How Crossbeam saved $10K+ with Ramp Price Intelligence

As a fast-growing technology company Crossbeam is leaning heavily into augmenting its workforce with technologies that drive productivity, reduce manual work, and generate ROI.

Crossbeam works with multiple software vendors and juggles various multi thousand-dollar contracts. Matt Dougherty, Crossbeam’s Senior Director of Finance, says his team spends one to two hours each week tracking and managing vendor pricing. 

When it came to purchasing new software solutions, Matt was using a highly manual, time-consuming, and frustrating process to research the best possible price. “I would look through three, four different online communities and search around to try to see what the price was, if there were any competitor prices, and try to see if there was any relevant data to me,” says Matt. That search process would take him one to two hours, and he’d follow it with an additional web search. “Sometimes you can find a little nugget of information randomly,” Matt explains. “If I couldn’t find anything, I would then create my own post or even email a group of colleagues for insights.” It typically would take him a few days to receive replies that could help inform his decision. 

“If it’s a new vendor, there may not be any data out there,” Matt says. “Those new vendors are still iterating on their pricing and packaging, so you can’t really get relevant data points.” 

Every time Crossbeam wanted to select a new vendor, Matt needed to undergo this tedious process. Even after conducting his search, Matt still couldn’t ever be sure he was getting the best price.

Crossbeam already saved several hours per month using Ramp for spend management, corporate cards, and Bill Pay.

“We’ve been on Ramp for two years,” says Matt. “It’s embedded into everything we do as far as spending money, and it’s been a great tool for keeping everything super accurate and answering questions people have about their vendors.” 

With early access to Ramp's new Price Intelligence tool, Matt saw an opportunity to shift from a sub-optimal manual vendor selection process to a more data-driven approach. Price Intelligence uses AI to extract pricing data from uploaded contracts and benchmarks them against millions of Ramp transactions, giving finance leaders full visibility into software pricing down to the individual SKU and cost-per-seat.

With Price Intelligence, Matt and his team can immediately identify if the quotes they receive are materially higher than average and negotiate with confidence to save more money. 

“Saying that we’re within a 5% or less variance of what the best price is is very important to us,” says Matt. “We don’t want to be wildly overpaying by 25% or even double what someone else is paying. Hitting that sweet spot and knowing that we’re not getting ripped off is extremely important.”

Price Intelligence has eliminated the need for Matt’s circuitous, vendor selection process and regained lost hours for Matt and his team. “Looking at contracts is important, and we want to get the best price, but my time is probably better spent thinking through more strategic activities like the structure of our sales team or forecasting revenue rather than just reading contracts,” says Matt. Price Intelligence allows him to spend his time where he’s needed most critically. 

Since deploying Price Intelligence, Crossbeam has already realized material cost-savings. “It has saved us tens of thousands of dollars,” says Matt. “I anticipate it might save $100K to $200K per year across all our contracts.” 

Those cost-savings are significant, certainly—and so is the reduced mental burden Price Intelligence has facilitated for Crossbeam’s finance team. 

“It just gives me peace of mind, right?” says Matt. “When I go to all these different sources, I’ll get a few different data points. You can’t ever feel fully confident. But if you’re actually able to back the price up with dozens of data points as opposed to one or two, it gives you a lot of peace of mind. You can be confident you’re getting the best price, and you don’t need to spend any more time researching it.”