At RightsZone, we have identified three key steps that we believe can grow a rights business: Workflow, Data and Strategy. The steps are based on the work we have done with many different rights departments and professionals, across an array of publishers and agencies.
We will take you through each of these steps in this series of blog posts, looking at common difficulties, approaches you can take to overcome them and how in doing so you can grow your rights business.
In this, our first post of the series, we will look at the impact that streamlining your workflows can have on your rights business.
Workflow worries
Rights can be admin heavy, there are a lot of things that have to happen before you can make a deal, and just as much work to maintain a rights agreement over its lifespan. At each stage of the workflow, there is a lot of information to stay on top of and when you have a large number of books, with deals at various stages of the rights lifecycle, it is easy to get bogged down in tedious admin and feel like you never have enough time for the really important sales work.
Common workflow issues shared by rights professionals
When we talk to rights professionals, we hear a lot of frustration around workflow.
Common complaints include:
having to key something in one place and then enter the same data elsewhere
trying to manage a proliferation of spreadsheets or systems that have slightly different versions of the same information, i.e. one for submissions, another for contracts, a third for royalties
having to wait to get sign off from different people at various stages, e.g. getting someone to approve a request for an invoice to be raised
losing track of where you are with any given deal or what the next action should be because there is no easy way of recording this.
How much time is wasted in your workflow thanks to your current system?
When we surveyed rights users on the amount of time it took them to check rights availability and record and send a submission, using their existing systems, the feedback ranged from 8-15 minutes per submission.
Using RightsZone, this time can be reduced to as little as 1 minute. Or, to put it another way, would enable you to process 8 submissions in the same time it would previously have taken you to process 1.
Auditing your workflow
With these frustrations (and others!) in mind, at RightsZone, we recommend that you do a workflow audit. It’s something that we do with our consultancy clients. Together, we break down each of the stages involved in your rights work and, for each stage, we review all of the steps you currently take in order to progress to the next stage.
We delve in to who is involved at each step, why it is necessary and review how it could be done better or more efficiently…or whether indeed the step it is needed at all!
Having mapped out the workflow in detail, it is easier to spot things that are being double-handled, duplicated data entry or tasks carried out because they have always been done that way, whether or not they serve any useful purpose. You can then start to design new, more efficient workflows that will save you time and make your workflow flow more smoothly.
Once you’ve reduced your workflow woes, you will find that you have increased the time you have available to invest in growing your rights business.
Image Credit: AndreyPopov from Getty Images (via Canva)
Where should you spend that extra time most effectively?
Check out the next blog post in our Grow your Rights Business series, when we examine how data can point the way:
At RightsZone, we built our system with efficient workflows in mind from the beginning so that rights professionals could spend more time actively learning about their business and growing it instead of endlessly re-keying information in different places.
It has worked!
Our RightsZone clients tell us that they have saved days, weeks and even months from workflow efficiencies as a result of using RightsZone.
If you’d like to know more, please do get in touch. We will gladly arrange a time to chat about what you might need and how to get organised. We can also offer a full demo of RightsZone, if a system upgrade is the right thing for you.
“RightsZone enables us to record our deals much faster and therefore enables us to spend more time on our core job, which is selling rights. It is an indispensable tool for any busy rights team like ours.”
