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Get up at 6.20am, go for a 2 mile jog, complete in 1 hour 14 minutes, burning 247 calories, I drink 1.5 litre’s of water and have in total 346 calories for breakfast. Our lives now consist of tracking metrics and setting personal targets. So why is it when it comes to tracking business metrics we become inadequately equipped to monitor the important aspects that keep a company riding high?

I mention the tracking of our daily lifestyle because it’s become such a norm that we do it in our sub-conscience, anything you’re curious about it can probably be tracked and a monthly graph with a rundown for improvement supplied. Question is why do so many people enter a boardroom or meeting and present everyone with a pie chart of something they are not entirely sure of? Then try to pass it by with meaningless numbers, explaining that Q2 targets were missed due to a ‘slow market’.

Metrics can peel back those layers and explain fully what we all want to know, where the company is going well and how improvements need to can be made.

Related: Use ‘Business Owner Snacks’ To Make Decisions Quickly

Applications

We use Salesforce religiously to monitor how the company is doing with the quarterly targets; it’s incredibly complex but offers full monitoring of all the metrics you set. The growing number of applications that can be added to the main package itself makes it all the more worthwhile, there’s a new metric to be monitored all the time or a certain aspect of your business which can generally be tracked fully with Salesforce. It does however come at a cost but the rise of other metric monitoring packages has really opened the doors to everyone and any type of business, which in the end means you can and need to know your numbers.

Determining the application/package you want is down to the level of monitoring you wish to have and also the size of your company, you do however need to consider the growth prospects of your team or business and consider viable products in the future.

Not understanding the results or not even knowing how to use the package would mean you may as well turn up to the board meeting with a unicorn and explain how that came about, it would be far easier. So it’s important to research, try trial editions and analyze your options before you commit to any package. It then comes down to the metrics you want tracked or more specifically the inputs and outputs to determine the actual productivity of your business.

WTF is this?!

This could potentially be your reaction when you receive the results from the latest quarter of metric monitoring. It can be a daunting time seeing these results and you then realize that the company is in fact doing nowhere near as well as you thought and the next meeting will actually be your trial. It could also be the other way around but chances are it’s bad, simply because the needed actions were not taken in time for damage limitation.

Related: How Healthy Is Your Business?

Choose Metrics to Track

So we now need to choose metrics to track, this I can’t help with due to the large scale of metrics to choose from but there is a general start with picking metrics. We need to start at the end goal and work backwards, with most of us the end goals consist of:

• Growth
• Profit (/Loss)
• Cash flow (Positive)

There are various ways we can go which lead to all of the above e.g. ROI (Return on Investment), CAC (total cost to acquire a customer) and so on but from a sales perspective we will look at a telesales view and determine some metrics we can in fact monitor.  These could be:

• Number of calls per team member.
• Number of outbound calls VS cold calls per team member.
• % of conversions on all calls combined per team member.
• Overall group performance i.e. deals size, total calls.
• Number of deals closed * average deal size.

These are all ideas but you would have to adjust accordingly to suit your company, your needs and what you want to monitor overall. As I said the scale of metrics to monitor are huge but it’s always imperative you avoid certain areas of tracking i.e. factors which cannot be changed or affected by yourself or the team. Just focus on the biggest metrics that can have the biggest effect on the business.

I’m going to monitor this drying paint

Metrics do sound tedious and boring, but the ability to fully understand the mechanics of your business will in the long run be incredibly beneficial and keep those headaches away. It’s as always down to setting targets and having them in place to drive profits, growth or anything else you wish to achieve when you know your metrics. Results drive the company but also drive employees, productivity needs to be pushed and realistic with time scaled targets which can be set in stone instead of promises and then forgotten about.

So I’ll ask you this, do you know your metrics?

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Image: “A wooden ruler with the words To Measure is to Know/Shutterstock“