Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re going after the midmarket. 

Aman Mann: Yes. I don’t think anybody is still clear what the midmarket is as the economy grows. But I would call our space the midmarket.

Sramana Mitra: How do you define that? Are we talking $10 million to $500 million companies?

Aman Mann: That’s a pretty good number. We also see this cusp between 50- to 1000-team members. We also look at the tech stack for their accounting system. 

Sramana Mitra: What are the dynamics of adoption in this segment? What are the triggers that drive people to start bringing in a solution like yours into an organization?

Aman Mann: When you have this dichotomy of wanting to move fast but very safe, you typically sacrifice one for the other. Organizations that are trying to grow need to keep consistent with data and keep it as real-time as possible.

The forward-thinking ones move fast. Sometimes, we see organizations that learn the tough way. They end up having some form of bottleneck where people aren’t able to get what they need in time, so projects are delayed or they spend too much money and now have to figure out how not to make that mistake again.

Sramana Mitra: How would you find who is having that kind of bottleneck?

Aman Mann: We spend a very long time and a lot of effort on creating engagement online and creating awareness that allows organizations who are looking for solutions to this challenge online. We are focused on just creating knowledge and awareness. 

Sramana Mitra: Are all your prospects inbound?

Aman Mann: Yes. We definitely do our own outreach in trying to get proactive, but a lot of our focus is on just generating enough content online.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to synthesize the kinds of bottlenecks that are coming up in organizations that reach out to you that look for a procurement solution, are there triggers that you’ve identified? 

Aman Mann: That’s the exciting and challenging part. Every industry, in some way, is unique in the way they think about spend and their processes. They have their own unique identifiers. You can look at operational excellence. You can think about lean Six Sigma.

If you don’t have continuous improvements and have stagnant archaic processes, you’re inherently going to move slower and make lower-quality decisions. A lot of organizations are waking up to this idea that data can be a powerful insight indicator for making smarter decisions.

Bottlenecks is as simple as if an engineer needs product X and sends it through ad hoc ways. He needs it one week from now, but it takes one month. That entire project could be an architect team, an engineer team or any different forms of engineering. That will create a bottleneck throughout the entire system. 

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like in manufacturing or engineering-driven organizations, parts procurement is a mega-trigger. 

Aman Mann: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other such trends?

Aman Mann: You’re going to get many layers and factors. You’ve got an organizational challenge of how to manage this allocated resource, which is finite in most cases, and make sure that it’s allocated correctly to the right decisions. Real-time information is also relayed back to you.

You will typically weigh yourself in one direction. If an organization has bad processes, they’re going to create a lot of policies and control. That inherently creates complexity and slows down decision making. If you go the other way and create complete autonomy without any structure or systems in place, you’re going to find quick decisions that end up with some unfortunate consequences sometimes.

It’s okay to take risks and fail in projects that need to get out, but when you think about your finite resources, you don’t get too many mistakes with that. If you’re an organization burning more cash than you bring in, you’re living on a very finite game.

If you’re an organization that’s running on revenue, that’s also a finite game because you then have to measure and manage against what you’re bringing in.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann
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