A page where a buyer enters their own numbers and sees cost, savings, payback and return.
A vendor's ROI calculator usually proves that the vendor's product pays for itself, and buyers know it. This one, for a 14-van heating company, tries to earn more trust: every input is the buyer's own, every guess can be moved, and the arithmetic is on the page. Its answer is only as good as the numbers and guesses that go in.
Who it's for
Salespeople and founders whose buyer likes the product but has to get the spend past a boss or a finance team. Send it after the call where you learned their numbers, with those numbers already in.
It suits a product whose saving is time or material you can count. It's the wrong tool when the benefit won't go into dollars, a rebrand for instance. The page also forgets what the buyer types: reload it and your starting figures are back.
What a good one contains
- The buyer's figures as the starting point. The example opens on 14 vans, 65 miles a day and $46 an hour, labeled "from our call". A calculator that opens on zeros asks the buyer to do your job.
- A hint under each input. "Last month's fuel-card report has it" says where the real number lives.
- One answer, large. Payback in months, with year one's cost, savings, net and return beside it.
- Guesses the buyer can move. Routes getting 12% shorter is a slider with its reason underneath. A fixed assumption is the first thing a finance person attacks.
- The working, line by line. 14 vans × 65 miles × 250 days is 227,500 miles, and 12% of those at $0.70 comes to $19,110. Anyone can redo it.
- A worse case. The example reruns year one at half the main guess. Better the buyer sees that from you than works it out alone.
- What you left out. Extra jobs and fewer missed arrival windows are named and counted at nothing, which makes the counted savings easier to believe.
- A sentence to forward. "For 14 vans, Whimbrel costs $19,752 in year one and saves about $42,300." It changes with the inputs.
When the number looks too good
The usual failure is a return so large nobody believes it. If your first draft says 900%, look for a saving counted twice, or for freed minutes all treated as revenue. Halve what you're unsure of and say that you did.
Then set both guesses to zero. This one answers "Not within 3 years." A careless one shows a negative number of months. Count your own costs in full too: here setup is charged up front and month one saves nothing.
How to send it
With a password. It sets your price against one buyer's wages and fuel costs. Your contact will forward it to whoever signs off, so choose a password that's easy to pass along.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
