Under Pressure: A CPO's Guide to Savings

It’s a scenario every procurement leader knows well: the proverbial 2 a.m. call from the CFO. The message is urgent: the quarter is bad, and the business needs savings, now. In that moment, procurement stands at a crossroads. Do you become the “cost police,” squeezing suppliers and cutting budgets, or do you step up as a strategic partner who can generate real, sustainable value?

In the latest episode of Proc & Roll, hosts Natasha Gurevich, Conrad Smith, and Zachary Bachir provide a practical playbook for navigating these high-stakes demands. They share their combined 71 years of experience on how to move from a reactive cost-cutter to a proactive, strategic powerhouse.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Understanding the “Why”: The crucial first step is to understand the driver behind the savings request. This context determines whether you need to aggressively pursue cash for survival or if you can focus on longer-term value.
• Proactive Preparation: The hosts agree that getting ahead of the call is critical. This involves having clean spend data ready to go , ensuring all contracts are accessible , and building strong stakeholder relationships in advance.
• The “Iron” Relationship with Finance: Your connection with the finance team must be solid. When Finance presents procurement’s savings numbers, they are seen as “bulletproof,” which eliminates the common “I don’t see it in the P&L” argument from the CFO.
• A Spectrum of Savings Levers: The discussion covers a range of tactics, from identifying “low-hanging fruit” like eliminating redundant services and subscriptions to the simple power of a “just ask” for a discount and more complex, transformational changes to a business’s operating model.
• The Uncomfortable Reality of Reopening Contracts: Conrad raises the tough subject of going back to a supplier to renegotiate a signed contract. The hosts discuss how to approach this transparently and why it’s sometimes necessary when a deal is “majorly disadvantageous to the enterprise”.
• The “Desktop Drill”: The episode concludes with a powerful, actionable tip from Conrad: don’t wait for a crisis. Run a “desktop drill” with your team to test your readiness by pretending the call from the CFO is coming tomorrow and asking, “Are you ready? What would you do?”.

Watch now or read the transcript below.

Transcript: Proc-N-Roll | Under Pressure: A CPO’s Guide to Savings

Natasha: Welcome to Proc and Roll, your guide to practical procurement, where we make procurement rock and roll. I’m Natasha Gurevich, founder and CEO of Candor Procurement, formerly CPO of Nike. With me are Zach Bachir and Conrad Smith. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the S-word, the swearing word of procurement called savings. We’ve all gotten that proverbial 2 a.m. call from the CFO that says the quarter is bad or COVID struck, and we need your team to deliver savings. In that moment, we can either become the “cost police” and start squeezing suppliers on the margin and cutting stakeholder budgets, which gives me chills just saying, or we can act as strategic partners, deep thinkers, and innovators. Zach, when a client calls you for savings, what’s your team’s thought process?

Zach: The first step is to understand the driver for the request. Is it a bad quarter, a bad year, an upcoming M&A, or a private equity owner trying to improve financial performance? The reason that’s so important is because you need to understand how much license you have to push for cost-cutting. If it’s a real financial challenge, like a turnaround situation where the business needs to survive, that’s one mandate. But if it’s about general financial performance, you can focus more on getting more value for the money, not just hard numbers. Understanding the context is super important because executing a cost reduction program can be very painful for stakeholders and suppliers. Sometimes, banging the desk with a supplier is necessary if the business is struggling and you just need to get that cash; it becomes about survival, not long-term relationships.

Natasha: So how can procurement get ahead of it so it’s not a last-minute demand? We all know very little can be delivered tomorrow.

Zach: It’s very difficult even when you’re doing an amazing job. You might get the call and feel like you’ve already trimmed all the costs you possibly can. In terms of preparation, it’s about getting the basics right. Have good spend data ready to go so it doesn’t take two weeks for finance to provide it. You need access to all your contracts so you don’t spend the first month just looking for documents. You also need to network and build good relationships in the business so when you get that call, you’re not going in cold to a stakeholder you’ve never met and saying, “I got a mandate to cut your budget”. It’s also a chance to ask the CFO to extend your reach into a bucket of spend you were previously told not to touch, where you know you can drive value.

Conrad: It’s important to recognize that procurement teams exist on a continuum of maturity. You might be in a very immature, tactical organization where you’re just reacting to expiring contracts you didn’t even know existed. For that team, just getting your spend data and contracts together could be a 6 to 12-month project. Or you could be in a very mature organization where you have everything at your fingertips—spend data from an ERP, a data warehouse, a CLM—and you can respond in an hour or two. As leaders, we have to invest that extra 5 or 10% to keep nudging our teams up that maturity curve, even when the tactical is killing us. Today, we have more help than ever with technology and AI to analyze spend information much more easily than even a year ago.

Natasha: For me, proactivity is the main thing. The first thing I do is follow the money to understand how much the company spends, with whom, and who the buyer is. This helps you understand the company’s buying patterns. I once asked a CMO how many agencies they thought they had, and they guessed 400; the real number was 3,900. When you’re a proactive thinker, you always have a long pipeline of projects that procurement would love to deliver but couldn’t because they lacked buy-in or resources. When the CFO calls, you can say “We can,” but you also know what you need to drive that value, whether it’s more resources, tech support, or a mandate to merge shadow procurement organizations.

Zach: To find savings, the first thing you should do is look for low-hanging fruit in redundancies. Get your spend data categorized, rank your suppliers by spend, and identify who is buying what. The easiest lever is to stop paying for something you don’t need, like terminating a subscription. The next lever might be asking non-strategic suppliers for a 5-10% discount just to see what happens. I once had a sales job where a person called and got a £10,000 saving just for asking. As you move up the chain, it gets harder. You might need to challenge the exact specifications of what you’re buying, or even change the whole operating model of how the business does things to save really big money.

Natasha: I think before you cut demand or squeeze suppliers, you should identify those redundancies. More often than not, you have redundant services or suppliers because speed to market dictates buying behavior. By proactively communicating where these sources of value are, procurement can potentially help prevent workforce cuts by showing leadership where money can be saved from business activities first.

Conrad: That puts a pit in my stomach—having to go back to the table on a contract that was already negotiated and signed. It feels really uncomfortable.

Natasha: I agree it should be rare and heavily justified, but I’ve done it a couple of times. If I see a contract that is majorly disadvantageous to the enterprise and will continue hurting it for years, it should be reopened. On another note, the relationship between procurement and finance has to be iron-solid. The best impact I’ve ever seen is when finance presents procurement’s savings numbers to the CFO. When FP&A validates your numbers, they are considered bulletproof, and it eliminates the CFO saying, “I don’t see these savings in the P&L”. We should also be trained in basic corporate finance literacy to understand terms like P&L, capex, and balance sheets.

Conrad: Just before we wrap, I have to share this. In business, we often do a “desktop drill,” where you pretend a crisis happens tomorrow and you plan what you would do. Why don’t we do that with this? Pretend right now that the call is going to come from the CFO. Go back to your teams and have a desktop drill. What’s in place? What would you do? How would you approach it? The call is going to come, and to be proactive, you’ve got to think through it in advance.

This transcript has been edited for clarity while maintaining all substantive content