4 Key Performance Areas for Your Business

Your business has probably never moved faster. And the competition has probably never been more cutthroat. But there’s one thing that will give you a leg up in business—and that’s your data. That is if you can stay on top of its non-stop growth and help your executives pull the right business intelligence from it. After all, your data is only as useful as the decisions that arise from its use.

Your executive team needs business intelligence they can access in a flash; not mounds of data to sift through. They need access to the information that helps them make fast, informed decisions about your company’s future while shedding light on where you’ve been.

Do you know the key areas of business intelligence your executives really care about? The ones they turn to first in a moment of decision? In other words, what are the key areas that you need to look at when evaluating your business performance?

4 Key Performance Areas

If you’re just getting started, allow us to provide you a shortcut. It doesn’t matter your industry—following are the four main areas of business intelligence any executive needs to know to run a company.

Key Performance Area #1: Financial KPIs

It’s a no brainer—your executives care about making money, hitting goals, and capturing market share.

First, make sure they can easily access revenue projects versus actual growth. They may even want this information drilled down by product, industry, or client.

They’ll also want an instant understanding of your profit margins, as the dips and valleys there give critical insights into the overall health of your business.

You might want to add more financial metrics to your dashboard, like expenses—how much money is going out? and stretch goals—these are major drivers for innovation and long-term changes within a company.

Your executives probably also want to know a few more nitty-gritty details, like profit per customer, growth rate, and customer retention rate.

So, in order to build a comprehensive financial reporting, here are the KPIs you’ll need to build:

• Projected revenue vs. Actual growth
• Profit margin
• Break down of expenses
• Stretch goals
• Profit per customer
• Growth rate
• Customer retention rate

Key Performance Area #2: Customer Satisfaction KPIs

Your customers’ happiness and perception of value impacts everything—from the number of customer service calls you receive to your product recommendations in the market.

Besides, keeping your customers engaged and happy with your product will cost you five times less than acquiring new customers. Focusing your marketing and sales strategies on customer retention –therefore on customer satisfaction– will increase your chances to upsell and turn them into your brand Ambassadors.

Here are a few customer satisfaction KPIs you need to monitor:

• Complaint rate
• Returning customers – for e-commerce websites for example. It can be Upsells for SaaS companies
• CSAT – customer satisfaction score
• NPS – net promoter score
• Customer retention rate
• Customer support rating
• Recommendation rate

Key Performance Area #3: Market Perception KPIs

First, do people in the market –the ones you care about– even know who you are? In other words, what’s your brand awareness like these days?

Becoming a top-of-mind brand in your marketplace is every marketer’s dream. There are multiple ways to increase brand awareness: using social media, collaborating with influencers and leaders in your industry, participating in events or webinars/podcasts, doing PR campaigns to announce new funding rounds/new products/new partnerships, etc.

In order to understand how well you’re doing in increasing your brand awareness, you need to ask yourself these questions: How do customers emotionally connect with you—do they view you positively? How do your customers –and potential customers– engage with you? Is social media playing a positive role in customer acquisition?

To answer these questions, you need to monitor the following KPIs:

• Total of brand mentions on social media
• Customer reviews score on your products – you need to collect data from your website, review websites, and social media.
• TOMA (Top of mind awareness) – you can get your TOMA through customer/market surveys. Your brand should be mentioned first by the respondents.
• Share of voice on social media
• Brand mentions on sponsored content (articles, videos, podcasts, webinars)
• Brand mentions on non-sponsored content (articles, videos, podcasts, webinars)

Key Performance Area #4: Productivity KPIs

You need to measure the progress of your projects and make sure that any critical tasks are being blocked for too long.

Managing on-site and even remote teams requires having a centralized report with everyone’s progress clearly laid down.

With your reports, you should be able to answer these questions:

• How are your business units accomplishing their goals, and what’s the percentage of completion to each departmental goal?
• Is inventory matching production?
• Are customer quoted deadlines being met?
• Are your employees happy? This category may even include stats like employee retention numbers. Happy employees tend to be more productive.

Here are 5 team productivity KPIs:

• Task completion rate per staff member
• Average time to task completion
• Time to market – how many days/weeks/months have past since the day you had the original idea and the day it has been launched.
• Number of innovations or ideas initiated by your staff members
• Employee satisfaction rate – you can get this data from internal surveys.

Start With the Metrics

Give executives the information they need and want. These four focus areas are the core components of any executive’s decision-making toolbox. If you’re not hitting these areas in your executive dashboard then you’re not empowering your team with the business intelligence they need to do their job and manage the business.

Use these recommendations as a launchpad for revamping your executive dashboard, and then customize it with recommendations across the executive team.

You can easily build your KPI dashboards with ClicData’s reporting platform and share them with the board members. Provide them with real-time KPIs in order to make better decisions in the 4 key performance areas of your business.

---

You will also like: