SaaSMe Unfiltered: The SaaS Management Podcast · Zylo

From Spreadsheets to Success: A Guide to High-Velocity SaaS Procurement with Brittney Linville (Zylo)

·28 min·2 clips

Brittany walked into a new job and was told the Salesforce renewal was due in one week.

This episode features Brittany Linville, a strategic account executive at Zylo with a background in U.S. Army service, government procurement, and building procurement at high-growth SaaS firms. Hosts from the SaaSMe Unfiltered podcast interview her about developing high-velocity procurement strategies to manage software renewals. Linville explains that procurement professionals must build strategic partnerships, particularly with the CIO and CTO, to understand the SaaS tools each department buys and their specific compliance needs. She describes common early-career scenarios, like walking into a new role with a critical Salesforce renewal due in just one week. Linville details how she managed hundreds of annual renewals as a team of one by treating procurement as a "team sport," collaborating with app owners and leveraging relationships instead of immediately seeking more headcount. She recounts using disparate spreadsheets across IT and revenue teams, calling this state "spreadsheet hell," and emphasizes moving to a centralized system. Her approach involved creating a "table of contents" or single pane of glass, using platforms like Zylo to integrate data from tools like Coupa for intake and Ironclad for contract lifecycle management. She built a four-question intake process in Coupa to simplify requests and integrated conditional logic to avoid unnecessary steps, like a Data Processing Agreement for buying paper. A surprising insight is her view that a CTO often has more leeway than a CIO to bring in apps, provided they meet security standards, because those tools become subprocessors in the company's own product. Linville advocates being "intellectually curious," sitting in on FP&A meetings to understand budgeting and attending compliance discussions about regulations like GDPR and CCPA. She notes that procurement can manage scale by analyzing workload like a sales team, comparing the number of renewals per person. A memorable moment is her Taylor Swift "Bad Blood" analogy, equating spreadsheets to the cake in the music video that gets destroyed. The tone is conversational and educational, blending personal anecdotes with practical, step-by-step advice. The style is informal and relatable, with hosts and guest sharing laughs about common procurement frustrations. This episode is ideal for procurement leaders, IT managers, and finance professionals in SaaS companies who are overwhelmed by renewals and spreadsheets. Listeners seeking advanced technical deep dives or those not involved in software procurement might find it less relevant.

As heard by us

Procurement feels more strategic once spreadsheets turn into a system of record.

The episode lands on a plain enterprise truth: SaaS procurement usually starts in spreadsheets and urgency, then gets somewhere useful once someone turns the mess into a system of record.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how a first-week Salesforce renewal turns into a SaaS management lesson.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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