Business Case · ROI Proposal
Business Case / Return on Investment
What is a business case?
- A document that prepares the customer's internal approval for them
- Four axes: current cost, benefit, payback, and risk
- Conservative numbers from the customer's data
Once you start writing a business case, your sales conversation changes. Instead of a practitioner asking about features and schedules, the people reading your document are planning and finance teams asking where each number comes from. The subject of the document must be the client’s profit and loss, not the strengths of your proposal, so the wording shifts from “the benefits of adoption are significant” to “how much of the KRW 160 million (≈ US$119,700) a year.” The goal comes down to one thing: laying out the evidence so well that your client contact can defend it alone in a meeting room.
In practice, business cases fall into three types: cost reduction, which cuts labor and outsourcing costs; revenue growth, which lifts conversion rates or average order value; and risk avoidance, which prevents the cost of accidents, turnover, or regulatory violations. Training services mostly fall into the third type, where an expected-loss calculation, 'what it costs if it blows up once,' works better than a payback period. The boundary with a proposal is also clear. A proposal states what we do; a business case states what the customer gains. Once amounts reach the hundreds of millions of won, you will be asked for a sensitivity table showing what happens if assumptions shift, so it is better to prepare one in advance.
Timing matters too. It shouldn’t be an appendix tacked on at the end of the proposal; draft it right after discovery, once you have the metrics the client already tracks. If you use only numbers already recorded in the client’s own systems, such as turnover rate, rehiring cost, incident count, and average response time, the argument over sources disappears. Once the draft is ready, build in a step of showing it to your contact first and asking, 'Could you send this table up to your executives as is?' A document the client has already edited themselves travels furthest inside the organization.
The most common failure is a salesperson filling in a spreadsheet alone. Savings built from industry averages collapse at the finance team's first question, 'Where did that number come from?', and at that moment the whole document is dismissed as sales collateral. The belief that a bigger claimed benefit is better is also risky. A document claiming KRW 500 million (≈ US$374,100) in annual savings comes back after signing as a performance-verification clause and a refund demand. Showing a conservative low-to-high range, and laying out your assumptions and formulas openly in the document, raises the odds of getting through review.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Kwangdong MinExpert in business models, revenue models, and market researchIt is the investment feasibility review document used in IT and facilities investment screening, carried over into B2B sales. As finance departments have become more involved in purchasing decisions, it has become a standard sales deliverable.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a food manufacturer with 1,200 employees, saw 11 of the 34 newly promoted team leaders from the past two years step down or leave within a year. The HR manager had submitted a leadership program proposal three times, but it had been rejected twice at executive meetings on the grounds that 'the impact can't be measured.'
- In the first meeting, we asked the HR manager, “Of the 11 people who left in the past two years, what did it actually cost to replace one?” Together we worked out a figure of KRW 42 million (≈ US$31,400) per person, adding recruiting fees and the loss from a three-month vacancy.
- In the second meeting, they brought in a finance team manager to verify the annual loss of KRW 230 million (≈ US$172,100). They accepted the feedback that 'we'll only recognize half of the vacancy loss' and lowered the figure to KRW 160 million (≈ US$119,700).
- They set the benefit as a range, reducing the 11 departures by 2 to 4 people. Adding 120 hours of HR staff effort to the KRW 48 million (≈ US$35,900) program cost, they summarized the total investment as KRW 56 million (≈ US$41,900).
- They built a table showing a 9-month payback even at the lower-bound assumption of just 2 people, and wrote a clause into the risk-response section: if the program prevents no departures, the second-year program is rerun at no charge.
- The HR manager attached this two-page table to the approval request as is. A proposal rejected three times passed the executive meeting on the first try, and KRW 56 million (≈ US$41,900) was confirmed in the following year's budget.