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5 Essential Measures Of Charting Business Success

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Charting Business Success|5 Essential Measures Of Charting Business SuccessWhen you think about it, ‘success’ is often a broad term, and it applies to many different desirable outcomes. For instance, a post-injury patient overcoming the long journey of learning to walk again, alongside their physiotherapist, will no doubt feel the same kind of personal success that a major athlete feels when coming in first – both have had to put in work, aim for goals, and battle adversity, even if the outcomes seem very different on the surface; success abounds with each.

The same principles could apply for business. A small company that couldn’t hope to compete with a multi-national entity may be adored within its community and have generations of patrons select them first, ultimately guaranteeing a small market to serve for some time, and won via fantastic goodwill efforts.

That said, while thinking of your success in relative terms is a smart place to start, it’s also important to know what format by which to present real, tangible metrics you can use to plan for the future. Let’s consider how to achieve that, below:

The Essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

It’s important to recognize that the key metrics for growth can be defined in more than one way. This list of customer success KPIs is a fantastic place to start. They allow you to understand where your risks and opportunities are when it comes to net revenue retention and driving business growth. One recommendation provided will show you how to calculate net revenue retention (NRR) to see the growth of revenue even without onboarding new customers.

In addition, seeing the churn rate of customers who may come and go can help you determine what your actual growth figures are and how they trend. In addition to this, managing your relationships, especially with long-term customers, is an essential measure to focus on, as anyone can generate new clients, but if they stick around, that suggests you’re doing something correctly.

Sales Growth & Retaining Customers After Promotions

Retaining customers after a promotion is a healthy means of showing if your product or service is delivering its value, or is perceived as valuable, once the real charges are applied. Anyone can sign up to a month free trial, but if a customer is happy to retain your service after signing on during that period, then odds are you’ve kept them for the time being.

It can be helpful to also push surveys out to these accounts for an incentive, perhaps offering 5% discount on their next purchase for completing a five-minute survey. Here you can determine why they stayed, if they would in the future, and what their main decision was to keep their subscription ticking over. You may reformat this depending on the general intent of your business, but it’s not hard to see how this perspective makes a difference.


Customer/Client Favorability

It’s healthy to consider the customer and client favorability that you grow over time. Note that this means more than just enhancing your relationship and remaining on good terms, but analyzing just how long term clients or even recently onboarded clients regard your service.

Comment cards, feedback, and analyzing their behavior using your services (are they receptive to upselling, do they preorder your newest items, what packages do they go for?) can make a huge difference.

In addition, you may be able to track this feedback through online customer reviews, seeing the discourse regarding your company on social media platforms like Twitter, and seeing what aggregate websites like TrustPilot have to say about your particular brand. This might not be a particular numerical measurement, but it does give you an insight into the wider cultural conversation about your brand, and how it’s viewed from various levels of your customer base.

Market Share

Analyzing your share of the market by calculating your total sales and dividing them by the reported sales of your industry can be a good idea. It will help you understand what share of the market your business is cornering, or at least give you an approximate idea.

Of course, you can adjust this depending on your niche, your specific location and the markets you serve. Note that you probably will occupy only a small corner of the market, and that’s okay, even this can serve businesses competently for years upon years going forward.

Market share can give you a somewhat decent understanding of how you might be fairing compared to your competitors. In some ways, this may be obvious, but again, one more tool in the arsenal to determine your position is never a bad thing, and should never be considered as such.

Staff Feedback & Satisfaction

It’s healthy to consider the staff feedback and satisfaction that you gain over time. Sure, no business will run solely that its staff feel happy and comfortable in their roles, as this is not enough to support their salaries.

That said, it’s an essential measure of if your internal management structure has been working effectively or not, and if that’s backed up with meeting realistic targets and solid productivity metrics, then odds are you’re doing something right.

A staff survey, listening diligently to the reports of your managers, and making sure staff are permitted to review working for you online in any way they wish will make a big difference. Sure, staff being happy and feeling capable in their roles is a good thing no matter what. But it will also lead to benefits such as them going the extra mile, staying at your company and lowering staff turnover (which is good if you’ve invested money in training them), and even promoting working for your brand to people they know.

In some cases, companies that are awarded ‘best employer’ status in your area have candidates lining outside of the gate for a chance to work for you. A great number of promising staff members hoping to apply the best years of their innovative thinking and hard work is never a bad thing for your brand.

With this advice, we hope you can understand some of the most essential measures of charting business success. With a little luck and a willingness to keep on top of these metrics, you may feel more secure in your position than ever.

Developing Performance Measures

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Performance Measures|Developing Performance MeasuresIn any industry, businesses pursue profits as a measure of success. However, profits can disguise many variations in effectiveness behind the scenes. In competitive sectors with a confluence of variables, businesses need strategies that reveal their performance over the long term. Without this, businesses will be adrift, lacking in focus or direction whilst their competitors get ahead. Developing performance measures is essential to allow businesses to develop strong strategies and continual performance at the top of their industry.

What Are Performance Indicators?

Performance indicators are deliberately structured measures to gauge your company’s performance in the long-term. Performance measures will have to be curated to the unique environment in which your company operates, the markets you’re operating in and the specific challenges of your sector.

“Once KPIs (key performance indicators) have been identified and constructed, they will help to determine the direction and focus of your business in its finance, operational and strategic objectives,” says Leonard Johnson, a writer at Last Minute Writing and Writinity. “These are key to a business’s continued high performance as well as the contextualization of your company within its sector.” Without KPIs businesses are adrift, lacking a sense of their direction and performance. Let’s take a look at how to effectively develop performance measures.

Identify Outcomes

To have meaningful performance measures, an organization needs a sense of the outcomes it wants to achieve. Rather than using abstract concepts to guide your strategy, find objective results that have clear indicators of success. Make sure that everyone on the team understands how each outcome is being understood as individuals can have radically different interpretations when it comes to identified outcomes.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures eBook

Compare Measures

Recognizing that there are multiple measures for different outcomes enables you and your organization to select the measures that best express your objectives. “When comparing measures, you should be asking whether results can be measured directly or if you need a secondary measure that indicates performance in certain strategies,” says Jerry Dubose, a KPI expert at Draftbeyond and Research Papers UK. “If results can’t be measured directly, how you assess your performance can be based on the performance of indirect hypotheses that are linked to your outcomes.”

Tailor Measures To Objectives

When selecting the final measures your organization will use as performance indicators, there are a few criteria to consider. Metrics for your performance should be able to answer key questions about the orientation of your organization’s strategic decisions as well as providing actionable information that can guide future strategy. Negative consequences of your measures should be kept to a minimum, such as laborious data collection or incentivizing employee behaviour that “shortcuts” the objective.

Define Targets

Equally as important as selecting accurate performance measures is the process of defining the organizational targets your company needs to achieve. Targets should be aspirational, yet realistic and encourage everyone working in the organization to optimize their performance.

As well as identifying targets, a number of thresholds can be created with different action plans indicated by each. A minimum performance threshold can be as valuable as an aspirational target, or more so, when measuring organizational performance. A traffic light system of red, amber and green target/thresholds can provide a valuable visualization of performance as well as a motivator for when action and strategy needs to adapt.

Document Performance

Lastly, performance as related to defined outcomes needs to be documented. These documents can be issued quarterly and will become valuable for reflection on past performance as well as an indicator of future trajectory. Documentation should be systematic and complete – a data definition table provides an excellent structure for overarching documentation of performance. Software can streamline performance documentation as well as create compact performance reports that will indicate how strategy is performing.

Wrapping Up

Developing performance measures should be a cornerstone of every business looking to secure their future. In a fast-changing world, organizations need to have a strategic approach to development and objective ways to assess their performance, otherwise fluctuations in market environments can catch you out. This approach to developing performance measures, as articulated in the article above, will strengthen your business and enable resilience in the face of an unpredictable world.


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Ronald CainRonald Cain is a tutor at UK Essay Writing Services. He is a professional writer, a blogger, and a contributor to Gum Essays. His passion for communication and organizational strategy has led him to roles which support businesses in achieving selected outcomes and, for Ronald, nothing comes close to the thrill of success in a competitive environment.

What Is Agile Marketing? The Strategy You Need to Know About

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |What is Agile Marketing |What Is Agile Marketing? The Strategy You Need to Know AboutA 2018 study shows that 37% of polled marketers rely on agile marketing.

Most people associate agile with the software development world. In a world where operational efficiency is critical, it was inevitable that agile would impact marketing. The allure of consistent growth and flexibility in operations demands that you know how to take advantage of agile marketing.

Here’s a primer to help you answer the question, “what is agile marketing?” and show you the benefits you can reap from it.

What Is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is the tactical process where marketing teams identify, test, and execute high-value projects collectively.

The agile approach can trace its origins to the software development sector. Here, teams craft development objectives over a particular period (typically seven days).

For the next seven days, every team member focuses on these few objectives. When the set time passes (or the project gets done), the team reviews to gauge its performance.

Agile marketing adopts a similar approach. A project will be split into tasks during the planning phase. The team then follows that up with the execution and a review of the project for future improvement.

Features of Agile Marketing

When a team plans to execute a campaign using agile methodologies, there are critical features they must consider.

They include:

1. Sprint

A sprint is the amount of time a team has to complete its project. Typically, a sprint can range from one to six weeks.

2. Team Work

A critical feature of an agile approach is that the team has to work together. Even when one member spearheads the project, each teammate will still need to contribute meaningfully.

3. Standup Meetings

With agile marketing, a team has to hold a brief meeting every day. During this meeting, each team member goes over their previous day’s actions. Additionally, each team member analyzes the challenges they experienced the previous day and lay out their plans.

4. Progress Tracking

Since everyone on the team needs to keep track of what’s happening in each sprint, you need a centralized information point. Thus, teams working through the agile approach use a board or software to track the progress. Every member then gains access to this information.

The Agile Marketing Process

Once you choose to adopt agile marketing, there is a workflow process you need to use as your guide. The ultimate goal of this process is to promote a continual setting of goals and executing them. Here’s an outline of the process:

1. Goals

The starting point for any agile marketing project is setting SMART goals. That is, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. You should give each goal its appropriate priority and review it with every iteration.

2. Personas

Once you set the overall goals for your project, you need to zero in on your target audience. Creating buyer personas helps you accurately define who you want your campaign to impact.

A well-crafted buyer persona will accurately represent real audiences that your campaign can successfully resonate with.

3. Performance Indicators

You now know what goals your agile marketing campaign needs to hit. You also know who your marketing campaign is designed to reach. The next thing you need to do is develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you track the progress.

As you develop your project in each sprint, you should compare the results with your KPIs. Doing so helps you identify areas to improve upon for better results.

4. Jobs to Be Done

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a running list of tasks that the team needs to complete. During the regular sprint meetings, any action points you identify then turn into tasks you need to do. JTBD can also feature a list of tasks you plan to save for the future.

5. Journey Mapping

Although sprints are critical to ensure the task at hand gets done, you shouldn’t ignore future growth. You need to create goals and tasks for the future that can take your project where you want it to go.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

Agile marketing employs unique methodologies to deliver compelling benefits for your campaign. Let’s take a closer look at some of these advantages.

1. Clarity

A significant advantage of agile marketing is that it clears up any ambiguity with your project. With each sprint, you get to develop specific action points that move your campaign forward.

On top of that, as you track and analyze each stage, you get to test what works best. Thus, your implementation moves from a guesswork approach to a precise effort.

2. Flexibility

Agile marketing places a premium on the ability of the team to respond to changes throughout the project. As you assess the work done in short periods, you get to respond faster to any dynamics that face your project. The result is a more flexible workflow that helps you achieve the results you need.

3. Data-Driven Growth

Agile marketing campaigns rely on real-time data to inform the decisions you make. Consequently, you have better odds of developing more reliable strategies. As you execute one reliable strategy after another, you deliver consistent growth.

Whether you’re working with MediaFace marketing agency or marketing partners, finding out about their data capabilities is critical. Take time to ask them how they plan to leverage real-time data to boost your campaign.

4. Nuanced Campaigns

Spray-and-pray marketing is ineffective because it does not go as deep, despite its broad reach. Therefore, while many people get to see your campaign, a significant number of these viewers don’t fall into the category you want to target.

Agile marketing helps you develop accurate buyer personas that get you to understand your target audience better. The more you know your target audience, the better you can predict their buying decisions.

Such focus on getting to know your audience with every iteration enables you to make smaller marketing audiences profitable.

Agile Marketing Has the Power to Lift Your Campaign

Agile marketing holds the capacity to help your team respond to changes faster and be more efficient. To get the most out of this approach, you need insightful responses to the question, “what is agile marketing?” Understand the elements you need to make the strategy successful and train your team to execute on them.

Are you a busy executive looking to grow your organization? Check out more of our content for insights that can help your business deliver superior results.

Data Clean-up

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticleImplementation of performance metrics or the alteration of an existing metrics represents change. These changes often expose previously unseen data; producing unexpected information and bringing to light both performance inefficiencies and errors in captured data. Consequently, performance reflected by the new or updated metrics may be erroneous; necessitating further investigation and possible corrective action.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Balancing Performance Measures

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticleBecause resources are always limited and there is no free lunch, too much of any one thing can be bad.


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Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually).

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.