Developing key performance indicators

Posted by admin on 19 April, 2009 under Business advice, Business development, Businesses in Trouble, How to save money ideas for business, What you measure you can manage | 3 Comments to Read

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial measures used to help a business define and evaluate how successful it is and are used to monitor how the organisation is doing.

Another term for KPIs is Key Success Indicators (KSI) and any business that uses KPIs is one that certainly has an advantage over businesses that don’t. What you measure you can manage and each business needs to choose which KPIs are key to the performance of the business and those performance indicators that will have a major impact on the business if they are improved upon.

So what exactly is a KPI – the best way to answer this is by way of an example:

Client Conversion KPI

A KPI that is key to any business is it’s conversion of enquiries into actual clients, so for example if you are currently getting say 30 enquiries per month and you convert 10 of those enquiries into clients, then your KPI is 10 divided by 30, which equals 33.33%.

By having this percentage you now have a target to beat, but more importantly, by acknowledging your conversion rate as being 33.33% you can take steps to look at why it is this low and take action to make improvements.

A first step might be to make contact with the 20 out of 30 enquirers that do not become clients and ask them why this is. By asking your potential clients you will find out what it is you can do to improve upon this KPI. By taking action you will get more clients from those that enquire about your products or services and improve your Client Conversion KPI.

Average Revenue per Client KPI

Another example and also one that is both relevant and key to all businesses is the Average Revenue per Client KPI. Let us assume that you presently have an annual turnover of £550,000 and on average you had say 2,500 clients in the same year. Your Average Client Sale is £550,000 divided by 2,500, which equals £220, which represents your Average Revenue Per Customer KPI.

As with the first example, once you know what the average spend of your clients is you are able to address ways in which you can increase their spend, thereby Increase Business Profits.

There are KPI’s that are non-revenue related, for example:

Employee Retention KPI

If a business has a high employee-turnover this will be very costly to the organisation. Therefore, if you can keep your employees for longer periods and thereby reduced employee-turnover you will drive down costs and save time, by avoiding unnecessary interview and training time involved in replacing every new employee.

To get your Employee Retention KPI you take the number of employees that you lost over a given period (lets say you lost 5 employees over a 12-month period) and divide this by your total employees over the same period (let’s say that this was 20) therefore, your KPI in this instance would be 25%.

Once you have your Employee Retention KPI you can take the necessary steps to change this and make improvements and one such step would be to carry out Employee Exit Interviews and ask them for reasons why they are leaving your organisation. By performing Employee Exit Interviews you will discover a lot about why your staff are leaving you and then take steps to reduce this KPI and save the company money in the process.

So to begin on the road of business success you need to start Developing key performance indicators.