In our blog, Common Barriers to Growing Your Rights Business, we mentioned that sometimes rights teams aren’t supported as well as they could be. In turn, this can make the case for investment in a Rights Department something of a challenge.
In this post, we explore this barrier in more detail, to help you make a case for investment in a rights management system.
How to get investment in your rights team
Step 1 – A strategically informed business case
To get any significant investment, you will need a compelling business case, which is informed by your longer term strategic aims.
A business case is essentially a well-thought through, evidence-backed recommendation to the business, where you will set out the problem you are trying to solve and show how it will be solved as a result of the investment. For example, you may be aware that there are opportunities to sell rights in a new market, but you don’t currently have the resource to take advantage of it (problem). You could propose investing in a rights system, which would free up some of your team’s time to develop the new market without needing to increase headcount (solution). You might include details of how much time is currently spent on resource-heavy administrative tasks versus how much time could be saved by using better technology. You could then show how that time would be re-invested in business development activity (evidence).
Ideally, your business case will include an outline of the costs of implementing your recommended solution and, critically, the return on investment (ROI) that the business will realise as a result of the purchase. You could show this return over several years, as businesses don’t necessarily expect an immediate return, but that will be dictated by the overall strategic objectives of the business.
ROI is calculated by establishing the value of the gains you expect as a result of investment (profit after cost) and dividing them by the cost, you can then multiply the result by 100 to get a %.
For example: If your rights business was worth £100,000 per year, and you estimate that as a result of an investment of £5000 you would be able to increase that value by 10% (£10,000), then your ROI would be 200% – you would have made twice the value of the investment, which makes for a pretty compelling case.
Step 2 – Backing up the business case with evidence of ROI
To make your business case really compelling, it is useful to show some evidence to back up your assertions about the returns that can be expected. The Book Industry Study Group published a report a couple of years ago called: Positioned for Growth – The Return on Investment in Rights and Royalty Systems . If you book in a demo with us, we can share the report with you free of charge.
The report is well worth a read. It identifies a range of ROI benefits that have accrued to those investing in rights systems. We are proud to say this includes feedback from RightsZone users and there is a full RightsZone Case Study, featured in the report.
Here are some highlights of what was reported:
“A midsize trade publisher reported that their rights management system freed up 10–15% of license sales staff time, which led to an increase in staff from 2.5 to 4 full-time equivalents (FTE), enabling growth of licensing revenue from 8% to 15% of total revenue.”
“Several publishers reported using data analysis capabilities to optimize sales efforts as well as to optimize pricing. Publishers across segments and sizes uniformly reported 5–10% increases in licensing revenue through data analysis.”
“A large professional publisher increased its licensing revenue by about $600,000 through analysis of data about prior licensing deals, enabling it to improve pricing and increase license renewals.”
“A Large professional publisher reported that “it used to take half an hour per contract; now it’s done in seconds.”
The authors of the study conclude that the quantitative expressions of these benefits provide solid justification for investment in rights management solutions.
As further evidence to the benefits of investing in a rights management system, we would also recommend checking out Richard Charkin’s Publishing Perspectives article. He states:
“I would ask every CEO to inspect their profit and loss accounts. Pass over the sales, cost of sales and royalty lines. Take note of the line defined as “rights,” “other income,” “subsidiary income,” etc., and wonder whether we’re allocating too much resource and time to the top lines and not enough to rights.”
It’s a great one to wave under your boss’s nose, if you need to persuade them that they need to give you an increased share of the budget!
Step 3 – Offering a user-friendly, easy to implement solution
A critical part of your business case is about showing how you will solve the problem that you have identified.
It is important to review all of the potential systems that are available to you and assess their suitability for your team, as well as for the broader business.
- Is the system flexible and configurable to the particularities of your business?
- How easy is it to migrate your existing data to?
- Is it user-friendly and (in our hyper-mobile world) easy to access on the go?
- What technology underpins the solution and how easy will it be for your IT team to support?
- What kind of training and support is on offer?
Adding information to your business case about all of the solutions you have considered and why you are seeking investment in the option selected will make it all the more compelling.
We are confident that RightsZone stacks up well against other rights management systems and we know that its comprehensive workflow management capabilities and business analysis tools have delivered strong ROI for our customers. It is the only solution that has been designed by rights professionals for rights professionals. RightsZone covers the entire rights lifecyle from end to end, including:
- capturing data about available rights
- logging interest and managing submissions
- negotiation and contract generationpayment and royalty statement management
- addenda and renewals
With its powerful business intelligence tools, RightsZone enables you to create custom dashboards and bespoke reports on the fly. It also has AI search capabilities and intuitive hyperlinked navigation. All hosted on Salesforce, one of the world’s leading cloud platforms, RightsZone offers rights teams unparallelled opportunities to grow their rights business.
In addition, our dedicated, rights literate team, manage every implementation as well as offering after care, to ensure you get the best out of all of RightsZone’s features…and get that expected ROI you promised above.
Want support with making your case?
We are happy to discuss the benefits of moving over to RightsZone at any time. We can show you all of the features and how to use it effectively. We can also discuss with you how to create a compelling business case that aligns with your longer term strategy. As fellow rights professionals, we understand the barriers you face and the sorts of concerns you may have.
We also offer consultancy, so if you are not yet ready to think about a system upgrade and would just like some help working out how to get started or how to organise your many spreadsheets more effectively, then do get in touch.