During the Frankfurt Bookfair, we had some fantastic conversations with rights professionals. Worryingly, however, we heard the same thing over again…Rights people want and need new tools to support their work, but they are struggling to get buy-in from senior leaders to secure budget for the investment needed to do so.
Yet, at the same time rights teams are being expected to grow revenue, revenue that comes into the publishing business as direct bottom line profit. We had to address this and offer some further support.
The Rights Paradox
Our colleague, Sinead Tully, has recently blogged about this phenomenon, one that she calls “the rights paradox” – I think she hits the nail on the head with that phrase! Whilst sales teams often benefit from modern CRM systems, we heard too many stories of rights professionals being stuck with spreadsheets or ageing databases, or worse still duplicating work on a patchwork of systems designed for other teams. Why are publishers expecting rights teams to do more, with less?
We know as a rights community the fantastic value that rights teams deliver to the publishing industry, and that with emerging AI licensing opportunities, the future is an exciting one for rights and licensing professionals. Perhaps, this is not so well understood at the top level of our organisations. Or at least what tools rights teams need to realise these opportunities, is not so well understood. We’ve been thinking in very practical terms about how rights teams can be pro-active about making a persuasive investment pitch to senior leaders.
In this blog, we’ve put together 5 areas to consider if you are struggling to get your message across and want to build a compelling case for investment in your rights business.
5 areas to help get across a compelling case for investment in your rights business
1. Think like a CEO
What are the things that keep your CEO up at night?
What are their priorities?
What’s in the long-term plan for the organisation?
Is revenue the priority, or profit?
Perhaps there is a focus on organisational efficiency and productivity gains?
Maybe it’s around competitive advantage in terms of attracting authors or there is an objective to expand into new markets?
Perhaps they are looking beyond traditional publishing models for growth?
It’s probably a combination of things. Getting a good handle on what matters to the senior leaders in your organisation will enable you to frame your argument around the strategic challenges that they are grappling with.
Spend time thinking strategically about your rights business and how it contributes to these goals at a high level. Can you summarise, in a handful of short and punchy bullet points, how your team can play a critical role in helping the organisation get to where it wants to be? If so, you have the start of a convincing business case.
2. Focus on the figures
In our experience nothing grabs the attention of a senior leadership team more than some carefully considered numbers! Think of it like being on Dragons Den (or Shark Tank for those in the US)!
You know that if someone walks through the door without an excellent grasp of their P&L they are quickly going to become toast! The same is likely if you try to make a business case without being able to show well-researched, achievable projections for your rights business. If you want investment, be that in people, training or systems, the organisation has to know whether and when that investment is likely to pay off.
Start with building up a picture of where you are now:
- types of rights deals
- numbers of deals
- value of deals (remember to include the long tail of royalties or payments due after initial contract payments).
Look at what your budgets or forecasts are over the next few years. Consider the time savings that your investment would bring, and how much more business would likely be generated with that time saving. Consider too, whether your investment would bring other advantages likely to increase revenue, beyond just being able to do more of what you are already doing. Will it lead to better quality deals, with higher returns or that have greater longevity? Will it enable you to open up opportunities that have not yet been explored, revisit long neglected areas of your business, reduce errors or even enable you to support the business in other ways? Do the research, find evidence to support your assertions and calculate the revenue that you believe you can deliver, given the right support.
As part of your research check out the BISG Positioned for Growth report – an independent analysis of the return on investment that publishers typically see when they adopt good rights software – there are some really useful findings, that you might find helpful to support your business case.
Project your growth over time – your investment doesn’t have to be returned in a year, but if you can make a convincing argument that an investment will deliver returns within a few years, it starts looking attractive. A word of caution here, it pays to be realistic. Don’t inflate the numbers to make things look good! Your leadership team will expect you to be able to evidence your projections and if you get investment, you’ll be accountable for them. If you aren’t able to deliver what you promised (and there aren’t very good reasons why your projections were off) it won’t do your credibility or chances of future investment any good at all.
3. Demonstrate value beyond the figures
There is no doubt that you will need to put some convincing figures together in order to get budget for investment. However it’s worth making the point that there is value in what rights teams do that is not revenue dependent.
What impact has your team had on the authors that you publish? In some publishing houses, authors make more from their subsidiary rights deals than they do from their regular sales royalties! Attracting and keeping good authors is not easy, but the work of the rights team can play an important role in enabling a publisher to do so.
One of the less visible roles rights teams have is facilitating the re-use of content for an enormous variety of purposes for which there is no or minimal payment received from the end user. For example, authors re-using their own work in other publications or granting permission for small amounts of material to be reused. This is work publishers are obligated to do and is critical to the functioning of the copyright framework on which our industry depends, yet the time required for this kind of work is not often appreciated beyond the rights team. If the investment you are asking for will allow for more efficiency in these processes or result in better customer experiences or have reputational benefits, this is worth highlighting.
There are many ways rights teams add value, beyond the revenue they generate, think carefully about the broader wins your team delivers for the business and how this is enhanced as a result of your investment and build that into your business case.
4. Be realistic about risk
What are the risks of making this investment?
Don’t be afraid to call them out, because by doing so, it demonstrates that you’ve considered the risks and enables you to show how you can mitigate them. It might be that there is a risk in simply making a change.
For example for a systems investment, a whole team has to transition from working with one system to another. That might mean that efficiency gains aren’t realised straight away as the team learn to get used to working in a new way. In this example, mitigation might focus on scheduling the transition at the beginning of the financial year, to allow time for efficiency to ramp up to expected levels well before year end or amending your forecast to show slower growth in year 1, which will then be compensated for in the following years.
Another risk might be that key team members will need to take time out of their day-to-day work to prepare for the new system, which may impact on “business as usual”. Gather information from vendors about the amount of time needed to plan and deploy a new software implementation, ask them how much staff time will be required to support implementation and what sort of input is required.
You can then create a realistic plan around when the required staff are available and re-organise their work accordingly. If the transition will simply take more bandwidth than you have available, a mitigation might be to plan a phased roll out, where you aim to go live with one part of the system, and see how that goes, before you embark on the next phase. Different projects will carry different risks, anticipate the concerns your senior leadership team may have, so that you can pro-actively address them in your business case.
It is also important to consider the risk of NOT making this investment. If you don’t get the resources you need, what does that mean for the organisation? Will you lose valued colleagues because without the investment you are seeking, they will find jobs which enable them to be more productive or will reduce their stress levels? Will you be less competitive in the market because it is taking you too long to get back to your customers, resulting in lost business? Are you missing revenue you ought to be collecting because you simply don’t have the capacity? Consider what it means to carry on as you are, without the investment, and then put a value on it. There is likely to be a financial cost that the business will bear, which you can set against the cost of investment and there may be other impacts too.
5. Win friends and influence people
How often do you communicate what you are doing with colleagues internally (outside of your direct team)?
When I was an in-house rights professional, I just assumed that the other teams knew what my team and I did. We worked really collaboratively across the business, with lots of different teams and got involved with many company-wide projects. But of course, they only understood the small piece of our role that touched them. It was only when the company asked various teams to present at “lunch and learn” sessions to explain what our department did, that we realised there was a huge gap between what we thought people knew about us and what they actually knew. We had amazing feedback after that session, with people saying they hadn’t realised how involved the job was or how many different things we were handling or exactly what it took to get a rights deal from start to finish.
The nature of our role means that it is easy for rights teams to become siloed, as a result it makes it even more important to reach out and build an internal network of collaborators. From putting on “lunch and learn” sessions, to creating regular email bulletins and even pinning down your MD in a quiet moment at a bookfair to wow them the vision you have for the rights business, building your internal network will help you to influence your peers and senior leaders across the organisation. Having informed allies at the senior leadership table means they will already understand some of your challenges as well as your potential before you’ve even pitched. Add in your well researched and fully costed business case and it becomes that much easier to secure the investment you and your team need to thrive!
Tell us about your struggles with securing investment in Rights
We would love to hear your feedback on what’s worked for you when seeking investment from senior decision makers, or even where you have come unstuck.
We offer support in producing ROI calculations and putting together business cases for investment for all prospective RightsZone customers, so please get in touch with us on info@rightszone.co.uk to share your experiences or to book a call to chat more about how we could help.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by Anna Tarazevich from Pexels