The $30B ARR Stealth Unicorn Nobody’s Talking About

In 2016, IT firm IE ran a comprehensive study and found that $30B of software was…“completely unused” or “heavily underutilized.”

Enter the fastest growing $30B ARR stealth unicorn that no one’s ever heard of: Shelfware. 

(NYSE: SHELF 😏)

In 2016, SHELF was already bigger than the annual revenue of Southwest Airlines ($27B), Adobe ($20B), and Spotify ($15B). If your brain is busy factoring in another eight years of growth in software spend and what that would do to SHELF…your math is mathing. SHELF is likely north of $100B today.

But let’s go back to the numbers from IE’s research team. They found 37% of software licenses and applications in the average organization in 2016 either weren’t used or weren’t used to their potential, and the average $10M revenue company spends 5-12% of their revenue on software annually.

To put that in perspective (and make it easy), let’s consider a $10M revenue company that spends 10% of their revenue on software, or $1M. That means we’re talking about ~$370,000 down the drain...or a 3.7% direct hit to net income. 💸

But here’s the thing.

That $370k loss is 100% avoidable. And if you’re someone who sits at the intersection of software and process…keeping software from turning into shelfware is arguably one of the most valuable contributions you can make.

Here are three steps to start increasing your company’s ROI on tech and tools.👇

Step 1: Study your problems and processes (before buying anything)

What’s one reason software gathers dust? 

Poor purchasing decisions. 

In all fairness: 

• Shiny object syndrome is real.
• With 30,000 (and counting) software applications on the market, there’s no shortage of best-in-class solutions and benefits to get excited about. 
• Even the savviest buyers have been known to sign iron-clad, multi-year, six-figure SaaS contracts without thinking enough about the business problems that need to be solved.
• It’s easy to forget what a big role business processes (past, present, and future) play in it all.

That said—it doesn’t matter how many case studies you read or how sleek the user interface is if your new software doesn’t 1) work with the way your company works, or 2) address the deeply rooted challenges it has.

The more you can encourage your buying committee to consider your problems and processes *before* bringing on new software, the better off you’ll be. 

Step 2: Resource your migration and/or rollout  

Even if you knock Step 1 out of the park, you’ll stumble if you aren’t equally successful with Step 2.

Step 2 addresses another reason why software goes unused: poor implementation planning.

Horror stories are a dime a dozen, with negative consequences like:

• Project delays and extended downtime
• Unanticipated troubleshooting costs 
• Data loss and/or corruption
• Increased exposure to potential security breaches and cyber threats
• Decreases in productivity 
• Frustration and low morale 
• Loss of trust and credibility 

…and the big one: failed training and enablement.  

Step 3: Nix traditional software training in favor of Real-Time Enablement

As you may have guessed, poor user adoption is the third big contributor to SHELF.

Even if you purchased the right software to solve a problem and you allocate resources to implement it, you won’t see software ROI if end users just…don’t want to use it.

But if you take a step back and think about a traditional software training playbook, can you blame them? 

Traditional software training:

❌ Relies on mandatory workshops, wordy PDFs, and boring videos 
❌ Overwhelms end users with information before they can apply it
❌ Asks them to memorize dozens of constantly evolving procedures
❌ Forces people to search multiple places for answers when they inevitably can’t remember

But there’s an oversight even more egregious than all of those. And that is: 

Traditional software training pulls employees away from the work you hired them to do. The work that solves problems, delights customers, differentiates you from your competition, provides business value, and fuels company growth.

Why would you do that when you could use Real-Time Enablement to: 

✅ Deliver bite-sized instructions to everybody’s fingertips, in the tools where they work
✅ Teach end users to learn software while using it 
✅ Make SOPs so brainless to follow that process adoption skyrockets 
✅ Free up your best people’s time and energy for more strategic projects

Still on the fence?

We'll leave you with nine things your end users are actually doing during your traditional software training course, before they multiple choice thier way through the section to keep you happy 👇

📧 Drafting an email
✅ Catching up on Slack
🍽️ Ordering lunch
📱 Sending a text message
🤳 Opening Instagram 
📍 Checking the weather 
👀 Scrolling through LinkedIn
☀️ Looking out the window
😐 Wondering when they can return to their actual jobs