What numbers in my business should I focus upon?

Far too often we are focusing on the wrong numbers. Too many management dashboards contain the wrong number.

For example, the monitoring of the following areas are good for the identification of patterns and trends, but these are all results or outcomes of other activity in the business and too late to measure for impacting performance.

  • Turnover
  • Cash
  • Margin
  • Profit
  • Value
  • Market share
  • Number of customers

Instead I recommend that you identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and understand what drives your success.

Here are some examples:

Sales drivers

  • New lead contacts to the database
  • Referrals received
  • Prospect meetings held
  • Conversion rate
  • Average income per new customers
  • Pipeline value
  • Number of leads, sales, products sold etc

The most common make up of our revenue income is the number of people we sell to, the number they buy and the average sale value.

Cost and Cash drivers

  • Debtor days
  • Average cost per customer, per sq ft, per unit held,
  • Cost per customer recruited
  • Team productivity
  • Average invoice value (lower may indicate other costs)
  • Stock turnover days

Key underlying success drivers

  • Customer happiness (complaints, testimonials)
  • Team happiness (measure, turnover, years service)
  • Proactive calls / visits made
  • Proactive contacts with introducers
  • Chargeable hours
  • Hours on training, R&D, idea generation
  • Number of customers won / lost

At first glance, you may think some of these are not numbers, but most come back to a numeric of some sort. For example, customer service, how do you measure it? 5 Star? X out of Y in a survey were happy……

I receommend that you focus on the numbers, and the related activities, that drive your success not just measure the outcome.

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