NoSaveNoPay vs In-House Procurement
The short version: your procurement team negotiates Oracle once every 3 years. Oracle's account exec negotiates all day, every day.
Honest head-to-head: fees, incentives, vendor independence, outcome accountability. No marketing. The decision factors we'd want if we were choosing.
Context on internal stakeholders, budget cycles, technical roadmap, and politically-charged trade-offs no outside firm can fully understand.
Even a world-class procurement team negotiates a given vendor 2–4 times per decade. The account executive on the other side of the table negotiates the same product 200+ times per year and has a team of deal-desk specialists backing every move. The asymmetry is structural — no amount of internal talent closes it.
Head-to-Head: Every Criterion That Matters
Identical criteria across every comparison we publish. No cherry-picking.
| Criterion | NoSaveNoPay | Your own in-house procurement / ITAM / SAM team |
|---|---|---|
| Repetitions per vendor per year | Our team closes 40–80 Oracle/Microsoft/SAP negotiations annually across the firm. | Most in-house teams: 1–3 per vendor across the whole contract cycle. |
| Cost model | 25% gainshare — no retainer, no headcount. | $180k–$350k fully-loaded per senior negotiator, plus benefits, tooling, training. |
| Vendor-side experience | Our negotiators came from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AWS, IBM. | Varies — most teams have buy-side experience only. |
| Conflict management | Zero internal politics — we just negotiate. | Internal stakeholders (IT, legal, business units) pull in different directions. |
| Audit-defence bench | Dedicated audit-defence practice, 60–80% claim reduction typical. | Usually sourced separately from law firms or big-four consulting. |
| Outcome visibility | Every dollar of savings verified against your original baseline. | Savings claims often buried in budget variance reports; hard to isolate. |
| Opportunity cost | Your team stays on their day job. | Senior procurement leaders spend 6–12 weeks on a major renewal. |
| Gainshare alignment | We win only when you save. | Salaries paid regardless of negotiation outcome. |
When to choose what
Use in-house procurement for internal context, technical scoping, and ongoing vendor-management hygiene. Call us 120 days before a major renewal or ELA cycle and we'll handle the negotiation itself.
How our gainshare actually works
We sign a one-page engagement letter that says three things: (1) we negotiate your nominated contract on your behalf; (2) 25% of verified savings vs. your baseline contract is payable to us; (3) if verified savings are zero, so is our fee. No retainer. No time-and-materials. No hourly billing. Read the detail on our pricing page or see a live walk-through on how it works.
Next steps — two paths, both zero-risk:
- If you have a renewal in the next 120 days: Request a free estimate. 30-minute call, we tell you whether we think there's savings worth chasing, no commitment either way.
- If you're earlier in the cycle: read our vendor-specific playbooks — Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AWS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday — or browse the blog and case studies.