1. Set a real baseline. I’ve seen so many business cases fall apart when an executive sees it. They look at the baseline performance you present and your hear, “Those aren’t our metrics, where;’d you get those numbers?” Conversation derailed, you will not get past this, the rest of your model is shot!

2. Make the opportunity believable. A 5000% ROI may seem great, but it’s always better to be conservative with your estimates AND have them backed by something tangible. Backing can be things like performance use cases of your other customers or industry benchmarks.

3. Use their language. This year I built an ROI model using revenue as the primary metric. Turns out, while the organization recognizes revenue their primary metric is gross profit. The entire model needed to be translated to gross profit in order to get buy in from the CEO and CFO.

Hope those are helpful. Do you have any other advice for building an ROI model or business case for a deal? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.