Introduction

What is an ROI Calculator?

As a product marketer, one of your primary goals is to help buyers and customers understand the value of your product. To translate features and capabilities into a practical business case that helps buyers justify spending their money.

In other words, you help them understand what their Return on Investment will be.

Now, you can opt to let them fumble through this process on their own and create an ROI story from scratch, or you can give them the tools to calculate and present their business case. That’s where ROI calculators come in. They are simple tools your buyers can use to calculate the return they’ll get from using your product or service.

Why create an ROI Calculator?

When buying a chocolate bar, do you ask yourself how much value it will bring to your life, or what your ROI will be? Obviously not, because the bar costs only $2. Even when purchasing software, if a product is only $15/month, you likely don’t need to consider the ROI before purchasing.

But when your customers are faced with purchasing your software for thousands of dollars each year, it’s a different story. The stakes are higher. These are referred to as “considered purchases” — things that require a lot investment and therefore, more justification to buy. And today (mid-2024), when budgets are tighter, you need to have a strong ROI story. Something that’s easy for your champion to understand and explain to their boss, and their bosses boss.

ROI Calculators help with this process in two ways:

1. They make it easy for your buyer to calculate their ROI and explain it internally
2. They help you coach your buyer on how to present a strong business case

What’s the purpose and goal of this guide?

ROI Calculators can have a big impact on your ability to land, expand, and retain customers, but they’re often one of the projects sitting in the backlog for months — even years 😖.

Why?

1. The project seems more complex than it actually is
2. Your company doesn’t have an ROI story to tell (or at least you haven’t figured it out yet)
3. You doubt people will actually believe it

My goal with this guide is to break down the process of creating an ROI calculator and arm you with inspiration and resources you can use to ship your first one quickly. You can use it as a reference any time you need to take on this type of project. You’ll find examples, tools, and resources that will hopefully make building and launching your ROI calculator a lot easier.

If that all sounds good, keep reading. If not, feel free to keep that ROI calculator in the backlog.

How to build and launch an ROI calculator

So you’ve been tasked with managing the creation of an ROI calculator. Where do you start? How do you manage this type of project? What makes a good ROI calculator?

We’ll answers these questions and more in the following 9 sections:

• Setting Up Your Project and Team
• Defining Objectives and Key Results
• Gathering Data and Inputs
• Creating Your ROI Story
• Drafting Your Calculator
• Testing and Validating
• Building Your Interactive Calculator
• Launching Your Calculator
• Measuring Success

Let’s get into it!

Setting Up Your Project and Team

The first step in creating your ROI calculator is to assemble your team and create your project plan. ROI calculators are often a cross functional project that requires input from multiple stakeholders in the business.

They include:

1. Founder(s) - in startups especially, founders are likely the ones with the strongest sense of your ROI story. You’ll want to loop them in early and use them as a sounding board.
2. Sales leadership - ROI Calculators are a valuable tool for sales teams and typically become a staple in their sales process, so you’ll want to align with your sales leader (Director, VP, CRO) early and get their support. Like founders, your sales leader usually has a strong opinion on your product’s ROI story.
3. AEs and CSMs - You don’t need to involve the entire revenue team in your project, but you’ll likely want to select a couple of key reps from sales and CS that can provide input and feedback, test early versions of your calculator, and advocate for it once it’s complete.
4. Designer and Developer - If you plan on publishing this calculator on your website, you’ll need design and development support. But there are also a number of tools you can use to create interactive calculators on your own. We’ll cover some of those later.

🏁 Start your project with a kick-off meeting including the relevant people mentioned above.

What will you cover in this meeting?

• Your project brief → this is a simple strategy document that gives your team important context around this project.
• Your rough project plan → this is the first version of your project plan and timeline.

Resources:

Copy the Project Brief Template

Copy the Project Plan Template

Defining Objectives and Key Results

The most effective ROI Calculators are built with clear objectives in mind.

Are you trying to:

• Speed up sales cycles? i.e. The easier it is for buyers to prove a business case, the faster they can buy.
• Increase close rates? i.e. A bullet-proof business case makes getting budget approval a lot easier.
• Increase your average contract value (ACV)? i.e. A strong business case can make a customer want to buy more or start at a higher tier.

Is it something else?

It’s also important to think about where this calculator will be used along the customer journey. Will you be embedding it on your homepage? If so, you may want to set goals around increasing conversion rates and inbound demos. If it’s used at a particular stage in your sales cycle, you’ll want to measure the lift in conversion rate from that sales stage to the next.

Using these objectives as inspiration, work with your team to set clear OKRs around your project.

The goal itself is less important that the act of setting clear metrics to measure and tracking the impact over time. As author James Clear says, “the things we measure are the things we improve. “

The impact of an ROI calculator is different for every business, so there are no real benchmark metrics to measure against, but you can easily measure your key metrics pre- and post-rollout to see if there is a lift quarter over quarter.

Gather Data and Inputs (ie. Research)

Every ROI calculator project has to start with research, in order to understand what your ROI story actually is. You can hire research firms and run expensive impact assessments, but for this guide we’re focusing on what you can accomplish with a small team and a tight budget.

With that in mind, there are a few practical sources of data and inputs for your calculator:

Your founder

Your founder or founding team likely have a strong opinion or hypothesis around the ROI customers get from your product. This is an easy place to start, but these inputs need to be validated.

✅ So here’s what you do → Book 30 minutes with your founder to get their hypothesis on the ROI of your product.

Your sellers

AEs are constantly talking to customers and helping them build business cases for your product. There’s a great chance they’ve been shared spreadsheets and presentations that their champions have built to try and justify buying your product.

✅ So here’s what you do → Ask your sales team for examples of business cases that prospects have created, either on their own or with their help. You’ll also want to meet with your most experienced AE to pick their brain on how prospects justify the purchase of your product.

Your CSMs

CSMs are one of your most valuable resources because they’re the closest to your customers. They get to see the actual results your customers see after using your product and in many cases work with them to build a business case for renewing. This is one of your most reliable sources of ROI data since they’re seeing real results from real customers.

✅ So here’s what you do → Ask your CS team for real examples of business cases customers have created in order to get budget approval to renew your product. Also ask for any success stories including real metrics that customers have shared.

⭐️ Your customers

Nothing beats going straight to the source. Happy customers that have been successful using your product and have renewed one or more times, are hopefully going to be able to tell you how they justify the investment in your product. You also likely have existing case studies that break down this ROI story and include specific metrics you can use in your calculator.

✅ So here what you do → Start by looking at your existing case study library for real metrics shared by happy customers. Outside of that you can distribute a customer survey with questions centered around the success they’ve had using your product.

When it comes to gathering feedback from customers, there are a few important tips to keep in mind:

1. Get a baseline before onboarding - It’s going to be way easier to measure customer ROI if you get a baseline of a customer’s performance BEFORE they start using your product. One great way to do this is with an intake survey during onboarding.
2. Send surveys at key points in the customer journey - Building on the point above, gathering ROI data from customers shouldn’t be an ad hoc sprint. You should aim to send surveys regularly, or at specific stages in their customer journey. For example, it could be 90 days after they finish onboarding, after they reach a usage milestone in your product, or whenever they submit a high NPS score. A great tool that can help you automate this is UserEvidence.
3. Use ranges to make answering easier - It’s often difficult for a customer to put their finger on a specific number when they’re asked about the impact of your product. That’s why the folks at UserEvidence suggest using ranges and multiple choice questions to make the process easier. For example, it’s a lot easier for a customer to say you’ve increase their conversion rates by 10-20% vs having to do the math and tell you the specific increase.

What data points are you looking to gather?

Here are some example data points you could be looking for:

• Trainual looks at the number of hires, managers, and salary rates to calculate the total time and money they save their customers.
• Keap looks at monthly sales volume and ACV to calculate how much additional annual revenue they help customers make.
• Klue looks average sales pipeline and competitive win rate to calculate how many additional deals (and revenue) they help customers win.
• Hubspot looks at things like industry, web traffic, and monthly deal volume, to calculate how much additional revenue their customer can generate through marketing leads.

Create Your ROI Story

Now that you have your inputs, it’s time to start piecing together your ROI story.

What do I mean by an ROI story? The best way to illustrate this is by looking at an example from Chris Orlob, founder of QuotaSignal.

Chris wrote an awesome blog post where he breaks down the ROI story for QuotaSignal, a recruiting platform and service that manages the interview process for sales teams. In a relatively short article he walks potential buyers through a practical framework for calculating the cost of hiring the wrong sales person.

I really like this approach of first calculating the cost of inaction. After all, one of the biggest reasons for a lost deal is the buyer deciding to do nothing. This happens when buyers worry about making the wrong decision.

The great thing about quantifying the current problem is that it puts a value on the cost of doing nothing. In other words, what money are they losing today to the problem that your product can solve.

Another great example is Klue’s Competitive Revenue Gap.

This video below is from Klue’s CEO, Jason Smith. It’s focused on explaining their ROI calculation, while at the same time introducing you to their product narrative.

I personally worked on this project with Jason and I can tell you that building an actual calculator is the easy part. Figuring out your ROI story is 95% of the work.

We workshopped this concept for months and tested these slides on live calls with prospects and customers before we ever turned them into a formal calculator. Our calculator became just one tool to help turn our narrative into a quantifiable business case.

It’s not to say that we weren’t tinkering with spreadsheet calculators while this process was happening. We definitely were, which brings us to the next chapter. 👇

Drafting Your Calculator

Now comes the fun part (depending on whether you like spreadsheets). Using your ROI story you can now start to piece together a rough draft of your ROI calculator.

This is also something you can start doing as part of exploring your ROI story. In the past, I’ve experimented with multiple spreadsheet calculators at once as a way to play with different concepts.

This also sets the foundation for what you’ll soon starting testing internally and gathering feedback around.

Below, is a simple template you can use to start building your draft (what I also refer to as VO) ROI calculator 👇

Copy the V0 ROI Calculator Template

Testing and Validating

Share internally for feedback

Once you have a v0 of your ROI calculator, it’s time to circulate it internally for feedback with a handful of people who:

1. Understand the product (product management, engineering)
2. Understand numbers (accounting, finance)
3. Understand the story (founder, sales, marketing, CS)

Schedule a short meeting, walk them through the calculator like you would with a customer, and ask for their thoughts. Getting well-rounded feedback at this stage will help you refine the calculations, the delivery, and save you a lot of time later when you polish the calculator itself.

Depending on your plans for how your team will use your calculator, you may want to share it with some teammates async as well and ask them about their experience using it without anyone walking them through it.

• Was it easy to use?
• What parts were confusing?
• How long did it take you to understand it and use it?

Test with AEs and CSMs

After gathering feedback from your internal stakeholders it’s time to test it in the wild. If you can partner with one or two AEs or CSMs to “pilot” it for you, that’s the best case scenario.

Help your reps get up to speed on how the calculator works (ideally they are already familiar because they were part of the research team) and brainstorm a few prospects/customers for them to introduce it to.

Tips for finding customers

1. Focus on your ICP - ROI is very different for an enterprise client vs. an SMB — make sure you focus on where the business need is.
2. Prioritize role over account - It may be tempting to go after a big-name logo right off the bat, but at this stage the more important piece is role or their specific JTBD. Just like anything you are making as a PMM, you want to make sure the ROI calculator is resonating with your audience and driving that person to action.
3. Tap your network - The best feedback might come from your friend on Linkedin who isn’t actually in your target audience but used to work for your biggest competitor… don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
4. Ask your sales friends - I’ve found that if you ask a customer-facing rep if they have any friendly contacts who might be open to exploring something like this with us, they almost always do.

Talk to Advisors, Customers, and Partners

You can also look toward your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) if you have one, someone from your existing case study or customer testimonial library, or even a partner or consultant you work with.

Send an email to these select customers to schedule calls — you can either join and observe or watch the recording after.

Here’s an email template you can use when reaching out:

Hi {Name},

We’ve been working on an ROI calculator to help prospects and customers better understand the value of {your product} and make justify the investment (or renewal).

As someone who understands our market, product, and value prop, I was hoping I could grab 15 minutes to walk you through it and get your candid feedback. 

If you’re open to helping, just shoot me your availability next week and I’ll send you an invite.

Thanks in advance! 

Jason

Building Your Interactive Calculator

I’ve had success using tools like I have listed below — it makes the process of turning your hard work into something with a nice design and interactivity easy.

When it comes to ROI calculators, first impressions matter, so I recommend taking the time (and budget if you have it) to make it look professional. This will build trust and credibility, make it easy for your reps to use it, and make it easier for your champions in the buying process to share with their bosses too.

Tools you can use to build interactive demo calculators

• Calconic (https://www.calconic.com/)
• Interactive Calculator (https://www.interactivecalculator.com/)
• Outgrow (https://outgrow.co/website-calculator/)
• Involve.me (https://www.involve.me/interactive-calculator)
• uCalc (https://ucalc.pro/en)
• Paperform (https://paperform.co/calculations/)
• Convert (https://www.convertcalculator.com/)
• Calculoid (https://www.calculoid.com/)
• Formaloo (https://www.formaloo.com/calculator-builder)
• Shout (https://shout.com/custom-calculator-builder/)
• ValueCore (https://valuecore.ai/)

Launching Your Calculator

When it’s time to launch your calculator your focus is going to primarily be on launching it internally, and it’s important to make sure your team is well-prepared.

Enable and Train Your Teams

Your customer facing teams are on the frontlines when it comes to having the ROI conversation with prospects and customers. To set them up for success:

• Plan a training session: Create detailed training (live and async) that covers all aspects of your ROI calculator. I have found that sessions with customer facing reps are best when they are interactive, with hands-on exercises, and based on real-world scenarios.
• Provide Resources and Support: Make it easy to find training assets, FAQs, and quick reference materials. If you offer deal support, consider including ROI support in the same way.
• Ask for feedback: Your teams will get more feedback than you did, and much more quickly. Be sure to listen to it and be open to regular updates. Acting on team input will also help get more buy-in and ultimately, make your ROI calculator even more successful.

Publish It on Your Website

Once your team is ready, consider making a dedicated external page:

• Create a Dedicated Landing Page: Design a landing page on your website specifically for the calculator. It doesn’t need to be fancy – but the page should clearly communicate your product’s value and how your ROI calculation is set up (from a high level). Don’t forget to include product visuals, customer testimonials, and a clear call to action.
• Know your audience: Are your prospects googling “ROI of <your product category>”? If so, then team up with your content marketing team to get the word out, ensure the page is optimized for SEO, etc. If not, and the page will mostly be accessed by your internal team, then just make sure your team knows how to access it and where to send feedback.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your calculator landing page, or to simply see how other B2B SaaS companies approach their ROI calculators, check out this collection.

Measuring Success

Once your ROI calculator is live, measuring (and sharing) its success is crucial for understanding its impact and providing real value as a product marketer. Here’s how to make sure you are delivering the expected value:

Look back

Review Your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): Revisit your project planning docs you created before the launch. Your OKRs or goals should outline specific metrics related to the ROI calculator, such as pipeline generation or sales win rates. These metrics might take some time to track, but finding a few quick wins is key.

Manually find the impact: You might have to start by directly following up with your reps, asking whether they used the calculator or not, and then tracking the impact it made. Best case scenario is that it gets baked into the sales or CS process, they track usage in your CRM, and you can report on it with nice clean dashboards. This is a great goal, but the reality is you might have to start from a bit more of a scrappy place!

You can also make note of metrics such as the number of internal calculator uses, user interactions, and the quality of leads generated from the landing page. Staying on top of these metrics will help you communicate value and iterate on the calculator over time.

Share your wins

Highlight Key Achievements: Be quick to share data that showcases the success of the ROI calculator. Either create a new slack channel or use an existing one to highlight closed deals, saved renewals, positive feedback, or an increased win rate that can be attributed to the calculator. Like always, using visual aids like charts and graphs helps clearly communicate these successes to folks scrolling through slack.

Celebrate Milestones: In addition to external wins, sharing internal milestones like number of accounts that have used the calculator or number of times sales reps have provided a strong business case can also help build or keep momentum around the calculator and lead to it being more and more of an essential part of the sales cycle.

Get feedback, Iterate, and improve

Talk to your team and listen to calls: Like all launches, the launch of your calculator is the beginning, not the end. It’s crucial that you review recorded sales and customer success calls where the ROI calculator was used so you can analyze how effectively its being integrated into conversations and whether or not its working. Pay attention to any patterns or recurring issues that may be red flags.

Here are some common red flags to look for:

• Confusion over calculations
• Misinterpretation of results
• Signs of disinterest or disbelief
• Constant technical issues
• Generic or extreme results
• Negative feedback
• Sales rep struggles

Test your value prop messaging: The inputs and outputs of your calculator should clearly reflect the unique benefits and differentiators of your product. This will help you gauge whether your value prop is resonating with users based on the financial outcomes they are seeking.

Test your audience behavior: By publishing your calculator on the website and monitoring traffic/usage you can get some early indicators about how your audience thinks about ROI in your problem space. Eventually you can A/B test messaging, landing page layouts, and more.

Test your ROI credibility: After your calculator gets some traction, there are a few ways to test how believable your calculations are among prospects and customers. You can send a short survey to respondents (especially easy to do if you gather email or other contact info in exchange for their ROI results on the website) or have customer-facing reps reach out and ask for feedback 1:1.

What makes a great ROI calculator?

Make it comprehensive, without being complicated

Just like messaging, you you can’t try to pack too many things into your ROI calculator. You want enough detail to make it a valuable tool for buyers, without packing in so much that it becomes impossible to explain.

As a general rule of thumb, you should aim for a max of 10 inputs. The fewer, the better.

Make it believable

Remember, you are going to have a hard time convincing anyone that you are selling the perfect silver bullet for their problems. You want to make sure you are representing the product capabilities accurately and in a believable way. Buyers are sensitive to bullsh!t.

At Klue, we even included a section that addressed this and asked buyers to “try knocking off another percentage, just to make this an extra conservative estimate.”

Explain your calculation

Black-box ROI calculators are a quick way to loose trust. After all, if your buyer can’t explain the ROI story to their boss, it will never hold water.

If you walk your buyer through the calculation and help them understand it, they’ll be 10x more capable of explaining it to their boss when you’re not around.

Provide hints or ranges so it’s easy to fill out

If you ask for things like conversion rate percentages or sales volume, you may want to consider giving your buyers benchmarks or using multiple choice ranges for your inputs.

At Klue, we used this help text when asking people to share their competitive revenue gap:

A study from RAIN Group says the average is 28%, but based on our submission data so far, companies are reporting an average of 33%.

Gate wisely

Lead-hungry marketing teams are often quick to want to gate ROI calculators — treating them like a lead magnet to capture high-intent buyers.

While this often feels like a philosophical preference, I personally side on keeping buyer enablement tools like this ungated. It just makes for a better buying experience.

Support with real data and case studies

Most B2B SaaS companies are quick to mention benchmark customer data as the precedent for their calculations. But I don’t see enough including actual customer stories as proof.

I mean, if you say you help the average customer increase their revenue by 10%, you must surely have at least one case study saying the same thing or better.

People are much more likely to believe (and resonate with) real stories involving real customers.

Help buyers translate it into a business case

A great way to really enable your buyers is to help them take your ROI calculation and turn it into something they can share with other stakeholders.

If you have the right tools or development resources, this could be an auto-generated report that customers can download or receive via email.

At Klue, to get us started we simply created a Google Slides template where customers could grab the results from our calculator and plug them into the correct spots. This also then doubled as a business case deck they could present internally. Worked like a charm!

Conclusion

Thanks so much for making it to the end of this deep dive 🙏

I put at least 40 hours into making it, so I hope you enjoyed reading it. I also hope you’re able to leave with more confidence around building your first (or next) ROI calculator.

And remember, creating an ROI calculator doesn’t have to be hard. It’s a simple tool that helps people see the real value of your product. By making it easy to use and understand, you build trust with your buyers. You give them the proof they need to say, “This is a smart choice.”

Keep your calculator clear and honest. Test it, listen to feedback, and make it better. When your calculator shows true results, people will believe in it. And that’s what makes it work.

Resources

• ROI Calculator Project Brief
• ROI Calculator Project Plan
• V0 ROI Calculator Template
• ROI Calculator Swipe File

• Introduction
• What is an ROI Calculator?
• Why create an ROI Calculator?
• What’s the purpose and goal of this guide?
• How to build and launch an ROI calculator
• Setting Up Your Project and Team
• Defining Objectives and Key Results
• Gather Data and Inputs (ie. Research)
• Create Your ROI Story
• Drafting Your Calculator
• Testing and Validating
• Share internally for feedback
• Test with AEs and CSMs
• Talk to Advisors, Customers, and Partners
• Building Your Interactive Calculator
• Launching Your Calculator
• Enable and Train Your Teams
• Publish It on Your Website
• Measuring Success
• Look back
• Share your wins
• Get feedback, Iterate, and improve
• What makes a great ROI calculator?
• Make it comprehensive, without being complicated
• Make it believable
• Explain your calculation
• Provide hints or ranges so it’s easy to fill out
• Gate wisely
• Support with real data and case studies
• Help buyers translate it into a business case
• Conclusion
• Resources