How to demonstrate Value/ROI?

Here are the 4 things that I have seen helping tremendously demonstrate value/ROI to the customer:

• Capture the business outcomes the customer wants to accomplish from your product/service. 

  1. Don’t just settle for vague statements like ‘We would want faster user onboarding’ OR ‘We would want to maximise our reach to our app users’. 

  2. Ask for numbers to quantify the goals (eg: ‘We would want to increase our user onboarding from 10 days to 6 days using your product’).

  3. Once you have quantified the goal, ask for a timeline to achieve this number. This will help you set up milestones and achievement targets for the customer and yourself as well. Once you have identified a,b,c…your business outcomes/goals will look like this: We want to reduce the user onboarding time from 10 days to 6 days by using XYZ product in 6 months.

• The next step is to identify the revenue this goal will impact for the customer. Let’s say the customer said that if their user onboarding is reduced by 4 days, they stand to save/make 10L rupees. SAVE THIS INFORMATION, this is going to be your critical data in demonstrating ROI.

• Now once you have identified the right business goals, you will need to align with your leadership and any internal stakeholders within your organization to make sure you and your customer can achieve this.

• Now, in your monthly business reviews, you can demonstrate value by referring to the business outcome and the current stage of progress. Something like

  • ON-TRACK

    • We have reduced the user onboarding to 8 days in 3 months, and we have the rest of the steps planned. So we are currently on track to reaching user onboarding in 6 days in the next 3 months

  • DELAYED

    • We haven’t been able to reduce the user onboarding and it has been 3 months since we started. These are the current blockers which are causing a hindrance:

      • Issue a - Pending from customer

      • Issue b - Pending from CSM

      • Issue c - Pending from Product

  • EARLY

    • We have reduced the user onboarding to 6 days in 3 months. We have achieved the goal(s) we had agreed upon earlier. This business outcome accomplishment has resulted in reducing/earning 10L (as mentioned before). The customer is paying 1L for the product and has saved 10L resulting in an ROI of 10X.

This is one of the methods which has helped a lot of CSMs in driving value conversations and ROI demonstration.