How a $400M distributor cut SaaS spend by 42%
Inside a 90-day Spend Rescue engagement — methodology, surprises, and the CFO-ready outcome.
A distribution business with roughly four hundred million in revenue was running one hundred and forty paid SaaS subscriptions across four operating units. Nobody owned the total.
The first thirty days were pure discovery: contracts, invoices, SSO logs and actual active usage reconciled into a single register. The surprises were ordinary and expensive — three overlapping analytics tools, a CRM tier bought for a feature already licensed elsewhere, and nine hundred seats provisioned for eleven hundred employees with six hundred monthly actives.
The next thirty days consolidated capability and set renewal dates deliberately, so the company would never again negotiate two major contracts in the same quarter without leverage. The final thirty executed the renegotiations.
Net reduction was forty-two percent of annual SaaS spend, with no reduction in delivered capability, and a governance model the CFO could present to the board without footnotes.