If your answer starts with “Well, it depends…” you’ve already lost the room.
In working with large-scale organisations across Europe, we’ve seen this moment stall more data platform initiatives than poor tooling, talent gaps or legacy architecture combined. It’s not because the ROI is hard to prove; it’s because it’s often wrongly framed based on outside business estimations.
The ROI trap: What’s the return? vs What’s the waste?
Our advice is to flip the conversation. Instead of trying to sell the benefit of your initiative, sell the cost of doing nothing.
That’s where our ROI calculation sheet comes in. Built as part of our business buy-in starter kit, it helps you do 3 things:
- Shine light on invisible costs that decision-makers ignore, like shadow IT, coordination drag and engineering FTE burn
- Quantify opportunity loss and operational waste with cold, hard numbers
- Isolate the first-phase ROI, so you’re not forced to justify a 2-year roadmap on day one
Here’s the kicker: most data ROI calculators focus on benefits. Ours starts with pain, losses and current waste.
If you’ve ever sat in a boardroom trying to explain how a new data initiative, data product, or solution will “create efficiencies” or “democratise insights,” only to get blank stares, try this instead: “Last year, we burned €2 million in wasted FTE time and missed a market opportunity worth €5 million. This happens year over year! This initiative will make sure this won’t happen again.” You have the room’s attention. Whatever your price tag is, it’s anchored to huge savings.
What it looks like in practice
We’ve seen it work again and again. In one case, just two use cases showed over €3 million in avoidable costs, without even touching AI. This approach works because it’s not just about metrics. It’s about making ROI feel real:
- Missed deadlines? That’s lost revenue
- Manual tracking? That’s overhead, churn and lack of operational scalability
- Shadow pipelines? That’s compliance risk
We help you pull those threads and package them into something that gets buy-in fast!
Want our ROI calculation sheet?
Our ROI calculation sheet is pre-formatted, simple to use, and comes with real-world examples you can adapt to your own context. Download the ROI calculation sheet together with our data initiative starter kit.
Want to know how to extract the hard numbers directly from the Business use cases? Check out our Deep Dive on “How to get Business buy-in”.