A Few Weeks In: Why I Joined Green Cabbage
Written by Jeff Piluso, RVP, East Cost Sales
I’ve spent more than 30 years helping executives work through hard business problems. I started in accounting at a Big 4 firm, then spent years in management consulting on strategic sourcing, procurement transformation, technology enablement, and M&A integration. Most recently I led client accounts and go-to-market for a fast-growing managed services business.
During my decades of experience across various industries around the world, one moment happened over and over: a CFO or CPO heading into a big renewal or sourcing review, fairly sure they were overpaying, with no way to really prove it.
The old playbook
Most sourcing work runs the same way: issue an RFP, get the responses, then compare them against what you have been paying, whatever current market data you can find, or a should-cost model someone built. The data is unfortunately usually from a different industry, outdated, reflects a company twice your size, or is completely generic. It led me to use a commonly used adage about benchmarks: “I only know one thing for sure about benchmarks…they’re WRONG!” So you walk into the negotiation with an estimate, a hunch, and hope.
I think about one engagement often. We were helping a multinational retailer renegotiate a large advertising agency relationship. Our should-cost model was solid, but we still never knew where the floor was. With Green Cabbage, that client would have known exactly how far the conversation could go. Specifically, they could know exactly what that supplier had conceded to another, similarly sized / sector customer in the last few MONTHS!
Where the confidence comes from
People ask me why a good should-cost model isn’t enough. It certainly helps. But a model gives you a reasoned estimate, and what you want walking into a negotiation is a hard target based on what comparable companies actually paid.
That’s what got me when I looked under the hood here. Green Cabbage’s pricing data is constantly refreshed, comes from the client’s own sector, and reflects companies in a similar revenue range, in the same geography. Those are exactly the gaps that made older market data unreliable.
Recency matters more than most people realize. I’ve always loved Moore’s Law – Gordon Moore’s observation that computing power doubles roughly every two years – because it captures how fast technology moves. Pricing rides the same curve. Early buyers pay the most, and prices fall as products mature. Services are moving just as fast. Agencies and consulting firms are using AI tools today that they didn’t have six months ago, and their cost to deliver has shifted with them. On a curve that steep, data from 18 months ago describes a different market.
Eric, our CEO, sums up what we deliver as speed, precision and security. Precision is the one I felt right away, because it’s where confidence comes from. You know where the market is, you have a specific number, and you can hold your position. And when you and your supplier are working from the same picture of the market, the time to completion gets shorter and more productive. So if you’re a consultant, that speed means fewer man hours for the same value delivered and if you’re a Procurement organization, it means a more productive team and shorter time to savings. For both? On to the next!!!
The people behind it
Knowing where the market is gets you halfway. Green Cabbage pairs the data with experts from technology sales, procurement, legal and consulting who have sat on both sides of the deal and can help you act on it.
For most of my career, I’ve watched smart people walk into big negotiations with less information than the person across the table. Green Cabbage closes that gap, and that’s why I’m here. If you have a renewal coming up or a supplier relationship you’re rethinking, let’s talk before you sign. I’ll bring the data!