Tag Archive for: KPI

What Are KPIs And How Commercient SYNC Can Help A Business Thrive

A business, in many ways can be comparable to the human body, filled with complex systems that keeps things running smoothly. KPIs can be seen as the vital signs of a company. Key Performance Indicators are a type of performance measurement and are important to gauge the health of your business.

One of the greatest challenges of the sales process is to measure the efficiency with which a company is achieving its goals. You need reliable indicators that allow you to evaluate the results against the business objectives. That is where KPIs come into help. KPIs evaluate the success of a strategy the company engages in and improve the performance of a sales strategy.

It is important to remember that if something can be measured, it can also be fixed and improved upon. In order to establish effective KPIs, the company’s goal must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Specific. In order to evaluate the success of your sales strategy, make sure that KPIs are well established first. Your team should be using them as guidelines while interacting with customers.

Here are a few KPIs you might consider for your business: increase profit, new clients, employee satisfaction, customer service, technical support and more. You can also measure email marketing KPIs such as newsletter opens and offers. KPIs are highly personal and they all depend on your company’s objectives. There are thousands of KPIs to choose from. You’ll need to decide what metrics are most important to your business. In order to know which KPIs are specific to your industry and which ones don’t align with your goals, you need to do your own research.

Keeping track of your KPIs can be overwhelming. But if you make use of a CRM you are already halfway there. The valuable information compiled by a Customer Relationship Management software can help you assess KPI’s for each of your departments.

Luckily, a powerful data integration app like Commercient SYNC, which synchronizes your ERP and CRM, can show sales history, inventory, and do wonders for your sales forecasting. Commercient SYNC can help your organization save time and get organized because you avoid double data entry and human errors.

How to develop effective Key Performance Indicators

Once you have established your KPIs, you have to implement them in a certain way to get the most out of them.

Here are some valuable recommendations to do so:

  • Communicate them. Your employees won’t be able to strive towards KPIs if they are not aware of them. As long as the sales department and other important areas of the company are aware of the KPI’s, the employees can feel involved to achieve business objectives.
  • Keep them updated and always aligned with business goals. You have to monitor your KPIs in real-time, and also carry out weekly or monthly reviews. Depending on the results, you may have to update the KPI’s, if there are indicators that reaching your objectives is not possible.
  • Renew them when necessary. Don’t be afraid of a fresh start when it comes to evaluating the performance of a business strategy. If you keep measuring the same KPI’s continuously, there’s a risk of not fulfilling the main objectives and not being aware of trends that may be relevant to the business. Be ready to innovate and implement new tools.

How can Commercient SYNC help you measure your KPIs?

One great value of a Customer Relationship Management system is to aid in the company’s strategy and objectives. In order to do so, CRM software provide insightful data analysis that show KPI progress and results.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make with KPIs is not separating them from other data. Business KPIs can be lost in a sea of information. To avoid that mistake, Commercient SYNC, the #1 data integration platform for ERP and CRM, is the right tool when it comes to tracking you KPI’s.

Don’t just take our word for it:

McClure’s, a family run company based in Detroit, has put KPI tracking to the test by selecting Commercient SYNC to help them integrate their ERP and CRM. Providing them with a 360-degree view of sales. With Commercient SYNC integration of  Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Salesforce, McClure’s received intelligent insights such as sales history and improved sales forecasting in order to monitor KPIs and their strategic goals. Speaking from experience, McClure’s found it very helpful to have access to customer data, serial numbers, invoices, new accounts, ship to and bill to addresses, and more key features being integrated. With Commercient SYNC they are now receiving more specific reports that can help the team grow and boost sales.

“Communication between those two systems [via SYNC gives] us intelligence that we need to make business decisions… to grow the business” – co-founder Bob McClure.

With the help of Commercient SYNC data integration for ERP and CRM, you can easily dig deeper into your data and measure the KPIs important to your team. Don’t run your company in the dark, use valuable data you already have to evaluate what works within your business strategy. Drive your company towards a successful path. Contact us now.

How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 2

In last week’s post, How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 1, we talked about how important it is to provide your sales team with the right tools and content. You have to provide your sales reps with the right information if you want them to hit the ground running and close in on those leads.

Sales enablement is a simple way to achieve this. One of the first things you can do as part of the sales enablement process is to teach your team how to measure the right things and why they should be measured.

Measure The Right Things

With a CRM platform like Salesforce for example’s sake, your sales team can basically run a report on anything and everything you can think of. Want to see which accounts belong to who? You got it. Want pipeline projections for Q2 of 2016? Done. Who’s going to win Friday night’s Atlanta Hawks vs. Miami Heat game? No problem.

All of this is great and all, but is your team measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? Or are you just measuring stuff to measure it?

What’s A KPI?

Key Performance Indicators are signposts along the way that your sales team is doing everything they need to do to be successful. Keeping an eye on your KPIs is one of the best ways to enable your sales team and keep your strategy on track.

So what KPIs should you be keeping track of? There are five in particular that can make a difference in the sales enablement process.

 

  • Lead response time. Speed is essential to increasing your sales reps’ odds of success. Prospects equate a responsive company to a good company. The only question then isn’t when to respond — the answer is as quickly as possible — but who should respond.

    There’s no substituting a personal phone call from one of your reps. You can measure this by tracking inbound and outbound phone calls within Salesforce and look at how rapidly your team is responding.
  • Follow up contact rate. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” -Thomas, A. Edison.

    A National Sales Executive Association Survey found that 48% of sales reps never follow up a second time on a lead. This is important since 10% of sales are closed on the fourth contact and 80% are closed between the fifth and 12th contact.

    If you’re a sales manager, you want to look at every lead record that is being worked over time and see multiple calls and leads logged against it. If you want to enable your sales team you’ve got to remind them that perseverance pays off, and they should never give up.
  • Clicks on follow-up emails. Take a moment to reflect on some of the best sales follow-up emails you’ve ever opened. The rep who emailed you probably brought something important to the conversation to re-engage you.

    Maybe it was a link to a  whitepaper, promotion, or a new pricing page? The point is they put a lot of thought and effort into what they believed would help you close the deal with them. The goal of measuring this KPI isn’t necessarily about click-through-rate. It’s to ensure that your reps are providing your prospects with valuable content.

    If you find this isn’t the case, try providing them with some content they can use or make them aware of resources that are already available.
  • Opportunity-to-win ration. Can you say for sure how many wins your reps get after bringing prospects to the opportunity stage? Or do you have to ballpark that number?This is an important KPI you should be tracking.

    It’s possible to have sales reps on your team that are exceptional networkers and who open doors all over the place, but they stink at closing. If that’s the case, you need to either a) work with them on improving their closing skills or b) move them into a different role so they can open doors for your best closers.
  • Social media usage. This isn’t an easy data point to measure, but you need to make sure your sales reps are active on social media. We know that the top sales reps out there use LinkedIn. What isn’t clear is how much contact and what kind of contact make the most difference with potential clients on these platforms.

    There aren’t many KPI guidelines in place for measuring social micro-strategies. However, you can rely on your own instincts to define how you want your sales team making connections and using different social media channels.

It’s critical that your sales team understand what KPIs are, which KPIs you want to give special attention to, and why they’re so important to your business. Next time you look at your dashboard, ask yourself if the measurements you see there are actually helping your sales team? And does everyone understand the importance of what’s being measured?
Read How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 3. It’s a real motivator!