Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are metrics used to evaluate your business success. The data compiled by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can help you assess KPI’s for each of your departments. So how do you use CRM data to measure your KPI's? What information should you be looking for and which questions will your data answer? Below, we’ve listed six of the most commonly assessed areas and the KPI metrics you should look at for each.
- Overall Management of Company Revenue
- Marketing
- Sales
- Tech Support
- Accounting/Finance
- Customer Service
Overall Management
If you’re increasing your revenue, it’s pretty safe to assume your performance is hitting the mark, right? Well, it really depends on how much you’re increasing in percentages and dollars, and how that fits into your projected revenue model. So, which KPI's will make that clear? Search your CRM for the answers to these questions:
- What is my percentage of all company revenue?
- What is my percentage of gross profit?
- What is my dollar amount of gross profit?
- What is my product revenue, in dollars, for existing customer sales?
- What is my product revenue, in dollars, for new customer sales?
Breaking it down into these five categories creates a concise picture of the revenue patterns and shows you where you are excelling and where you need to improve. Is your revenue for existing customers greater than your revenue for new customer sales? If so, why? How can you alter your marketing and sales strategies to shrink the gap?
Marketing
Before you even begin to assess your marketing KPI's, it’s crucial to understand how you’re defining your leads. Do you have criteria for “good” and “bad” leads? What are the parameters? If you’re counting the bad leads in with good leads, you’re not getting the real story. Once you decide what makes a lead “good”, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- How many leads are being generated from internal programs?
- How many leads are being generated by business partners?
- How many events and/or activities have we done?
- How’s my marketing plan execution? Is it on track? Within budget? If it’s off, by how much?
- How many leads are generated per campaign?
- How many leads convert to sales presentations?
- How many leads convert to an actual sale?
- What is my campaign ROI by lead source?
- What is my overall cost per lead?
Now, look at your overall cost per lead and compare that to your conversion. Are the benefits outweighing the cost? What about your lead generation versus your partners? Is your partner pulling their weight or do they need to step up their game?
Sales
Sales teams have a lot of considerations for key performance indicator analysis. The good news is, most can be obtained using some simple math. Start with big picture analysis and then get more granular. Ask these questions:
- What’s the revenue (in dollars) by sales rep that is rolled up to management?
- What’s the gross profit (in dollars) by sales rep that is rolled up to management?
- What’s the percentage of gross profit?
- How many units of the product have been sold?
- How many new clients have been acquired?
- What’s my add-on revenue?
- How many opportunities are open?
- How many proposals are we scoping?
- How many official proposals are underway?
- What do our sales look like in dollars?
- How many calls are we making?
- How many presentations are we doing?
- What is our profit (in dollars) for products? Services?
- How many renewals are we getting for these?
- How many days does it take for us to close a deal?
- What’s our close ratio?
Look for patterns in your data to discover how these KPI's are affecting your success. Feel free to adjust them to fit your specific business as well.
Technical Support
Technical support is like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. Just when you think you’ve beaten the game, ten more moles pop their heads out to laugh at you. Looking at the right KPI's for technical support is crucial whether you’re providing it to customers, or the technical support is internal to your team. The more efficient your technical support, the more work everyone can accomplish, and that translates to profits! Here are some key KPI questions to ask about your tech support:
- How many open tickets do we have?
- How long are tickets usually in queue?
- How many calls do we receive per day?
- How many of those calls result in a ticket being opened?
- What is our Mean time to repair, in hours?
- How many of first time calls are immediately answered?
- How many call backs are we receiving per issue?
- How often do we escalate the issue?
- What’s our average total time to resolve an issue?
- What types of resolutions are we seeing most frequently?
- Where do we stand in regards to our customer satisfaction metric?
These numbers only mean something if you have a predefined standard for your customer satisfaction metrics. That’s where #11 ties everything together. Make sure those metrics are established first, and that your team has been using them as guidelines for their customer interactions.
Accounting/Finance
Start with these core KPI’s for accounting and finance. Then, add metrics specific to your business to get the best assessment.
- What’s the accounts receivable over X days?
- What’s the accounts payable in # of days?
- What is the accounts receivable ageing? (a.k.a. How long have clients owed you payment?)
- What is the average # of days to pay?
Customer Service
Optimizing your customer experience is crucial because as we all know, the better the customer experience, the more loyalty you build. KPI’s for customer service are focused less on dollars and cents and more on the number of interactions and the follow through. Here are the questions you should be asking:
- How many complaint calls have we received?
- How many customer surveys have we sent? How many have been completed?
- How many customer nurture calls have we made?
- What percent of customer service interactions are being followed up on? How often?
- How many referral clients do we have?
- What are our sales, in dollars, from customer service?
- How many years (on average) do we retain a customer?