Yes, you can calculate the ROI of your customer onboarding improvements. And no, you shouldn’t skip that forecast.
If you are a VP/Head of Professional Services in a B2B SaaS company and you are about to ask for a small budget to scale your organisation, you should start with the why, the reason, the value. Why should the CEO redirect the money to your initiative?
How much should you ask for, and of that – how much can you recover? The first question depends on the scope of the work, while the second depends on the value and it is never easy to answer. Two ways to go about it:
- Finger in the air (used more often than people care to admit).
- Identify the friction points ⇒ understand how to solve the causes ⇒ and use accumulated industry data to factor in how much improvement can be introduced. There is even a tool for it.
A friendly suggestion/annoying fact about the numbers – you cannot run to your CFO to tell them how much you can save, because most probably you will not save anything immediately. But done properly you will face lower project costs in the future, and as a result have more capacity available for new projects. Congratulations – scaling unlocked!
So calculate your ROI, and use it, together with the benefits that are harder to quantify such as better governance and compliance, to build a business case for the PS uplift programme. It will be much harder for management to push back on a well-stated business case that includes hard numbers.
And there is another benefit for you, it will help you define your goals. And no programme of change can succeed without clear goals.
Anyone can build an ROI tool or a spreadsheet, here is one already purpose-built for PS scaling.