From Spreadsheets to $156M: Enable’s Framework for Proving ROI in a New Category

Selling software in an established category is straightforward: prospects know their pain points and actively seek solutions. But what happens when your potential customers don’t even know your category exists? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Enable CEO Andrew Butt revealed their systematic approach to converting prospects who weren’t looking for a solution.

Finding the Hidden Money Enable discovered that companies were leaving significant value on the table through inefficient rebate management. “There was a huge amount and an increasing amount of income coming in from suppliers in the supply chain in the form of incentives and rebates…and this clearly was becoming a huge part of profitability in the supply chain and also a real growth driver, but there wasn’t any modern software to manage it well,” Andrew explains.

The status quo was alarming: companies were managing billions in rebates through “all sorts of manual systems, home built systems, excel spreadsheets kind of limping along trying to use active ERP systems which don’t do this well.” This inefficiency wasn’t just an operational headache – it was directly impacting bottom lines.

The Business Value Assessment Framework Instead of leading with product features, Enable developed a systematic approach to quantifying value. “We have a process called business value assessment, where we get inputs from a prospect which they agree to. So it’s their inputs, and then we play back to them how we can give them a payback in maybe three or four months,” Andrew shares.

The key insight? Enable doesn’t just tell prospects they’re leaving money on the table – they prove it using the company’s own data. “We can show, for example, that distributors and retailers are not claiming the full rebate that they’re entitled to because they’re not tracking it as well as they could be,” Andrew notes.

Dual-Sided Value Proposition Enable’s ROI framework addresses both sides of the transaction. For distributors, they demonstrate unclaimed rebates. For manufacturers, “We can show how a manufacturer could be getting more revenue for their rebate dollars that they’re paying,” Andrew explains.

This dual-sided approach has been crucial to their network effect strategy. After starting with distributors, Enable expanded to manufacturers through natural network effects, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption.

From Proof Points to Scale The effectiveness of this ROI-first approach is evident in Enable’s growth trajectory. In just two and a half years, they’ve grown from 80 to 450 people, with over 10,000 companies now using their platform. “We’re about 150% up year over year right now,” Andrew reveals.

But perhaps more importantly, their focus on demonstrable ROI has helped them move beyond early adopters. “We’re creating something which is mainstream. You don’t have to be like a visionary or like a really early adopter,” Andrew emphasizes.

Lessons for Category Creators Enable’s experience offers valuable lessons for founders creating new categories:

1. Lead with concrete value, not category education
2. Use prospects’ own data to prove the opportunity
3. Create a systematic process for value assessment
4. Demonstrate quick payback periods (3-4 months)
5. Build case studies from early wins to accelerate adoption

The end goal isn’t just selling software – it’s becoming the industry standard. As Andrew puts it, “Just like DocuSign is the standard for Esignature, we want to be the standard for any B2B incentive.” By focusing relentlessly on provable ROI, Enable is well on their way to achieving that vision.