Or building a business case executives love to approve.

Operations teams often struggle to get investments approved whether it’s staffing or technologies or projects. With my Three Stack ROI Method and the One and Three Slide Method, you will wow executives with your crisp take on making money.

A business case is a short document describing the return on investment of a project, process, or other initiative to save costs or make money. All projects should have this analysis to ensure cross functional alignment, prioritization against other ROI positive projects; and to avoid ROI negative projects.

Building a case is easy once you grasp the One and Three Slide Method. You’ll amaze executives and get approvals in minutes while stopping bad ideas in their tracks.

The Three Slide Method

The three slides you need for approval by a committee or middle management are:

The narrative is easier to create when you work through the Problem, Propose a Solution among options, and then Calculate the ROI from the future gains.

This is how many of us are taught to think and solve problems. And that’s fine! Do this part first because it makes sense and leads to logical conclusions.

Remember to never show this story in this order except to your team, direct manager, and certain middle manager peers who may need to get on board.

The Executive One Slide Method

Only one slide is required to show an executive. That’s the ROI Slide. When you go to request the PO approval or any other approval, post only the ROI slide to the executives. During a live presentation, ensure the ROI slide is first and that is seen first by the executive.

The executive will see the positive ROI, likely ask a question or two, and then approve it. For very large projects, there will be deeper questions and pre-education before that approval. (Pre-education will mean going to the executive with one or two other leaders to discuss the situation to obtain approval for further investigation so the executive is not surprised later on).

For martech, this will get your ask approved quickly.

The other 52 slides in the Business Case Deck are for you and middle layer managers. Executives like to know you did your homework and they will never look at those slides. If they do ask a question about such details, you will:

Go to the relevant slide to show them the answer.
Expect not to receive approval that day.

So how do you calculate that ROI?

The ROI Stack Method

Outside of financial teams, ROI is a simple comparison of costs to do something over the expected gains.

ROI=(Benefit - Cost) / Cost

In GTM operations, your business case will often have a Cost Savings and Future Gain. Add up all your savings and growth figures to maximize ROI, which will often turn a negative ROI into a huge positive.

Automation Gain + Assumed Growth + Reduced Software License Fees [icons]

A narrative to explain the investment could read like this:

Goal: Generate 10% more opportunities for 22% lift in pipe and estimated 15% net new revenue.

The new platform will cost $40,000 per year. The benefits are:

Grow the business by identifying Upsell and acquisition opportunities we were missing

Improve NPS because support responds faster

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Generate 10% more opportunities
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Reduce time that my team sifts through email replies by 90%

That time costs $100/hr for a total of $50,000 per year

Will move their hours to increase capacity for Project Y.

Reduce time sales sifts through replies and manage Outlook Rules ($1M/yr)

Reduce license costs 12% because it will identify 10% of database that should be deleted.

Alone, each benefit may not be enough to get an executive excited to approve the project. Together, and with a Growth Story, now we’re talking. Starting with a Growth Story will usually have business leaders much more excited than simple cost reductions.

Let’s look at that in a spreadsheet.

Save Money

Most GTM Operations teams, and often marketers, will start here. Saving money by automating a manual process or reducing license fees in some ways is a noble concept. Remember that it is not always enough for a compelling Business Case.

Let’s say you want to consolidate from five vendors to three vendors. Switching will reduce license costs but also reduce the labor needed by 50%.

Awesome! You cut spend by 50% or more. In this case we also left out the Cost to Switch and Implementation costs. That would be something to analyze before going forward. Otherwise, this looks to be a great first step.

A deeper analysis is to understand the multi-year cost and gains. In this case we are comparing Process A vs Process B to reach a top line Goal.

While Process B does cost more in Year 1, the next two years are much more profitable than those of Process A.

Finance teams may want to calculate the IRR or NPV of such multi-year projects. It’s best to partner with them on their cost of capital thresholds. Collaborating with Finance and Procurement on complex ROI helps you be more accurate as well as prepares you for the Executive One Slide Method.

Enable Growth

A simple example is bringing in a point solution like a Click to Calendar system. We can’t say “it’s table stakes” we also must show some ROI, especially if we’re switching vendors.

The very simple growth story is that such a platform removes friction in the Book a Demo process, thereby improving conversion rates, which will cause more meetings to happen.

It’s a solid growth story and if also means switching from a higher cost vendor, even better.

Stack It Up

In many cases, we can add up both Cost Savings and a Growth Story. Let’s say we bring in a new Calendar Tool that has the following benefits:

20% higher license fee per seat
50% lower cost to manage daily or make changes (labor or time)
Reduces funnel friction for 25% increase in Booking Rates and Show Rates which will yield 15% greater revenue.

At the end, if the numbers are right, we should expect to add all of those reduced costs + Growth to exceed the 20% increase in fees.

Of course, if the 20% higher license fee is greater than the other gains, the project should be rethought or cancelled.

Large Project to Solve Speed to Lead

In this large project example, there are a set of complex factors to do a major project. The challenge is a 20% missed Speed to Lead SLA that is costing money every day. Three options could solve it. Which one should we choose?

Option 1: One time Data Cleanup
Option 2: Modify the workflow to get closer to SLA
Option 3: Re-architect the entire system to reach 4 Nines

Problem Statement

As you can see, Option 2 balances the needs of the business as well as the Time Value of Money. Option 3 “feels right” to perfectionists, however, it would take too long to have an impact, thereby making it too expensive. If facts change in the future, perhaps that is something to attain.

Conclusion

There are many ways to look at new tools, vendor swaps, and projects. It’s important to analyze the solution to make the best possible decision at the time. Ensure you are comparing the right Costs and Growth factors, exposing assumptions as well as long term impacts. Many of us only think of the immediate software costs, not the total cost of ownership (TCO) or the potential growth of a project.

When presenting the ROI slides, always remember, executives want a summary they can say Yes to.

How to Prove the ROI of Marketing Technology