Three Overlooked Benefits of Tracking Your Metrics
Any professionally run organization tracks their metrics. These metrics range from your sales, to your number of leads, to the number of phone calls or website visitors you receive.
Without knowing and tracking your metrics, you can’t improve them. Hence the popular saying “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.”
While every business owner knows they need to track their metrics in order to methodically improve sales and profits, most don’t know the hidden benefits of tracking their metrics. They are as follows:
1. Tracking Metrics Reduces Stress
When business metrics aren’t tracked, it’s nearly impossible to tell how well your business is doing. This inevitably leads to significant stress on the business owner. Unfortunately, this is often the case when the business owner tries to take a vacation. Often, they never fully relax since they worry that things aren’t going smoothly ‘back at the office.’
Conversely, both on a daily basis and when I’m on vacation, I receive a daily email with all of my key metrics. I see my key performance indicators such as current profits, sales, # of proposals, results from email promotions, etc. At a glance, I can see how every part of my business is performing. If something’s not running properly, I know exactly what it is and who to contact.
2. Tracking Metrics Improves Employee Performance
Most employees don’t perform at nearly their peak level because their performance isn’t being tracked. Conversely, when you are able to numerically score your employees, and show them their results in real-time, their success nearly always skyrockets.
For example, if your goal for your customer service manager is to reduce refunds, they need to be able to quickly see their results. Charts showing refunds by day, projected refunds for the month based on results to date, and comparisons to last month will motivate them to do better.
Likewise, tracking the number of proposals each sales person gives and their proposal close ratios will boost performance.
The fact is that you get the performance you motivate and track, so make sure to start tracking the metrics you want to improve.
3. Tracking Metrics Alerts You to Problems Ahead of Time
By tracking website metrics, I was able to see the rise in mobile and tablet traffic to my website months before my competition. I was thus able to revamp my site before the mobile and tablet traffic was significant. Likewise, by tracking proposal metrics, I was able to immediately spot when the number of weekly proposals was low. We subsequently corrected the problem, rather than waiting weeks to see the problem result in poor monthly sales.
In Conclusion…
In summary, when you track your metrics, not only will you improve your sales and profits, but you’ll reduce your stress, improve employee productivity and make better decisions faster. Importantly, using a metrics tracking dashboard like Guiding Metrics lets you see all your metrics in real-time so you make better decisions and your business soars.
