Trevor Clark - Business and Executive Coach; Speaker and Global Trainer

What do these three business metrics have in common?

• Number of clients
•  Revenue
• Profit

You guessed it â€" all three are historical key performance indicators (KPIs), that most business owners only assess in the rearview mirror of bookkeeping software or management accounts.

Another important distinction is that these numbers are outcomes; results we achieved, but they give no insight as to what caused them, or what we can do to influence them.

Here are five additional questions every entrepreneur should ask of his/her business â€" at least monthly. If you can track this on a weekly or even daily basis, you are so much more in the driving seat of what your business can achieve.

• How many leads (or sales   opportunities) did my business   generate?
• How effective was I (or my sales   team) in converting those   prospects into actual paying   customers?
• How often are our clients buying   from us?
• How many transactions did we   (on average) generate per   customer?
• What percentage of our revenue   is left for the business, once all   costs of sale and expenses have   been deducted?

Putting the five new KPIs into a formula along with the original three (customers, revenue and profit), will look something like this (I have added in sample figures to demonstrate the process): Now we start to get a better picture of our business’s chassis. What is under the skin? Why we are getting the results we are getting?  Do we have a better idea of the weak areas to be working on? And, assuming we are going to measure these numbers consistently going forward; do we have a tracking system? This will demonstrate the effectiveness of any campaign or system improvements we implement in each of these areas.

Let’s drill down on each of these ‘5 Way’ areas.

Number of Leads â€" our team has identified 73 strategies to help you create more sales
opportunities. While obvious ideas include radio, television and press advertising, social media
marketing, Google Adwords and hiring more sales people, we find that often-overlooked strategies such as systemized referral programmes, vehicle branding and strategic alliance campaigns yield quite impressive results. Key to this is tracking where our leads come from so we always know what is working and what is  not.

Conversion Rate â€" our list covers 84 proven strategies to improve this percentage yet most business owners struggle to identify ten. When last did you or your sales team attend sales training? There is a wealth of knowledge and simple tools that make the job of today’s professional salesperson so much easier. Aside from team training, ask yourself if you are using a guarantee system, sales scripts and a clearly documented sales process for quick wins in this area.


Number of Transactions â€" we have 70 strategies you can employ to get your clients returning more often, and maintaining an up-to-date customer database is central to the success of nearly every one of them. Today’s entrepreneur can no longer store client data in a little black book or Excel spreadsheet. An abundance of intuitive, off the shelf customer relationship management (CRM) systems are available at affordable monthly subscriptions, making it inexcusable to not capitalise on these technologies.

Average Rand Sale â€" Love them or hate them, fast food chains are the masters of this game.  You know the drill â€" order a burger at a McDonalds and before taking your money, the cashier will always ask you the magic questions,  “Do you want fries with that?” or “Can I upsize your order?”. I can guarantee that there is a supersize question that could make your business a small fortune once you have identified what it is â€" and that is just one of 52 potential strategies you can use to improve your score in this area.

Profit Margins â€" last but most definitely not least, there are 67 strategies you can potentially be using to improve your margins. We all understand that the higher our gross profit percentage, the less sales we have to generate to hit our break-even or profit goals. But do we have a clear plan in place to make sure we are consistently improving this magic number? Measuring our actual costs, regular price increases, putting a freeze on discounting and better negotiating skills are a great place to start.

Now â€" what would happen if, over time, the owner of our sample business implemented several new ideas to improve each 5-Way area to a target
improvement of only 10% in each?

Results - Those 10% improvements in each of the five chassis areas, have given us a cracking 46% improvement in revenue and a 61% improvement in profit!

Apply those percentage improvements to your last month’s revenue and profit figures and ask yourself if results like that would get you excited about working on your marketing machine today.

There is no silver bullet that transforms a business overnight, but it is the hundreds of incremental, one percent improvements, implemented consistently over time, that yield true, sustainable results.

If you need help working out how to track your own numbers more scientifically, our coaches would be delighted to show you how â€" contact us today to reserve a slot at one of our upcoming FREE business skills workshops. We will demonstrate these principles in person, and assist you in applying the chassis concept to your business.

T: 031 266 2258
www.mastery.co.za
durban@actioncoach.com