Tracking-Cover

I have a Fitbit and I wear it every day. At a glance, I can see how much more effort I need to exert to hit my daily goal. If I am close I will spend a few minutes walking those last few steps to cross the 10,000 step line. It doesn’t really make me walk or exercise, but it does hold me accountable. I can’t kid myself into thinking I walked enough when the scorecard on my wrist tells me the sometimes painful truth.

KPIs are a Fitbit for my Marketing Strategy

The same way I rely on my Fitbit to keep my fitness routine on track, I rely on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)  for my business and marketing strategy to keep Roundpeg on track. The right KPIs act like an early warning system telling you if you are off track or close to your goal.

While it is important to track sales, expenses and revenues, by the time you make or miss your sales goal it is too late to change your marketing, adjust your pricing or launch a new program. So in addition to those traditional KPIs, it helps to have a few metrics which measure what is happening further up the sales funnel. They might include increased new sales, new inquiries, web traffic or client turnover.

Want to keep your business fit with KPIs? Here’s how:

Pick a few meaningful KPIs.  

As a business owner there is so much I want to do. But  if I  pick too many metrics it is hard to focus the team’s attention. So we agreed as a group which five we will focus on. We selected metrics which we could tie directly to our bottom line. We chose to track our web traffic, downloads, average revenue per client, seminar participants and weekly billings.

For each measure everyone on the team contributes to our ability to achieve our goal. For example, weekly billings measures both deposits from new sales and completed projects. If I haven’t made enough sales or projects are stalled we won’t make our goal.

Check your progress weekly

If I waited until 10 p.m. to check my Fitbit it would be too late to go back and walk, so it would be unlikely I would hit my step goal every day. The same is true for KPIs. They work best if you check your progress weekly. If you have established a metric for which it is hard to collect data, you probably won’t do it on a regular basis. Then you will be trying to adjust your strategy based on out of date numbers.

For our KPIs, we compare performance every week and decide collectively if we need to adjust our tactics. Looking at the numbers opens up conversations about what each person can or should be doing in the next seven days. We don’t want to completely change direction each week, but these small course corrections keep the business on track.

What about you? Are you measuring performance when it is too late to change, or using performance measures to adjust and grow?

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