ROI business case

Purpose

A single optimistic ROI figure looks like a sales document, and finance discounts it on sight. The champion then has to defend a number they did not build. This skill builds the case as a range: worst, average, and best. The worst case buys credibility, and the best case becomes believable because the downside was shown. It also gives the champion a case they can defend in procurement.

When to use

• The deal is heading into procurement, finance, or executive sign-off.
• The champion needs an internal justification.
• A single ROI figure has been shown, or is about to be.
• Finance is likely to challenge the numbers.

Do not build the case on a problem whose impact cannot be grounded in the buyer's own baselines. Three scenarios built on invented inputs are three fictions. Getting the baseline is the first task.

Route elsewhere when:

• The question is which pains to demonstrate in the demo. Use discovery-to-demo-bridge.
• The question is the pricing or packaging itself. Use pricing-monetization-ops.

Inputs

• Deal context: company, champion and role, stage, the investment, and the contract term.
• The root-cause problem, in the buyer's words.
• Baseline metrics the return depends on, from the buyer's own data.
• The mechanism by which the solution moves each baseline.
• Total cost over the term, so payback is real.
• The reviewers: finance, procurement, or executives, and what each will test.

Procedure

1. Anchor to the root cause. State the problem as a mechanism. Every dollar in the model must trace to fixing it. Value unrelated to the root cause is removed, because it weakens the whole page.
2. Write the baseline with its source. Missing values are marked [CONFIRM WITH BUYER], not filled with estimates. A soft baseline is labeled as soft.
3. Define three scenarios against the same baseline:
   • Worst: a small, defensible improvement, the level that works even if little goes right.
   • Average: the most likely improvement, given the buyer's context.
   • Best: an ambitious improvement that still rests on a real mechanism.
4. Make assumptions visible. For each scenario, state the improvement rate, the timeframe, and the baseline it applies to. A reader should be able to dispute one assumption and re-run the arithmetic.
5. Compute value, investment, net return, and payback for each scenario. Show the arithmetic once.
6. Pre-handle the objection. Add a short section on which assumption is most sensitive and what the buyer would need to believe for the average case to hold.
7. Hand the case to the champion with the reviewers' likely questions listed.

Output

• One page: root cause, baseline table with sources, three scenarios with assumptions, investment, payback per scenario, and the most sensitive assumption.
• Open [CONFIRM WITH BUYER] items, with an owner for each.
• A list of likely reviewer challenges and the answer to each.

Quality bar

Each scenario has its assumptions visible. The worst case is one the buyer can accept without argument. Every baseline has a source or a confirmation flag. Watch for a single headline number, industry averages standing in for the buyer's data, value that has no mechanism, and investment left out of the payback.