How often do we hear about company KPIs associated with business performance or the activity of individual people? The KPI, an acronym for Key Performance Indicators, has now become one of the key concepts for determining a company’s progress in terms of strategic and operational objectives.
How and Why to Adopt KPIs
Companies often analyze metrics and data that do not fit with what are important business objectives. It, therefore, becomes necessary to define KPIs in line with the mission and core business of the organization and long-term objectives.
Identifying and choosing KPIs that make business strategies effective is certainly not such an immediate and simple process. Fundamental, in the process of selecting these indicators, is to ensure that these are relevant to business objectives, allow an objective measurement of the results obtained, rather than merely operational activities, and that they are monitored constantly, so as to have immediate evidence of the actual validity.
KPIs and Business Intelligence
The most advanced Business Intelligence tools allow you to analyze a large amount of data, transforming them into information to support business strategies. BI, therefore, through the creation of dashboards, allows monitoring of the main KPIs, identified by the company, making them accessible in real-time as well as easy to read for the actors in decision-making processes.
The advantage that BI provides through its solutions for the analysis of KPIs could be summarized in the following points:
- Real-time analysis of KPIs in order to promptly assess the operations of the organization
- Implementation of Dashboards and visualizations to highlight the main metrics according to the different roles and internal departments
- Creation of automated reports so that users can receive immediate updates.
Adoption of KPIs for the Sales Force
Effective KPIs to analyze sales performance have become indispensable to address the ongoing challenges that sales departments of companies in constantly evolving sectors, such as Retail, find themselves facing.
The daily monitoring of the sales force’s performance is one of the main activities under the responsibility of a sales manager.
The approach to measuring the performance of the Sales team can be translated into different types of analysis, with the use of Business Intelligence solutions, which today make the identification and reading direct and more intuitive. For example, even economic incentive systems are powerful tools to guide employee behavior and improve business performance.
In this case, the collaborator needs to be able to access their model transparently, to constantly monitor the achievement of their objectives and the economic benefits that result from them, as well as the actual disbursement of commissions and bonuses.
This implies the need for the company to equip itself with an application that allows, on the one hand, to define in the most dynamic and parametric way possible the KPIs to be monitored and therefore the incentive model of the individual collaborator and on the other hand, that is able to automatically calculate skills and performance, giving visibility to the interested parties.
What are the Sales KPIs?
What can be the main indicators to support the sales and marketing team, in view of achieving the objectives?
Here are some examples:
- Number of new customers
- Sales share with new customers
- Sales performance and growth compared to previous periods
- Indicators of penetration and market shares
- Sales comparisons to market benchmarks
- Average sales KPIs of customers per period
- Number of customer visits per week
- Open sales opportunities and percentage of closed and won offers
- Response times to Prospects
- Average sales value per line/brand/product and sales divided by period
- Value and margin of sales
- Delay in customer payments
- Number of customer returns
Blue BI and its team can help your company in adopting Business Intelligence solutions that are customizable to your needs and your internal company systems.
Blue BI has created BBI x KPI Management, a Business Intelligence solution based on a flexible data model that integrates with specific needs and technology platforms, allowing you to always keep your critical business KPIs under control.
Contact us to learn more.
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