A few years back I was struggling in business and didn’t know why. Sales were inconsistent and month to month income was highly variable.
I have a few close friends and menotrs that I shared this with and one of my good friends who is the CEO of a local charity asked if I have any “Key performances indicators”.
This immediately stank of business school jargon, but what I like about this kind of jargon is that you can always adapt and modify business concepts to suit your own needs, whether you are a sole trader with minimal staff or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. If there is something helpful in the jargon, take it, modify it, and make it your own.
Here’s how I made the idea of KPI’s work for me, I thought about it in terms of what are the weekly tasks I can do to help smooth out the variance in sales and income.
These are my KPI’s:
Traditional Marketing
Social Media and inbound marketing
Quote
Invoices
Admin
Within each of these categories are about 5 simple tasks that help my business keep running along successfully.
When I stay on track of these key performance indicates, I see a direct correlation with lead generation, sales and most importantly, income.