The power shift from seller to buyer is real but unevenly distributed. Mid-market teams - 50 to 500 seats - often lack the leverage that enterprise buyers have to force concessions, and they don’t have the procurement sophistication to know what’s actually negotiable versus what’s vendor theater. The playbook for getting the best deal is available if you know how to read contract structure and funding signals before you enter a negotiation. Most buyers show up to the table without that intelligence.
The buyer's market shift is real. We're seeing procurement teams actually walking away from renewal conversations for the first time in years — especially on tools that haven't delivered measurable ROI. Vendors who can't show a before/after on business outcomes are losing deals they would have auto-renewed 18 months ago.
CFOs and procurement leaders in mid-market are starting every renewal negotiation from a position of skepticism now. AI alternatives or in-house builds are live conversations, not hypotheticals. Great read.
If you have a unique, or AI/ML specific use case I would oblige the POC request. But if you’re asking for proof of basic features like ingesting data, spinning up compute, etc then it’s going to be a hard no from me dawg.
The power shift from seller to buyer is real but unevenly distributed. Mid-market teams - 50 to 500 seats - often lack the leverage that enterprise buyers have to force concessions, and they don’t have the procurement sophistication to know what’s actually negotiable versus what’s vendor theater. The playbook for getting the best deal is available if you know how to read contract structure and funding signals before you enter a negotiation. Most buyers show up to the table without that intelligence.
The buyer's market shift is real. We're seeing procurement teams actually walking away from renewal conversations for the first time in years — especially on tools that haven't delivered measurable ROI. Vendors who can't show a before/after on business outcomes are losing deals they would have auto-renewed 18 months ago.
CFOs and procurement leaders in mid-market are starting every renewal negotiation from a position of skepticism now. AI alternatives or in-house builds are live conversations, not hypotheticals. Great read.
If you have a unique, or AI/ML specific use case I would oblige the POC request. But if you’re asking for proof of basic features like ingesting data, spinning up compute, etc then it’s going to be a hard no from me dawg.
Of course. I was mostly referencing AI stuff with that. Although I am sure folks can push for more basic POCs as well in today’s market