In today's economic landscape, demonstrating the value of your product to customers is more important than ever. A data-driven ROI narrative is essential for building trust and showcasing the value your product or service provides. Understanding how to develop and communicate your ROI effectively can set you apart and help you position yourself as a trusted advisor to customers.

To create a compelling ROI narrative, you need to understand Matik’s hierarchy of data. This includes account data, usage data, adoption data, and how these elements tie into your customer's objectives. Once you have the data that is needed it is important to then calculate the ROI your customers are seeing with your product or service.

Calculating Your ROI‍

Calculating ROI involves a combination of assumptions and customer data to achieve value-oriented goals. Conversations should be tailored to each customer's specific needs and goals. Building trust through data is crucial for a customer success manager. To achieve this, it's important to understand a customer's business goals and objectives through direct conversations, which will help you determine the appropriate success metrics. This also means tying the capabilities of your product to the customer's business needs and desired outcomes. When discussing assumptions, treat it as a collaborative effort with your customer champion and incorporate the customer’s feedback.

Keep these three tips in mind when communicating ROI:

Visualize 

Avoid overwhelming your audience by putting too much content on one slide. Focus on the main points of your ROI story and have the ability to provide more context and explanation if needed. Stick to the outcomes that your customers care about and make it more of a conversation rather than going through every component of the ROI calculation. 

Defend 

When defending your ROI, it's important to feel confident and not be on the defensive. Ideally, you should have buy-in from program manager champions, end user champions, and other stakeholders before diving into an ROI conversation. Collaborate with them to build a defendable ROI story that is supported by assumptions and data. It's about having a valueable conversation with the customer rather than focusing solely on defending the final outcome. 

Reinforce 

Reinforcement is key to building trust and credibility in your ROI story. Use end user stories, data, and testimonials from satisfied customers to reinforce the components that make up your value proposition. Show real evidence of the value you have delivered to their organization.

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