I recently read http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/15/how-to-run-your-company-based-on-metrics/ – How to Run Your Company Base On Metrics – a useful overview for any company.
When I was in sales, I became a believer in metrics, and living by them. You probably know your weight, within a few pounds. You probably know your bank account balance, within a small range. You probably know your income, and take-home-pay if you work a traditional job. We all use metrics, and anyone not intentional about them is, in my humble opinion, being sloppy.
SwiftCloud’s systems are ideal for employee performance tracking, KPI and OKR (Key Performance Indicator, Objectives & Key Results [Google / Twitter’s respective versions]). Some things are self rated, others may be rated by peers, and others might be rated by others in the relationship such as employer to employee, client to vendor, etc.
My wife periodically rates our relationship on a scale of 1 to 10.
Why? Her perception is a metric that matters in the marriage. If I rate it a 10, but she rates it a 1, we’ve got problems.
Fortunately, she’s more generous that that.
In sales, metrics can be broken into lead-measures (action steps that help drive outcome) and lag measures (actual outcome). Actual revenue is a “lag measure” in our own definition, but number of calls made, emails sent, files updated in Swift CRM are all “lead measures” – 100% up to the worker to meet and act upon.
Math is truth. Accounting is the language of business. It’s easy to delude oneself or dress up a hunch, get a feeling of validation from happy customers, but in the end, the math tells the real story.
One can absolutely be accountable for lag measures as a feedback loop for lead measures. If the marketing department has met their quotas for producing leads, then sales should be accountable for producing revenue.
If you are not measuring your metrics that matter, you’re intentionally lying to yourself or that unwillingness to go under the microscope is a sign of a problem.
Awareness creates action
Action leads to results.
SwiftCloud can help. For peer review software templates, let us know if you need them, we’ll be happy to some starting place templates into your account.