How to measure business success

​You can’t improve if you don't know what to measure
 
There’s an easy way to see how well your business is doing. How much is it billing?
 
Done.
 
Right?
 
Wrong.
 
Of course.
 
There’s so much more to this topic and it covers both hard and soft factors. But before we get into those, let’s start with an important premise:
 
The “before” photo
 
It’s one thing to see how your business is doing now. But it’s infinitely more valuable to see how it’s progressing. Is it getting better? Worse? In what ways?
 
So before we dive into all the things you can measure and monitor, bear in mind that you’ll never know where you end up if you don’t know where you started. As in, right now.
 
Conducting this exercise is, in a way, fun. Because for each thing you’ll document, you’ll be able to think: “How will this get even better?”
 
Hard numbers
 
This one is pretty easy. Of course, there’s your monthly billing. But lurking just outside those numbers are others, which are important predictors of future billing. Such as how many proposals you have out there at any given time. Or, at least as important, your sales-closure rate.
 
Log them now. See how they compare in the future. If they’re going up, great. If not, seek the “why” and concentrate on process improvement. This might sound overly simplistic, but we found we get far higher response rates from ridiculously short (as in, two or three sentences long) initial sales queries than we do from lengthier, more-carefully-crafted ones. It’s a low-tech analog of A/B testing.
 
Here’s another one from the biz-dev side: Effort expended vs. billing realized. Large contractors (e.g., in aero/defense, architecture/engineering/construction, etc.) will have RFP response teams whose first—and arguably most important job—is to make the “go/no-go” decision on a given opportunity. Is it worth the time and effort?
 
You face the same decision all the time. What are your odds of winning that assignment? How much effort will it take you to pursue it? In a perfect world, the answer is “High odds, low effort.” So much for the perfect world. Still, you want to choose those opportunities which you have the best chance of winning, and then nail them. Second-best doesn’t win.
 
Influential factors
 
You can drown yourself in data if you like. You can exploit Google AdWords. You can check page conversion rates for your site. But you can also measure, and track, some other numbers that might not immediately leap to mind. For example, how many new contacts/leads/LinkedIn connections do you actively generate each month? How many people are following you on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter? How many “likes” are your blog posts generating? Which pages on your site are attracting the most traffic? What’s the response rate on your outbound eblasts?
 
And all of these factors, in case it wasn’t obvious, predicate upon the quality of the materials you generate and push out. Your site. Your emails. Your corporate bio. Your press releases. Blogs. Banner ads. You name it. Each one gives you an opportunity to shine—and, simultaneously, rope to hang yourself, if you mess up. So take every item seriously. It’s called the “world-wide” web for a reason.
 
Check back
 
Keep your “before” metrics in a handy, easily accessible/updatable form; a basic Excel spreadsheet works fine. And be realistic about your timeframes. Sure, you want your site’s traffic to grow, but it probably won’t change all that much by midnight. Choose an interval that gives you perspective… and incentive to improve.
 
Need help with any of these materials? Contact us. We’d love to lend our experience and expertise to your cause.

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