Today, Norwest is thrilled to announce our Series B investment in Enable. Enable has built a next-generation channel incentive management platform that automatically helps distributors, manufacturers, and retailers track, calculate, accrue, and allocate B2B rebates.
Strong Team
When we met the founder and CEO Andrew Butt, we were impressed with his clarity of thought, ability to identify and solve pain points, and empathy for customers. Andrew previously served as Managing Director at DCS E-Commerce, part of DCS Group – one of the largest distributors in the UK, founded and led by UK entrepreneur Denys C. Shortt OBE – and realized that many of their suppliers and customers struggled to manage channel incentives. So in 2015, he built a rebate software product for one of their largest clients and decided to spin the product out into a standalone SaaS company, Enable, in 2016.
We’re also thrilled to partner with the world-class team Andrew has built. Over the past six months, Enable welcomed Jerry Brooner as President of Global Field Operations and Cesare Rotundo as VP Product to join Chief Operating Officer David Hunt and Chief Financial Officer Nick Rose. We have known Jerry for years and followed his career as he helped scale Dropbox as the North America Sales Leader and Scout RFP as CRO. Cesare came from the channel management industry and previously served as VP of Product Management at Model N.
Massive Market Opportunity
From the food we eat in hospitals to the raw materials selected to build an office, B2B rebates drive much of the purchasing decisions that impact our daily lives. Rebates are growing in both complexity and importance, with manufacturers issuing over $1T of rebates a year in industries such as food, retail, building materials, electrical, and pharmaceuticals. In addition, every manufacturer has a channel program to incentivize their distributors to sell larger volumes of products. For many distributors, a significant source of margin leakage can be found in their management of vendor rebates, chargebacks, and deviated pricing. Enable provides a single source of truth for manufacturers, distributors, and internal stakeholders to manage contracts, track the volume of sales per SKU by region, and calculate the B2B commissions that are retroactively owed.
Here at Norwest, we have a core thesis around automating manual processes and investing in next-generation financial technology. This has led to numerous Office of the CFO investments such as Adaptive Insights, FloQast, Spiff, and now Enable.
Clear ROI & Customer Love
Prior to Enable, finance and commercial teams largely managed rebates manually in spreadsheets or used homegrown platforms. As you can imagine, this is a tedious and error-prone process, resulting in companies leaving millions on the table due to calculation errors or lack of accurate data. Even small actions such as confirming rebate terms with one supplier could take hours as someone needed to track down the original contract and review the 100+ page document to locate where terms are outlined. Enable streamlines workflows, increases the accuracy of forecasts and accruals, and improves visibility on how to optimize rebate agreements (i.e., which channels perform best), all while creating an auditable repository for all rebate agreements that can be accessed by both finance and sales teams. We heard from many Enable customers that their decision paid for itself multiple times over in the first year and delivered fast time to value (2 weeks to deal creation). With those time and cost savings, paired with Enable’s ease of use, adopting Enable is a no-brainer.
We are excited to welcome Andrew, Jerry, Cesare, and the entire Enable team to the Norwest family!
From left to right: Cesare Rotundo, Andrew Butt, Sean Jacobsohn, Jerry Brooner
