What does it mean to grow a company? Is it increasing gross revenue? The size of your staff? Your client list? All of the above? There are a near-infinite number of ways you can track your company’s growth as you begin to scale — but if you’re measuring the wrong metrics, then your business will follow the wrong path.
Understanding your business through key metrics is critical for any founder or executive. This holds especially true when it comes to measuring sales performance and revenue generation — sales teams live and die by their quarterly figures. But, sadly, it’s not as simple as recording your conversion rate to find the missing link between your business and successful growth. You’ll need to scale up your KPIs before you can scale up your business.
Specific KPIs need to be set to get results that help identify all the points of improvement needed in your business. This will not only produce a clear value to your organization’s growth but improve the effectiveness of your current sales strategies and action plans.
In our Spotlight on Revenue Leadership session, Supporting Scaling Efforts, we discussed these key metrics with Kevin Knieriem, CRO at Clari, Jayme Smithers, CRO for ThoughtExchange, Stuart Barnes, VP of Sales at Vimeo and Bill Schmitt, CRO for Tempo Automation. They’ve shared some of their favorite metrics with us, and explained how they’ve helped their businesses achieve meaningful growth.
Key Metrics to Measure Your Organization’s Scaling Success
KPIs Generated Through Collective Intelligence
Jayme Smithers, CRO for ThoughtExchange has shared how his company uses a cutting-edge process of collective intelligence gathering to help scale businesses. He explains that one of the best ways to develop metrics that translate into growth is by harvesting the combined insights of your customers and staff, and synthesizing that into actionable KPIs. By adopting this holistic approach when setting your KPIs, you will have benchmarks tailored to fit the targets that are most important to your company.
Talent Retention, Staff Churn, and Employee Satisfaction
As employee mindsets have shifted, retaining talent has become an increasing challenge for organizations. Many CRO’s suggest that now is the most critical time to listen. Businesses need to create spaces where they can hear from their employees. This will generate trust, and provide valuable insights into employees’ motivations, desired career paths, and preferred benefits. These insights then need to be converted into actionable programs and initiatives, so that staff feel as if their concerns and contributions are validated.
Customer Retention as a Lens for Employee Growth and Customer Fit
While almost every business tracks customer retention, our Spotlight panelists discussed a number of creative ways to get more use out of this classic KPI. Kevin Knieriem, CRO at Clari, talks about how sales metrics can not only be used to gauge performance, but actually create the foundation for employee growth: “What I’ve seen is an evolution of the seller to use data to become the best in their craft, just like Steph Curry does to be best at his craft of basketball.” Similarly, the panelists discussed the importance of constantly evaluating your customer retention against your ideal customer profile — are the customers you’re retaining aligned with the customers you’re seeking? If not, this is an indicator that there’s misalignment within your sales process.
Final Thoughts
There are a myriad of key metrics you can use to measure your business’s growth, and companies like Clari can provide you with excellent guidance on some of the most important ones. But just as important as understanding important KPIs to track is understanding how to combine them or use them creatively to generate deeper, more meaningful insights.
Watch our full Spotlight on Revenue Leadership session to learn more about Supporting Scaling Efforts with metrics and KPIs.
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash