Which comes first, the plan or the KPIs?
Whether you develop your own marketing and sales plan or enlist the help of outside sources, focus first on choosing the right Key Performance Indicators to give you a better chance of making and then exceeding your number.
Get specific on the results that you want to achieve, and make sure you have the right marketing, people, process, and technology to track your results.
Follow the four steps below to make sure your organization’s KPIs are on target:
Step #1:
Start with KPIs that are measurable. For example:
a) Our organization finished at 32 million in revenue in 2018, and in 2019 we want to increase our revenue to 35 million
b) We finished at 10% ebitda in 2018, and our KPI for ebitda in 2019 is 13%
c) We would like to increase leads in our marketing department by three net new meetings per week, turning up SEO and site traffic.
Step #2:
Make sure you have the appropriate staff, resources, and processes to achieve these goals. If you plan to increase your revenue by 3 million, do you need to spend more money on marketing, hire more sales professionals, or raise your prices with current clients and new business?
All of these factors will directly impact your KPIs. Too many organizations set their KPIs and fail to map this out resulting in disappointment when they don’t hit their plan.
Step #3:
Once you have completed the first two steps, you can move into optimizing your CRM to track real-time results. This is how you know your KPIs are on target. This should be looked at weekly and sometimes daily.
In addition, if you are off track, what needs to be adjusted, or what do you need to add to move you in the direction of making your number? As they say, what gets measured will improve.
Step #4:
Make sure you get laser-focused on three to five KPIs. Like anything else, if you try to do too much at once, you will overwhelm yourself and your staff. Of course, your CRM and other technology will manage all the processes, metrics, and data points to achieve those key KPIs. But that doesn’t mean all those metrics and data points should be your KPI’s.
In the 10 years since SEG’s inception, working on sales and marketing plans with over 250 companies has provided great insight into choosing these Key Performance Indicators. Future articles on KPIs will dig deep into which ones will help you exceed your numbers. In the meantime, take advantage of the simple calculators on the SEG website, and begin thinking about what you need to hit your KPIs.