Approaches to help business leaders connect their programs to ROI Methodology

What do you do when you plan to launch a product or service as a business person? You think of the possibilities, the profits that the product/program can bring to your business. You even think of ways to make the program deliver a positive Return on Investment for your business. Business leaders must always align programs with their business and evaluate the results to address an opportunity as mere guesswork can invite unwanted or unexpected problems.

ROI Methodology® is a systematic approach to help you measure the success of your business or can even help you plan goals in steps like initial analysis, setting objectives, and evaluating your program. The ability to calculate ROI is beneficial for every business in this present time and will continue to help measure the impact of the programs in the future too. 

Let us discuss a few approaches so that you can understand ROI Methodology and successfully include these steps while panning for your business programs.

Do not miss the “why” while planning the project: You must always start with Why. Why lets you seamlessly conduct the Initial analysis of your project. Why is a perspective system mapping that begins with an explanatory searching on the possible ideas? Questioning helps you seamlessly formulate ideas and gather information. Ask yourself:

• WHY do you want to do this project or program?
• WHY should you implement a particular measure, and how will it help you?

By asking the Why, you bring clarity to the actions that you plan to take. It helps you take the right path towards achieving the goals. Proper planning should include 5 W and 1 H Questions viz. Why, What, Who, When, Where, and How. 

• Never start any program or project without proper planning: Delving into the questions allow you to foresee the prospects of your business. It helps you to understand the program better and brings out all the negative and positives aspects. A proper plan or a road map can help you in building a better strategy, include and exclude necessary activities.

• Research and set objectives for your projects: Asking the 5 W & 1 H questions will help you ease your research work. After completing your research about the target audience, target market, and customers' reactions, think about ways to improve your business measures. By analyzing your business measures, you can start setting objectives. Take decisions on the necessary actions by exploring the causes of the problems. The key idea of ROI Methodology is to include a proper planning and evaluation process in your business so that you know what returns you are deriving. In case you detect that some actions are not giving you profits, then you can immediately change ways. 

• Measure the project at regular intervals: ROI Methodology allows you to measure the program or project and regular intervals. There are various tools and techniques that you can use to measure the program's success. You can use surveys and questionnaires to measure your project. Moreover, there is analytics that also helps you get ideas about the success of your project.

• Always keep a plan “B” as an alternative to Plan “A”: Based on the analysis conducted by companies, the ROI of a project may be positive or negative. A project or program might not always give you good returns.  Only when you measure the outcomes; you can immediately take necessary actions whenever you find the strategy is not working. Therefore, while creating the plan for your program or project, you must have a Plan B to manage an uncertain crisis. Accordingly, set objectives for Plan B of your project.

• Plan your project and programs keeping the target audience and target market in mind: Target audience means people who can be interested in your project or program. The target market means the area where you are planning to do the business. Target audiences vary according to age, gender, and other preferences. It is essential to approach the audience interested in your products, projects, and programs. Similarly, set objectives of your project according to the target market.

• Do follow your competitors to know their approaches: Study the initiatives taken by your competitors and understand they're a pattern of work. To beat your competitors, you must be capable of offering something better to your customers. A proper analysis of your competitor's goals can help you to come up with better plans. 

• Use simple statistics to evaluate the results of your programs: Statistics can give you a detailed outlook into the cause of the issues or the results of the program. For example: If you wish to measure the ROI of a Complain Redressal Program for a product, it is essential to understand what is it that are the customers' complaints? Is it about the service, or is there any fault in the product? Or is it that the executives are unable to help the customers understand the product. Having a survey done based on the complaints placed by the consumers and finally creating statistics with all these results can help you combat the cause of the problem.  

• Prepare survey sheets and questionnaires for feedback: Once you have completed the project or the program, make sure you have the survey sheets and questionnaires ready to measure the impact of the program.  ROI Methodology gives importance to feedback to help business leaders efficiently develop a report and communicate results meaning avoiding methods that do not work. 

• Use Industry standards if you do not have time for comprehensive analysis: In case you are in a rush, you can adopt industry standards or ROI analysis already done by your competitors. The business standards can help you create proper plans for your programs almost immediately; based on those, one can avoid decisions that have not given you positive results.

• Use available tools and templates for help: There are various tools and templates available on the web. Not only that, you can find resources and tools on the ROI Institute website, which will surely help you plan your programs easily. Click on this link to have a look. 

• The level of evaluation is for highly expensive projects: All programs are not evaluated at every level. The level of the application and implementation is based on the information, knowledge, skills, and contacts of the programs or the project.  All programs do not need measurement at every level. Measurement Levels depend on the information, knowledge, skills, and impact of the planned programs or the project. Input (Level 0), Reaction (Level 1), and Learning (Level 2) metrics need to be measured for all programs or projects. Depending on the project value and deliverables; Application (Level 3) is recommended for 30-40% of projects or programs. Impact (Level 4) to 10-20% and ROI (Level 5), which is the ultimate evaluation, should be conducted for the top 5-10%  of the projects.

Including the above-mentioned approaches in your business model to improve the business results. ROI Methodology helps you to identify the cause of the problem or explore various approaches to address an opportunity. For details related to ROI Methodology, you can get an ROI consultation from experts at ROI Institute India. Contact us to identify the best solutions to address the business need.