If you are involved in making decisions for your business' growth, then you know: it's a numbers game and KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) are one great place to start!  KPI's are performance metrics that measure specific goals for businesses across all sectors.

Common things that Key Performance Indicators might track are:

• Revenue (profits, total revenue, and new customers)
• Employment statistics (employee turnover, performance, and vacancies)
• Customer service (average call time, efficiency and customer satisfaction)
• Marketing (sales generation and overall effectiveness)
• Efficiency (overall efficiency, departmental processes and individual efficiency)

We help most businesses identify the KPI's for your industry and then determine which ones are most critical to your success.  Many businesses believe there is inherent value in creating sales and marketing goals, and there's also value in measuring those goals on a week-to-week basis. At quarter's end, sales and marketing results will indicate if quantitative data was left out of your organization's process. In other words, if you fail to track numbers at the beginning of the quarter, you won't be happy with your numbers at the end of the quarter.

I want to discuss how your team can begin measuring numbers with consistency, because the reality is that numbers are too important to ignore.

One of the hardest things about tracking your numbers (read: growth or decline) is transparency. It's hard to let others in on the reality of your business' sales and marketing efforts, especially if there's underperformance. But that's exactly why you should press for such transparency.

The more your team knows the numbers and what to strive for, the greater sense of urgency and ownership your employees will possess.

Of course, calculating any amount of numbers, goals and metrics takes time. But it's worth carving out a few minutes each week in the long run. I want to encourage you to conduct a meeting with necessary team members, once a week, to go over a weekly scorecard.

Don't get complacent with lazy systems in your office. If tracking numbers is lacking numbers, it's time to step up and change the status quo.

This stuff is science. Quite literally (testing and solving and testing again until you get it right). But you don't need to make it ... say it with me ... rocket science.

Here are the sorts of things you can track in a weekly scorecard...

• Price, term, refund and premium tests for profit
• Customer acquisition and retention
• Advertising response rates (digital and print)
• How many in the new prospect pipeline (and their collective cost benefit)
• New and qualified leads
• New sales meetings
• Revenue streams in concordance with your team's budget
• Other such items specific to your business -- only you know what should go in this scorecard column

The biggest component here is that you actually do it. If you already keep a scorecard, that's great! How consistently do you go over the numbers yourself or with your team?  Don't let the method or "prettiness" factor prevent you from taking action and implementing a weekly scorecard at the beginning, middle and end of your process. You'll like the final result.

We work with businesses of all sizes, to help identify KPI's, areas for growth, and ways to increase profitability.  Contact Emerald Financial Partners today and let's get started!