Moving your business to the next level in two words: Permormance Metrics

How do you know you reached your goals? How do you know that you’re on the right track? The only way to do this is to measure your results with performance metrics. Performance metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPI) are specific measures to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of an organizations offline and online operations. For example, if a company wants to make sure that it has 20% of its leads from search engines, your company needs to keep an eye on this and make sure this goal is being achieved. If you measure this goal and see you are only reaching 15 percent, you can make a correction in your approach and measure again. When a company sets a plan, it needs to consider four important things to measure the effectiveness.

Step one: translation of a company’s vision, strategy, or e-business model into components that are measurable in a quantitative way is the goal. For e-business, some goals should include conversion of visitors to the site into sales or building customer loyalty.

 Step two: the performance measures need to be understandable and easy to use.  All employees using them should have access to the information in order to make an informed decision. Organizations should use KPI in order to sort through all the data gathered. Keeping a dashboard is an easy graphical tool.

Step three: you must be able to act on a metric. Most companies will use benchmarking (using a baseline of one’s company compared to others) and also the past metrics to set goals for the future metrics. For example, decrease the bounce rate (the percent a person hits the “back button” on the home page and leaves your site) on the website.

Step four: Motivation of employees to reach desired metrics with the use of compensation and employee involvement will help reach the goals set in place. Bringing in employees from the beginning of the process and throughout will help ensure that the goals set forth are achievable and important to the organization.   

Therefore, the use of metrics to measure how your company is performing will ensure the longevity of the company. If your company is in operation now without metrics or goals, then your company is not utilizing the tools available to take your company to the next level. Do not settle for average, push your company and the sky is the limit. Let The HELM Group show you how to set performance metrics and how to track them.