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From Manual Spreadsheets to Market Standard: How Enable is Creating the B2B Incentives Category
Category creation is a high-stakes game in B2B SaaS. While many founders aspire to create new categories, few succeed in transforming an overlooked business function into a strategic imperative. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Enable CEO Andrew shared his playbook for turning rebate management from a manual, error-prone process into a critical business capability.
The origin story starts not in a garage, but at a flying school. Through conversations with the owner of what would become the UK’s largest distribution company, Andrew uncovered a critical pain point: “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.”
This insight revealed a stark reality: despite rebates being crucial to profitability, companies were managing billions in incentives 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,” as Andrew describes.
Rather than trying to fit into an existing category like financial software or ERP, Enable chose to create an entirely new one. But they faced a fundamental challenge: “A lot of these companies and some of the companies we’re working with are the world’s biggest companies and even they don’t necessarily know that this type of software exists.”
Enable’s category creation strategy centers on three pillars that other founders can learn from:
First, they focused on education and content creation to establish best practices. This wasn’t just about their product – it was about elevating the entire practice of rebate management and showing its strategic value.
Second, they built a community around practitioners. Taking inspiration from Gainsight’s success with Customer Success Managers, Enable recognized that rebate managers were an underserved population. As Andrew explains, “These guys often might find it hard to explain to their colleagues and friends what they actually do…they are underserved and just not kind of celebrated at all. And these guys really are moving the needle.”
Third, and perhaps most crucially, they focused on demonstrable ROI. “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. Their business value assessment process demonstrates payback within 3-4 months – a compelling proposition for prospects who weren’t even actively looking for a solution.
This approach has driven remarkable growth, with Enable expanding from 80 to 450 people in just two and a half years. But Andrew emphasizes that success in category creation requires making the solution accessible: “We’re creating something which is mainstream. You don’t have to be like a visionary or like a really early adopter.”
The Silicon Valley ecosystem has been crucial to Enable’s trajectory. As Andrew reflects, “Being here has helped…in terms of talent, some of the people we’ve brought on board, very skilled operators that have achieved hypergrowth before, and we wouldn’t have kind of bumped into them just in anywhere.”
Looking ahead, Enable aims to become the definitive platform for B2B incentives. “Just like DocuSign is the standard for Esignature, we want to be the standard for any B2B incentive,” Andrew shares. With over 10,000 companies already on the platform and 150% year-over-year growth, they’re well on their way to achieving this vision.
The lesson for founders? Category creation isn’t just about having a novel solution – it’s about making that solution accessible, building a community around practitioners, and demonstrating clear ROI. As Enable shows, when executed well, category creation can transform an overlooked business function into a strategic imperative.
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