Why ROI Claims Often Fall Short
Across industries, buyers have grown skeptical of ROI claims. Too often, studies highlight large percentage gains without context or transparency. Decision makers want to know:
- Which metrics were measured, and how?
- What baselines were used?
- Were the benefits consistent across users, departments, or business units?
- What caveats or limitations were considered?
Without clear answers, ROI claims can feel inflated or irrelevant. The result is lost trust, buyer hesitation, and sales cycles that stall.
Our Philosophy
Emerging Strategy approaches ROI research as a discipline, not a marketing exercise. Our goal is to help clients build defensible, evidence-backed narratives that can withstand scrutiny from buyers, boards, CFOs, and other critical stakeholders.
We believe ROI should reflect both quantitative performance metrics and qualitative context. Numbers demonstrate the scale of impact. Narratives explain why those numbers matter, under what conditions they were achieved, and whether they are likely to hold true in other organizations.
Strong ROI research answers not just how much impact a solution delivers, but also why it delivers that impact and what it takes to realize it.
Our Approach
Quantitative
We start by defining KPIs that tie directly to workflows and outcomes. These vary by sector and solution, but often include:
- Time-based efficiencies: average minutes or hours saved per transaction, task, or workflow.
- Productivity improvements: increases in throughput, speed of delivery, or volume of work completed with the same resources.
- Resource utilization: higher rates of feature adoption, greater use of tools or assets, or reduction in unused capacity.
- Labor reallocation: staff time redirected from manual or routine work to higher-value priorities such as customer engagement, innovation, or growth.
- Operational cost avoidance: measurable savings through reduced errors, lower duplication, decreased downtime, or more efficient resource allocation.
- Revenue enablement: uplift in sales conversion, faster deal cycles, or greater wallet share attributable to improved efficiency.
We then quantify outcomes using conservative baselines. For example, if customers report saving 20 minutes per workflow, we scale by typical annual volumes, adjust for adoption ramp-up, and discount for variance across users. This ensures reported gains are transparent, replicable, and defensible.
Qualitative
Quantitative metrics alone cannot explain why adoption succeeds or fails. That is why we pair numbers with qualitative inquiry that probes:
- Expectations versus reality: what users thought would improve, and what actually changed.
- Conditions for success: how champions, training, or integration supported outcomes.
- Partial wins and friction points: where time savings were real but offset by new tasks or learning curves.
- Belief shifts: how skeptics were convinced, or where doubts remain.
- Downstream outcomes: how efficiencies translated into benefits for students, faculty, and the broader institution.
This dual lens ensures every number is grounded in a real-world context.
Deliverables That Build Trust
Our ROI research produces outputs that sales, marketing, and product teams can use immediately:
- Transparent quantitative findings: clear KPIs, conservative baselines, and replicable calculations.
- Case studies: narrative-rich accounts that explain how and why results were achieved.
- Archetypal scenarios: models such as “large research university” or “small accounts with 10 or fewer users” that help prospects see themselves in the data.
- Board-ready ROI slides: concise, data-backed stories that institutional leaders can take into budget and strategy discussions.
The Benefits
This approach gives our clients:
- Greater credibility with skeptical buyers and committees.
- Defensible ROI evidence that can withstand scrutiny.
- Data and stories that align with the lived experience of your end users and clients.
- Differentiation in markets crowded with inflated or vague claims.
At Emerging Strategy, ROI research is a rigorous process. By combining quantitative precision with qualitative depth, we help our clients prove impact in ways that buyers believe and decision makers defend.
