I’m going to adopt Jason Busch’s AiTS disclosure here (and probably for all Green Cabbage blogs going forward) because I came up in Liberal Arts and my English-major brain is sick of the content washing machine most of the internet has become, and also as a newly minted CMO, my goal is to be real, transparent, and to stand out vs. drone along sloppily with the masses (see! A run-on sentence with two parentheticals! It’s me!).
And with a brand named…Green Cabbage…we’re kind of destined to stand out.
Anyway, here’s the scale:
AiTS Disclosure
Ideation: 10 | Writing: 9 | Editing: 8
Jason’s AiTS (AI Transparency Scale) runs 0–10 across three dimensions — Ideation, Writing, and Editing — where 10 means fully human and 0 means the AI did everything but sign its name. Ideation and data/proof/pipeline/results structure are mine. I asked Claude to help me with an SEO/GEO friendly title, and to clean up the CTAs at the end. It also suggested I give more “warm and appreciative” credit to my colleague Michael, so there ya go, Michael.
So, I’ve been asked to write about my first two weeks here.
Things move fast. Ideas move to dev to shipped quickly. We hear “get them on the phone” constantly, and honestly, there are a LOT of impressive people to call. The EAB is hyper engaged. Clients are saving millions, every day, and that is celebrated by our team every time we get a “woah, I wasn’t expecting this level of savings” e-mail or call.
It’s really fun.
There’s also a long way to go, especially as a marketer. My job is to tell the stories, to position, to differentiate, to capture the “why” of a tech-enabled services / market intelligence company that is only just beginning to truly come into itself, and to make people line up to see what they’re missing. Isn’t it funny, that in most companies, there’s always an element of “woah, we had no idea you did that too?”
I’ve been asked multiple times in the past two weeks “why’d you go to the dark side?” Or “why’d you go to a company named after a brassica?” Aka, why, after an almost two-decade “vendor neutral” career (first at Spend Matters, getting the birds-eye view of the space across solution providers, practitioners, consultants, and investors, and then the past two-and-a-half years on the procurement transformation services side). Here’s my answer: data, proof, pipeline, and results.
Data
I’ll get flack for this, but anyone can create a workflow these days (guys, I know you’re purpose-made and specially built for procurement and finance workflows. Let me generalize for a moment). Having the (clean) data to power it is a different story. If it’s just tech with no substance, or a thinly veiled “AI layer” on top of legacy SaaS that relies on an individual company’s data in their single instance to run, godspeed and good luck out there. Here comes some marketing speak (BUT IT’S TRUE I’VE SEEN IT): 2.2+ billion data points, 17,200+ suppliers covered, 2,600 clients.
Proof
15-30% hard-dollar savings on average.
Crazy high client retention rate.
Pipeline
100% growth, YOY, for the past five years. I’ll leave that there. A marketer’s dream.
Results
Average 20X ROI. Usually way more.
Ew, shut up Sheena, you’re getting marketing-y!
One more point: Green Cabbage’s AI spend cube is a huge reason I joined. We’re seeing Anthropic, OpenAI, et al have wild (WILD) price variance across the contracts we’re analyzing. It’s a seller’s market, baybee! My colleague, Michael Cadieux, our resident AI contract expert, says:
“What looks like a simple API contract is actually six overlapping pricing variables. Every one of them compounds. You’ve got seat vs. consumption, input vs. output tokens, real-time vs. batch processing, prompt caching, geography/data residency, and model tier selection. Also, EU/UK/APAC data residency end points carry a 15-30% premium over US baseline pricing.”
The Tokenpocalypse is real.
Michael continues, “This is 400-level strategic sourcing, with the angry hoard of Boards, C-suites, product coding teams, and end-user staff all wanting access yesterday. Procurement is like, ‘listen. This is a big, ugly, hairy beast of a supplier with hidden costs at every turn, and all the leverage. And you want me to push this through tomorrow. Ok – but I want to go on the record as saying, I reserve the right to say I told you so when we blow our annual consumption in three months.”
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to speak to the folks who are pioneering procurement’s (and preserving finance’s bottom line) leverage here, down to sub-vertical precision?
I think so.
On that note, here’s the CTA I’m training my team to put in every potential client touchpoint, based on where you may be in a research/buying cycle:
Never heard of you. Give me the 30-second version.
Intrigued. Show me more (without the sales pounce).
I need help now. Get me on the phone with an expert.
Get a demo.