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The old expressions, yogurt what you measure is alive and well. I suspect it is a part of the human psyche to please. It is important to therefore establish a set of key performance indicators (KPI’s) in your business.

I would strongly suggest you keep this to a limited few and build a hierarchy of measurements. Therefore top line measurements should be limited to a few important ones. We often suggest setting between 1 and 3 measurements per key sales process. So you set 1-3 measurements for lead generation, 1-3 for lead to sales and 1-3 for after sales. The more balanced a company the more balanced these measures and their focus.

We often get so focused on business growth that we forget our current customers. The reality is that the fastest way to business growth is through our current customer base. It is worth considering:

  • How you help customers use your products and services
  • How you encourage repurchase from existing customers
  • Your referral programme
  • Considering how you work these 3 Elements will go a long way to showing how you can leverage your current business for future growth.

Getting leads in a business is a skill that is worth working on. There are many aspects to it, it is not just about getting traffic to your website. You need to consider at least 6 things as outlined in the image:

  1. Your target customer
  2. The webpage design that you are taking visitors to
  3. How you get visitors and what channels you use to get them
  4. How aware are the visitors of their needs and of your solution?
  5. How are you engaging your visitors? Do you have a plan for what you expect visitors to do and have you designed your webpage and process accordingly?
  6. Is there any incentive for the visitor to become a lead?

The combination of these 6 attributes will dictate how successful you are at lead generation. If you are an established company we would add even more to this process.

A typical question we receive is, how do we compare to others or how is our industry in comparison to others. As a starting point, while it is good to benchmark in order to learn and improve, it is not necessarily the key. In sales and marketing, working from the perspective of your customers is the driving force. Implementing tools and technology to help that process is going to make all the difference.

In terms of a self assessment benchmark, we ask participants rate their business on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of use of digital today. The average to date is 5.2 and it is more or less normally distributed with a slight skew above this average.

A good starting point is to do a Digital Scorecard as you can then rate all the processes in sales and marketing. By doing so you can review how well you are doing as well as deciding where to improve.

We have been running a survey for all our Seminar attendees, well over 1,000 businesses to date, where we ask if they have a digital strategy or not. We have found approximately:

60% do not have a digital strategy

40% do have a digital strategy

A word of caution. We found some, a small number but growing, that do not have a specific digital strategy but have digital as part of their business strategy. This is advised for the majority however it will be many years again this is the case.

When you get your Digital Scorecard you will see all the Elements and your status colour coded using the traffic light system with red, orange and green.

Many ask if they should have all Elements green or an objective to turn all Elements green. The simple answer is no. Digital Scorecard gives you a perspective based on how you answer the questions. Your focus should be on:

  1. what your customers value
  2. what is important to your business

The above two points should be your guide when deciding what and how to improve your business.

I am sure you are aware of Google analytics. But if you are a business to business company you should also look at LinkedIn Demographics. Launched in 2018, it can provide insight on what companies are visiting your website and other useful insights.

While Google analytics is well know, there are many analytics options available. It is sometimes worth looking at the options. LinkedIn Demographics is one option that is worth adding to your website if you are a B2B company. It is free and will only take a few minutes to add.

Each business will have its own set of tools often referred to as their tech-stack. This term refers to the tools that the company uses to work with digital. Each person will usually have a selection of tools that they know and help them achieve their objectives.

The key when selecting the tools you need is to focus on your objective. What do you want to achieve and how will the tools help you achieve your goals.

During our training seminars we go over the tools that we use with clients and how they all fit together. Some of them can be suitable for your needs and some not. You will need to define your goal and then select the tools. One of the challenges is many tech companies are selling tools and not the result that you want to achieve. This is why we advocate starting by mapping how your customers buy and how you can help them. Then use this to define your goals and then pick the tools that will help you achieve your goals.

The most important consideration when setting key performance indicators (KPI) is balance. You want to make sure that you are taking in the total business. So as a starting point we would set 3 measures per key sales process:

  • Lead Generation
  • Lead to Sales
  • After Sales

If you are a start-up you may have a greater focus on lead generation as you lack a customer base. Equally established businesses may have a greater focus on after sales and how they can encourage customers to buy more and also refer their business. Performance indicators help give focus and drive performance.

Digital is often confusing and knowing where to start can be a challenge. As we focus on sales and marketing our starting point is clear. We always advocate starting with your customer. The more value you can add to customers the more success you will achieve.

In terms of digital, we start with understanding how our customers buy. Once we understand that we can see how we can help them and what more we can do. This acts as the guiding light for our digital efforts.

The other aspect that is critical is to have some KPI’s (key performance indicators). The old expression, you get what you measure is a fact. So having a balance set of measures is always vital and these can change with time.

As long as digital is considered, be that in a specific digital strategy or as part of your business strategy that is fine. The key is that it is considered and addressed. Being addressed means putting digital into the context of your business.

Today many businesses have a specific digital strategy. Over time this becomes part of the overall business strategy. As digital is such an important item today, it is often worth having a specific focus on it and a digital strategy. Again the key is not to have it in isolation but to put digital into the context of your business.

As a general rule it is best to start with to whom you are selling. If they use a particular platform, social or otherwise, then it is worth testing for your business.

All businesses are selling to people in one way or another. So finding out where they hangout and having a presence there is usually a good idea.