KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. This level of tracking is designed to monitor the metrics in between the most obvious and most common data points that indicate how a business is performing: your gross revenue and net profit.

The story to be told in the data between your gross revenue and net profit is significant.

For example, if you are experiencing a drop in revenue, do you understand why it is happening?

If you don’t understand why it’s occurring, how do you fix it?

Sometimes, the answer might be as simple as a lead source drying up. Or, your marketing stopped working on a particular channel.

But what do you do when everything seems to be in order, and yet you’re experiencing a negative financial impact?

On the other hand, how do you know when you are ready to create a new position?

What information are you utilizing to create your budget, and are you for casting with an eye on current trends within your business?

You need to have ways of measuring the performance of your business at every stage to equally identify challenges and opportunities.

For a sales team, perhaps the activities to measure are daily outbound calls to new prospects, follow-up calls to current prospects, etc.

For medical professionals, you may want to evaluate the number of opportunities, and then use industry benchmarking to determine how well they are performing with the opportunities presented.

With home services professionals, we might focus on response times to leads to ensure that our lead generation efforts are being fully capitalized upon. And perhaps we’ll want to track the ratio of upsells against appointments.

With any business, these are some common areas of focus that you should be tracking: