The Importance Of Visibility – 5 KPIs You Must Start Tracking to be Successful

“Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” – Suhail Doshi, chief executive officer, Mixpanel. (Source – Springboard.com)

For most small business owners gut-feel tends to be the default source of action. While this intuition engine is powerful in creating action, often time our efforts don’t deliver on the target we are trying to achieve. Take SEO as an example. We hire a content company and paid for Google and Facebook ads, (because that seems like the right thing to do). Rarely, however, do we go about defining measure for a before and after to determine whether what we’re doing (paying for) will drive the results we not even looking at. We’ll relate all these measures to you SEO efforts for this entry. If there are other aspect of your business you are interested in exploring reach out and we’ll be happy to talk about your business needs with respect to other aspects of business. Assuming you already have visibility to your cashflow, profitability and growth numbers, these are the 5 must-have mertics you need to monitor to be successful:

1. Leads Generated by Lead Source
2. Win Rate by Lead Source
3. Average Monthly Arrtition
4. Cost of Sales
5. Executive Time spent on Execution

Use Case: As small business if you spend $3500 a month on marketing. The most important thing you can start doing is tracking your Sales leads/opportunities more diligently. Leads from all sources should flow into your CRM (Customer Relationship Mamagement) solution seamlessly. that way you have one pool of prospects that you ca focus your attention on.

1. By tracking leads generated by lead source you will be able to tell if there is a lead generation mechanism that is performing lighter or better than usual. Additionally, it will allow you insight into which mechanisms are more successful than others.


2. Now let’s talk win rate by lead source. This will help you understand how you need to tweak your messaging to better set expectations earlier in the sales process. some lead sources generate stronger leads than others.


3. Average monthly attrition is another metric that gives you a good understanding of why the products/services didn’t stick. Whether you look at it by lead source or product/service, looking at this metric will force you to consider how much business is walking out the door.


4. Cost of sales. It’s easy to get lost in growth and forget about the bottom line. combined with the last metric this is a powerful metric to consider when determining what’s the most effective way to deploy your marketing.


5. Remember that to grow you must work on (not in) your business. Executive time spent on execution is simply the number of hours you spend as a percentage of your total time spent in the business. If it’s anything under 100% than you made some progress to bettering your business. The closer is it to 0% the more your business is running itself as you work on directing it to deliver the right results.