When you embark on any investment or business strategy it’s important that you have a game plan for measuring its return on investment. Whether it’s a project to improve productivities, reduce environmental impact, save costs, raise brand awareness or any other multitude of possible scenarios, you need to be able to calculate your ROI correctly otherwise you will never know the true benefit to cost ratio.
This is important for most businesses in it's own right, but how about if you sell your products or services through partners or agents? Good luck getting a large portion of partner businesses on board selling your product or service if they can't easily figure our the ROI of engagine with you. Likewise, how can you hope to sell a cash saving concept to your customers if you cannot prove to them in real terms what the benefits are.
Of course, the more complex the project, the more difficult it is to calculate your ROI accurately. Putting it simplistically, to calculate ROI you need to add up the value of the benefits and subtract the costs. Sounds simple enough but when you have to build in considerations for time, labour, hardware and how you account for intangible benefits etc it can become quite a confusing and complicated calculation.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could find someone to develop a piece of software or an app where you could input all the ROI criteria and then let it do the hard work for you? The good news is you can!
At Scorchsoft we specialise in building ROI calculators that can be tailored to your product or service. ROI calculators can be used in a variety of different applications and they can be used to measure the success of projects, to give sales forces an edge when they are comparing one service or product to another, and to support you and your customers in the decision-making process.
All you need to know is the right questions to ask and we can build a ROI calculator that provides the answers.
The Benefits of ROI Calculators
The benefits of building a ROI calculator are numerous and include:
- Communicating benefits - If a product or service is complex or mult-faceted then having a ROI calculator to support your sales process can help partners and sales agents to sell products in a way that best supports healthy margins within the business. You may even be able to tie the data from such calculations into your reward and comission structures.
- Project Improvement – by applying the appropriate ROI calculation to a project you can measure its true business value and identify areas that need improvement to make the ROI viable.
- Getting more funding – ROI calculators can help you identify opportunities within your organisation which could help to secure more funding because of the forecasted results that it may demonstrate.
- Project Roll-out – by running a pilot program and justifying its benefit through a ROI calculator, the project could be applied to other parts of the business and yield more benefits.
- Project Support – sometimes it can be hard to get a project off the ground but if you are able to demonstrate its potential benefits through a ROI calculator you can then get buy-in from stakeholders and decision-makers.
- Building Relationships – being able to demonstrate the worthiness of a product or service versus another product or service can help you to build relationships with your customers. For example, a ROI calculator could be embedded into your website to demonstrate how the customer could save money if they used your product compared to an alternative.
- Brand Image – having the ability to demonstrate the power of your products or services compared to an alternative can enhance the image of your brand and give you more traction in the future.
These are just some of the benefits that a ROI calculator could give you. If you would like to discuss your project with Scorchsoft to see how we can add value then please contact us now and speak to one of our specialist team.