When we look at new technologies, it is easy to focus on the exciting new changes that they can bring to an organisation and ignore the boring but important savings their inherent efficiencies deliver.

We came across this recently when doing a review with one of our clients. They had modelled not only the business benefits of "Shifting Left" to engage buyers earlier but also the financial benefits of using better, digitised processes for their existing content marketing projects. 

Their analysis looked at the savings in billable hours achievable by enabling senior leaders to more rapidly create insights when compared to their previous processes. They particularly focussed on the time costs of getting external writers to interview their experts; followed by an inevitable series of edits and hence versions of an article being emailed around, before final 'sign off' from the expert in question. 

For example, in their model, to get a blog post from the initial idea to the published product used up several (otherwise billable) hours, driving the real costs of each post into the thousands.