision making framework, but we still use principal analysts to ratify our research. Um, so like I mentioned earlier in the call, uh, how things ultimately get vetted is they get vetted by a leading expert in the field. And funny enough, sometimes those leading experts are former principal analysts at Gartner. Sometimes there are people who have authored many books on this particular category you might be researching. And so we really pick, uh, somewhere between the, you know, at least a top ten expert in this field, um, and pay them well, uh, to, uh, ratify the research and keep it fresh and keep us posted on things that change. So, uh, I do think that we're able to provide the same level of authority at Tableau Flow. Uh, but we're just doing it a much more scalable manner. And what we replaced is, again, the junior part, um, which is not as valuable as, uh, as we think. Yeah, great answer man. Um, so the last question that we always ask our guest is, uh, you you've seen a lot. You've done a lot. Uh, you're a serial entrepreneur. Uh, if you have to give one personal and or business advice could be anything, uh, that you're most passionate about. What do you think that advice would be? Uh, so to founders is when you start something, commit to ten years. Um, because it's going to take that long. So. Well, it could take that long. Of course, some of us get luckier sooner. Um, so that's been a learning for me because my first startup, uh, we hit product market fit within six months. And, you know, we were 50 or so people within a year and a half. Like, it scaled super fast. We got lucky with tail flow. It's taking longer. But I have such high conviction. I've built over time, um, that this is going to be a phenomenally big business because of, uh, exactly like the amount of time we spent talking to customers, the amount of time we spent iterating the product, uh, Crafting something to perfection has been an absolute delight. But to get here, I've had to, uh, you know, stick with that commitment that was going to build this over ten years and maybe longer. Um, because sometimes that's just what it takes to build something, hopefully massive. Yeah, I, uh no, I love that, man. It's such a such a great advice. And obviously everybody wants instant, you know, scalability and satisfaction. But, um, but no, thank you for all the conversation today. And again, we're so lucky and happy to have you guys as a, uh, savings partner, uh, for all the companies out there. So appreciate your time and, uh, look forward to growing the partnership. Likewise. Thank you so much, Victor. Take care. That was an amazing episode of the Spend Advantage podcast, where we show you how we can help you ten x your bottom line savings and top line growth for your business. Hope you enjoy the conversation. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.