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Smart businessman. Portrait of serious young elegant Black man in a suit is sitting at table in modern office and working on laptop. He is looking at the screen with concentration. Strategic research portal.

What’s the return on investment for a strategic research portal?

Return on investment (ROI) is a critical metric for any enterprise technology purchase. Strategic research portals are no exception.

A common undertaking among our clients – all of which are Fortune 500 organizations across many industries, with complex market and competitive intelligence needs and diverse content collections — is to build a business case for their strategic research portal.  Several clients have done careful calculations of the savings and other benefits of having a research portal.  Our conclusion is that the typical Northern Light SinglePoint portal pays for itself 10 to 20 times per year.

That’s no finger-in-the-air guesstimate.  We are basing the calculation on actual metrics reported by our clients that have studied and publicly disclosed the economic effects of a centralized strategic research portal for licensed market research, primary market research, business news, and other important content sets.

Here are some of the considerations that our clients factor into their determinations:

  • Value of time saved – An independent study commissioned by one client determined that each user session on SinglePoint saved 1.5 hours of professional time, which worked out to a financial savings of $7.5 million per year for this organization.
  • Consolidated purchasing of information – Duplicated and underutilized information contracts are the norm in many large organizations. SinglePoint makes consolidated licensing and enterprise-wide sharing of purchased content a practical goal, with multi-million dollar implications.
  • Primary research savings – Primary market research projects are, by nature, expensive undertakings. Often, the research has already been performed but the reports are neither widely known nor findable.  One Northern Light client has estimated that its SinglePoint portal saves the organization 10% in its annual primary research budget in avoided new research projects.
  • Reduced number of websites/portals – It is not uncommon for departments and functional groups within an organization to provision and field numerous websites. One client greatly reduced the cost of providing research internally when their SinglePoint implementation permitted the consolidation of 150 distinct intranet sites hosting or accessing research in all their divisions around the world down into just one site.
  • Supporting large numbers of users with limited staff – In this era of budget cuts and staff reductions, a self-service market research portal makes it feasible to support a wide audience of consumers of research with a very limited internal staff. For example, one of our clients has one person supporting 5,000 users of secondary research via a SinglePoint portal.
  • Obtaining new business – At one Northern Light client, members of the sales team identified $30 million in sales wins that were materially assisted by the SinglePoint portal helping representatives to prepare better for their sales calls.

These are just a few of the considerations Northern Light’s clients have used to cost justify their strategic research portals; there are many others.  Read our white paper to learn more.

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