What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business? Your KPIs relate closely to your goals. To track performance against your business goals, you need to be able to measure them.

KPIs need to mean something to you and your team.

What about the conversion rate from quotations to sales? The average sale to new customers? The number of stock outages or complaint rate? Many businesses will monitor liquidity and debt ratios. Financial KPIs might include profit margins, revenue growth, and cost of sale.

Not every business is the same and not every business owner wants the same things. The metrics for different industry sectors will also differ. Each business’ KPIs should be specific for that business.

When you develop your strategic plan with your team, working out your goals for the next year, what are the factors that will indicate most clearly how well the business is progressing towards meeting those goals? Try and keep it to six or fewer for the business overall.

It may turn out when the team starts to talk about it that different parts of the business measure their success in different ways. If you find this, work out KPIs for each department (not too many) and make sure it’s clear how they feed into the KPIs for the business overall.

If you know what your goals are, but it’s not clear how you will measure whether you’re achieving them, talk to us about working out KPIs to suit your business.