How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in an SMP?

If you think that a SaaS management platform will help your organization, you have to convince your boss to buy it first. And it will be easy if your boss is well aware of the contemporary development in ITAM.

But if your boss is not very aware of it, then you have to show the benefits and value these software management tools can bring to your organization to get a budget for the tool.

In this post, we'll discuss how to convince your boss to buy a SaaS management tool for your organization.

Let’s start with seeing the benefits which SaaS management tools bring to your organization.

Benefits of Using an SMP

SMPs improve the efficiency of the IT department. SMPs manage most of the tasks from license renewal to allocation to user tracking and reduce the IT department's burden.

They help the IT department focus on the more important and critical tasks that will bring better business outcomes.

Visibility to your SaaS landscape: An SMP will give you complete visibility of your organization's SaaS stack. It discovers all the SaaS apps used in the organization and provides information about which applications the employees are using the most and which are redundant.

This will give you insight if the specific tool is approved or comes under shadow IT. To diagnose if your current SaaS stack is unoptimized, you can refer to our post on symptoms of unoptimized SaaS Stack (+Solution).

Optimize SaaS costs: According to Gartner, more than 30% of the SaaS budget is wasted every year. An SMP will provide SaaS usage reports about applications spent.

The SaaS usage report will give you insights on redundant apps, such as duplicate, unused, and underutilized apps. It will also help you to rightsize licenses and choose the correct tier plans.

Based on the reports, you can make data-informed decisions on which applications to keep and renew and which apps to terminate.

It also notifies users about any cancellation of the renewals so that they won't spend on the licenses they don't want and eliminates the SaaS wastage.

Use our ROI calculator to see how much return you can get with Zluri.

An SMP helps you to keep your organization secure and compliant: Zluri, an SMP, keeps track of which applications and devices the employees are using. It provides alerts for unapproved applications to minimize security risks and threats due to those apps. Moreover, you can approve or de-provision those apps directly from the Zluri dashboard.

Since organizations' sensitive information like customer details is stored in these apps, they must be secured. In case of data or compliance breaches, organizations have to pay hefty fines or may face lawsuits. An SMP keeps you audit-ready and compliant.

Save time and money with license and renewal management: As the size of your organization increases, it becomes common to see mismanagement of licenses. The unused or underused licenses bring security threats as well as increased costs of SaaS applications in your organization.

For example, an ex-employee of your company may have access to applications, and you may not have any idea about that. Also, you will not have visibility into what they are doing inside these apps.

A SaaS management platform, like Zluri, helps you to manage license renewals and notifies you before every renewal to decide on renewing contracts or not. You can read more about software license optimization in this post.

Better onboarding and offboarding experience: When you onboard new employees, you need to provide them the necessary tools. SaaS management platforms help you to give access to all the necessary tools efficiently to the new hires.

With Zluri, you can provide access to all the apps by just mentioning their department and title.

Similarly, at the time of offboarding, you can revoke access to all the applications used by the employee and transfer those licenses to new hires or cancel if you don't need them. Zluri is the best tool in the market for de-provisioning apps and offboarding users.

Apart from these benefits, Zluri helps the finance department in budget forecasting too.

Common Objections You May Face

Now let’s see some common objections to securing a budget for an SMP and how you can address them when your boss asks.

1. Aren't we managing for free with spreadsheets?

Spreadsheets are good when you have very few employees and use only a few SaaS applications. But as the number of applications increases, it becomes tedious and difficult to manage and keep track of SaaS applications with spreadsheets.

Apart from these, due to the manual nature of the tasks, managing applications with spreadsheets is naturally prone to human error. Also, spreadsheets have their own limitations. For example, tasks like getting insights on SaaS usage are not possible with Excel/Google Sheets.

You can not check and understand how different users are using the allocated SaaS application and whether the application is underutilized or unused. Also, you cannot manage licenses renewal and cancellation with spreadsheets directly.

Furthermore, with spreadsheets, you cannot automate onboarding and offboarding. As a result, the IT and HR team ends up spending a lot of time during onboarding and offboarding of employees.

2. What if the tool is not secure enough?

Security is very important when it comes to choosing the right SaaS management platform. However, you must be cautious as you share your applications' important data with the tool.

Most of the SaaS management tools are highly secure and are always updated with the latest security technologies and approved and certified by the various security governing bodies.

For example, Zluri is SOC2, GDPR, ISO 27001 certified. It also has deployed an effective and efficient combination of people, technology, and processes to ensure that the platform is resilient against modern-day cyber threats.

3. Why SMP if we can do it with SSO?

The number of apps you can connect with SSOs is far less than Zluri, which has more than 200,000 apps in its SaaS library. Further, Zluri deeply integrates with SaaS applications to find accurate SaaS usage and thus helps reduce risks and optimize costs.

The core value of Zluri comes from the fact that it connects directly with the applications. Thus, we get data directly from the source of truth.

SMPs: A Must Tool for the IT Department in the Post Pandemic World

It may seem difficult at first when you try to convince your boss to use a SaaS management platform for managing your organization's SaaS stack, but with proper data and reasoning, you can convince them.

Our customers have told us that Zluri pays for itself with the money it saves on SaaS apps. To see, how much it returns you can get, refer to our ROI calculator. For a company having 250 employees and 100 applications, you get close to four times the return on the price you pay.

The benefit which the SaaS management platform adds to your organization is immense. Remember, in the post-pandemic world, SMPs are becoming a must for the IT department.Book a Demo