The Importance of KPIs

27 May 2015

But how do you measure performance?

With a sales team, the answer is easy: you set a target, whether it is amount sold or number of calls, for a certain period of time and ask them to meet it. If they don’t, you can drill down to see if it is, for example, a person, product, or time of year that is responsible for the drop-off.

The goal really is to find that piece of the puzzle that is measurable.

There are those areas of your business, however, that don’t naturally have some kind of measurable statistic. How do you come up with some way to get a snapshot view of this area of a business?

One way of doing this is to add a new step to your process, which allows you to measure performance, to actually get a number that you can link with an individual, team, or time period. You might want to include a customer feedback option for this part of your business to see how well your customers think the team member is doing? Or maybe start tracking the hours spent on a particular project to get a feel for how long your team are spending?

By segmenting the projects your team are working on by the resource needed or the type of work each entails will also allow you drill down past just the individual team members.

This information allows you to explore new options and measure how each change affects that measurable goal. From this you’ll be able to watch the duration of the project reduce and at the same time see the customer satisfaction ratings increase.

Without being able to actually weigh and measure the effect your changes are having, not only is each change a stab in the dark, you’ll never actually know how much benefit it has on your business.

By using a cloud based CRM system you are able to manage and track these changes, not to show a team member up, but instead to help and guide the individual to achieve the success they deserve.