3 Challenges You May Be Having With Your Scorecard

3 Challenges You May Be Having With Your Scorecard

Developing the scorecard that works for your business is a journey.  There are some common challenges that entrepreneurs face along the way.  This blog is written to help you take action to improve your scorecard and shorten the journey.

We will look at three common challenges that entrepreneurs face with the scorecard by providing:

  • The symptom
  • The likely cause
  • Suggested actions for improvement.

 

Symptom: Team members are not accountable to their numbers.

 

 

Symptom: We are hitting our activity numbers, not business goals.

 

 

Symptom: Long streaks of red or green on your scorecard or metrics that never prompt action.

 

Remember that your scorecard is a journey.  Ensure that you are getting to the root cause before you make changes to keep your scorecard moving in the right direction.

 

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Measuring Your Client Experience To Drive Profit

Measuring Your Client Experience To Drive Profit

I have seen a lot of entrepreneurial scorecards, and one thing is consistently missing…  the client’s perspective.  Some businesses track NPS which asks customers/clients how likely they are to recommend the product or service to their friends or colleagues, but this is only a good starting point.

The challenge with NPS is that it is a very macro/high-level metric, making it difficult to take a specific action. Tracking your client’s experience more specifically can enable you to take the right action sooner to positively impact how your clients navigate their experience with your business. You may ask: What is involved in measuring Client Experience over and above NPS? Mapping out the Client Experience/Proven Process/Client Journey more specifically provides the framework for breaking down silos and aligning the business to improve the Client Experience.

This blog will provide you with ideas to leverage your Scorecard to improve your client’s experience and drive profitability. We will look at:

  • Client Experience as the Alignment Point for Your Business
  • External Metrics: Measuring your Client’s Perspective
  • Internal Metrics:  Delivering the Experience
  • How This Approach Drives Profitability

 

Client Experience as the Alignment Point for your Business

Entrepreneurial Scorecards typically have a lot of internal metrics associated with individuals and departments. Sales, marketing, and operational metrics are tracked with the goal of acquiring and serving more clients.  I find it curious that the client’s perspective is usually missing from most scorecards. We have written a good bit about mapping out the client experience. The big idea with using a Client Experience Framework is to remove friction and provide a seamless experience for your clients from the time they learn about your business until you maximize the value you can provide them.   There are two perspectives on Client Experience metrics – external and internal.

External: Measuring the Client’s Perspective

External Client Experience metrics are about gathering feedback from clients that is specific to the stage they have just experienced. Let’s use a relatively generic Prospect/Client Experience for context:

  1. Qualify
  2. Discovery
  3. Proposal
  4. Launch (onboarding)
  5. Client Success (ongoing service delivery)

Properly measuring your client’s perception of how these areas work together allows you to immediately make an impact.  For example, it is no secret that an effective onboarding process drives long-term retention and profitability (more on that later!).   Gathering your client’s perspective on the onboarding process with two simple questions provides insight as to what you can do right away to improve:

  • Rate your experience with our Launch/Onboarding Process on a scale of 1-10
  • What are two things that would have made your experience better?

There are no internal metrics that could deliver actionable insights better than that!  While it is important to get your client’s perspective, tracking internal Client Experience metrics also drives efficiency and profit.

 

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Internal: Delivering the Experience

Adding a Client Experience layer to leadership, departmental, and individual metrics provides a couple of big benefits:

  • It helps you ensure your scorecard is connected from the leadership down to the ground level 
  • It helps you understand where to focus on improving your people, processes, or message.

Once you have your Client Experience stages mapped out, there are a couple of internal metrics to consider tracking:

  1. Conversion Rates: What % of clients move from one stage to the next?  This is particularly effective when looking at the Ideal Prospect Experience.  This is the process of turning prospects into clients (aka sales process).  This is a great indicator of how much friction is involved in each stage and also helps you zoom out to understand where to focus.  For example, looking at the stages above, if 85% of leads move past the Qualify step, but only 25% move past the Solution Definition/Proposal stage, then it might be time to look at the Qualify Process.
  2. Time in Stage: How long are prospects and clients spending in each stage?  This metric is particularly effective when looking at Client Experience stages that are more operational, like Launch/Onboarding.  If clients are taking too long to move through the stage, it can impact client satisfaction/retention as well as profitability.

Tracking internal and external Client Experience metrics is a great way to enhance client experience while driving profitability.

How this Approach Drives Profitability

Getting everyone moving in the same direction can be a challenge. The Client Experience perspective breaks down internal silos and converges the business around the most important thing – your clients! Gathering and acting on client feedback helps focus your team on making a positive impact in the right place to drive client satisfaction drives and retention. This, in turn, drives profitability.  According to Bain and Co, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by up to 25% to 95%  What are you doing to improve and measure the way your clients experience your business?

What Metrics Should You Have On Your Scorecard

What Metrics Should You Have On Your Scorecard

The process of developing the right scorecard for your business can be frustrating and is a journey. Does any of this sound familiar to you?:

  • Am I tracking the right metrics to support my business?
  • I have hopeless, long streaks of red for certain metrics on my scorecard.
  • Are my metrics at the right level (Leadership, Departmental)?
  • Some of my metrics make it difficult to take the proper action.

The purpose of this blog post is to help you break through these challenges.  We will:

  1. Position the difference between leading, lagging, and activity metrics.
  2. Describe the ideal state of an actionable scorecard.
  3. Help you determine what metrics should be on your scorecard at what level.

 

 

 

 

Lagging, Leading, and Activity Metrics

One way to think about metrics is that they are on a vertical spectrum to align with the leadership hierarchy. On the upper end of the spectrum, you have lagging metrics. These are the metrics that you would find on a business plan or V/TO®, and you might also find them on the leadership scorecard.  On the lower end of the spectrum, you have activity metrics and would likely see these at the departmental level and also have individuals that own these activity numbers. Leading are on the spectrum and fit somewhere in between. Let’s look at each one:

Lagging Metrics: Lagging metrics are closely connected to the business’s high-level goals.  The challenge with lagging metrics is that they are hard to affect on a weekly basis.  An example of a lagging metric is 12-month rolling revenue.

Leading Metrics: Leading metrics give you an early indication of whether or not you will be meeting your business goals and lagging metrics.  While an early indicator, leading metrics are not always easy to control on a weekly basis. Examples of leading metrics for sales reps would be proposal/win rates or retention rates for an Account Manager position.  An example of an operational metric is Onboarding Client Satisfaction.

Activity Metrics: Activity metrics are based on the activities you must do to ensure the leading metrics trend in the right direction and the business goals are met.  The idea with activity metrics is to be able to look at your activity metrics when you close out your week on Friday and know if you had a good week.  Examples of activity metrics include # of outbound calls made or # of social posts. In short, lagging metrics are what you are trying to achieve, activities are what your team needs to do, and leading metrics let you know if you are getting there.  Now that this context is understood, let’s look at the ideal state of a scorecard and what metrics you should be tracking and on what level.

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Scorecard – Ideal State

In its purest sense, a mature scorecard consists only of the metrics that you can control on a weekly basis. What is a mature scorecard?   A mature scorecard is where the metrics are tight from top to bottom. The activities that you are doing are going to drive the leading metrics that directly drive the lagging metrics and high-level business goals.

So, you should see a lot of activity metrics on departmental scorecards.   As you move up toward the leadership level, there are likely fewer activity metrics.  That said, any leading metrics should be closer to the activity metrics than the lagging metrics on the spectrum we discussed above.

When you are tracking the right activity and leading metrics, there is limited value in tracking the lagging metrics on a weekly basis, especially when you come down from the leadership scorecard.  Until you get to that point, it sometimes helps to have visibility to leading and sometimes lagging metrics.

Lagging metrics on lower level scorecards can have a negative impact because they are not actionable. This is likely the case if you see 13 weeks of red across your scorecard. It is a de-motivator.

When you see long streaks of red or green for activity metrics, you could be tracking the right metrics but not changing the target goals for the metric, making it hard to take the right action.  Ensure your goals:

  • are achievable goals within reach
  • motivate not deflate

What metrics on what level?

Understanding what metrics to put on a leadership scorecard vs. lower-level scorecards can be a big challenge.  The rule of thumb is that you should have the metric at a level that can be controlled.  For example, # of outbound calls made should not be on the leadership scorecard, and the retention rate should not be on the scorecard for the Sales Development Rep (SDR) team.

Metrics on the leadership scorecard should be actionable for the leader that sits in the seat, even if it is not an activity metric. For example, # of qualified leads could be the primary marketing metric tracked on the leadership scorecard.  If that number is off, the sales and marketing leader should know what corrective action their team should take by looking down a level at the sales and marketing scorecard.  Activity metrics to support # of qualified leads might be # of calls with referral partners or # of social or blog posts.

As we have said, turning your scorecard into a true asset for your business is a journey.  We hope this helps you navigate your journey towards developing a scorecard to drive your business results.

3 Things Your Scorecard Tells You About Your Business

3 Things Your Scorecard Tells You About Your Business

Developing a tight, mature scorecard is a journey worth taking if you want to take your business to the next level.  Introducing a scorecard into your business can be frustrating and make you wonder: Am I tracking the right metrics to support my business goals? Do I have the right targets?  Is my scorecard actionable?

It is hard to know where to focus if you don’t have a good scorecard. Should you focus on the people?  The processes? Or isn’t your message with your  Ideal Client? When your scorecard is mature, it is the perfect tool to help you diagnose where to take the proper action to focus on people, processes, or messages to move the business forward.

We will break down each of these in future blogs, but let’s look at what a mature scorecard might tell you about the most important assets in your business: The People, the Processes, or the Message.  

A “mature” scorecard is a scorecard that has evolved to a place where the right metrics are tracked and providing the right information to move the business toward its goals. For context, let’s use a sales team as the use case.

 

People

Conversations with your people are how you diagnose if the problem is with the people, processes, or the message, so let’s start there. A good indicator that you might have a people problem on your sales team is that the same sales rep(s) are underperforming despite documented sales processes with sales tools.

Looking at two reps helps provide context for this:

  • Superstar Sally: Consistently closes 60% of qualified leads
  • Mediocre Matt: Consistently is under 40% close rate for qualified leads.

If the quality of the leads is the same, and the process is documented and followed, then it is time to take corrective action with the underperforming rep.  The EOS® GWC™ is a great tool to help ensure you deal with the people problem appropriately:

  • Do they Get it?
  • Do they Want it?
  • Do they have the Capacity to do it?

Experienced leaders can peel this back in their normal process of LMA to take the proper action to help their people level up, move into a different seat, or exit the business.

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Process

If Superstar Sam (50% close rate) and Mediocre Matt (40% close rate) are handling their qualified leads differently, then it is not a people problem, but a process problem.

Superstars may be able to meet their sales numbers independently, but less experienced team members like Matt can still perform with process.  The good news is that a tightly documented process will not only help Matt, but Sam and the rest of the rest team will win more as well!

If you discover that you have a process issue, start with the desired metrics that the process is designed to drive, and take a close look if that process truly enables your team members to perform their regular activities.

 

Message

If your processes are documented and your people are performing, consider looking at the message. Having the right message is important from when a prospect finds you to the point that they are happily renewing or extending their engagements with your business.  

If you have the right message, you seamlessly convert leads into prospects, prospects into clients, and clients into raving fans.  Measuring the different conversion points across your client’s journey can help you understand if prospects and clients have the message they need to navigate your business.

 

Conclusion

As we said, turning your scorecard into a true asset for your business is a journey, but it is a journey worth taking.  Starting to measure is the first step. This lets you have a baseline, allowing you to evolve your scorecard and take proper action to improve your people, processes, or message.

The Key Metrics that Build Cross-Functional Team Alignment and Drive Revenue Growth

The Key Metrics that Build Cross-Functional Team Alignment and Drive Revenue Growth

The right scorecard metrics can be very challenging for entrepreneurial businesses, especially in the sales and marketing space. The stakes are high! If you don’t do it right, you can create silos, and departments might be working against each other without even knowing it. Do it right, and you have an entire business pointed in the right direction to drive revenue growth.

You don’t need to throw out your scorecard to build the perfect scorecard. However, some of your metrics might just need to be tweaked or narrowed to build alignment between your teams and get them working toward your ultimate revenue goal. When you get specific with your metrics, your teams will have more clarity on what they are responsible for (accountability), how they and other teams are performing (alignment), and will be able to see the impact of their work on the company’s revenue goals (impact).

Now, let’s get into it.

No one has an unlimited budget for sales and marketing, so it is imperative to have a smart, responsible plan to grow revenue. Businesses typically start to develop scorecard metrics with revenue goals, then eventually land on departmental metrics that support the goal. There are a couple of challenges with this:

  • Many times, the big revenue goal is unfounded, based on a “spaghetti-on-the-wall” approach to setting a financial goal.
  • Metrics are connected vertically for each department, but the cross-functional (horizontal) alignment between departments is lacking, and silos are created.

So how do you align the business around the big revenue goals? The answer is the Ideal Client Experience.

Let’s explore how Ideal Client Experience metrics work as the basis for aligning the business to drive revenue by looking at:

  1. High-level metrics
  2. Ideal Client Experience (ICX) metrics
  3. Departmental metrics

High-level Metrics

I was on a call with a partner yesterday that is working with a business that generates over $100M in revenue.
Interestingly, they do not have any specific growth goals they are pursuing as a business (just one of many reasons we love working with companies that run on EOS!).

Smart growth is about measuring both revenue as well as profit. In addition to tracking revenue and profit, consider tracking metrics like these to avoid the spaghetti-on-the-wall scenario:

  1. Number of Clients: Measures how effective you are in bringing on net-new clients
  2. Revenue per Client: Measures your effectiveness of increasing the value you provide to clients and the associated revenue

If it is trackable, you might even consider measuring # of ideal clients and revenue per ideal client. Regardless, these metrics can also help you develop realistic revenue goals (instead of the spaghetti-on-the-wall metrics).

How does this promote alignment? First, marketing and sales agree on the ICP — the Ideal Client Profile — and then leads are filtered against this. Marketing then focuses on generating the right leads, and sales prioritize closing them instead of chasing their tails with clients that are not necessarily good for the business. By the way, it is much easier for marketing to have a more narrow focus, and it takes fewer sales reps to close ideal clients and filter out suboptimal ones.

– From a past blog, 4 Strategies for Aligning Sales and Marketing

Ideal Client Experience Metrics

The big idea here is to ensure that your ideal clients seamlessly navigate their experience with your business with as little friction as possible – from bringing on a client to upselling/cross-selling and delivering value to them. For most companies, departmental metrics are not related to measuring how seamlessly your clients move through their experience.

What do we mean when we talk about an “Ideal Client Experience”?

That experience begins when your ideal prospect has a problem that you might be able to help with and ends when they are enjoying all of your products and services. The documentation of each stage that your prospect/client goes through is what we call the Ideal Client Experience (or ICX)…Ensure you think about it from the lens of your client and not from your internal sales or delivery process. Thinking about how clients feel in each stage and the friction that they might experience is a great framework for improvement. This lens allows you to be more objective in considering a sales and marketing direction. It often brings operations into the equation as well as they obviously have a significant role in maximizing the client experience.

– From a past blog, The Lens of the Ideal Client Experience

So how are Ideal Client Experience Metrics different? These metrics:

  • Connect directly to high-level metrics like revenue and profitability as well as departmental metrics (see below), and
  • Enable cross-functional teams to have visibility to the experience that prospects and clients have with your business.

Examples of Ideal Client Experience Metrics are:

  • Ideal Client Experience (ICX) Stage Conversion Rates: The % of clients that move from one ICX stage to the next.
  • Time Spent in Each ICX Stage: The time that an Ideal Prospect or Ideal Client spends in each client experience stage.

Keeping an eye on these metrics will help you prioritize where the biggest opportunity is to streamline your prospect/client’s experience with your business and realize revenue growth faster.

Departmental Metrics

Departmental metrics are normally siloed without the added context of the Ideal Client Experience. Departments absolutely need to have their own metrics, but they need to be tied to some aspect or stage of the Ideal Client Experience. The best way to illustrate this point is to look at a few examples of departmental metrics:

Department: Marketing

Siloed Metric: # of Leads

ICX Metric: # of Ideal Client-Qualified Leads

Department: Sales

Siloed Metric: # of Qualify meetings

ICX Metric: # of Qualify Meetings with Ideal Client-Qualified Leads

These new ICX Metrics will help you to get focused on your specific goals. We’ve already established that Ideal Clients are the ones that are the most profitable to your business, are the most productive to serve, and that your team actually enjoy working with. With that in mind, these clients are obviously the ones you want to bring in more of as they’ll drive more revenue and profit, right? If that’s the case, then shouldn’t your goal metrics be designed to help ensure you are bringing on more Ideal Clients, meeting with Ideal Client-Qualified Prospects, and closing business with Ideal Clients.

These new departmental metrics will help you to stay focused on bringing in ideal clients and driving more revenue. Out with old, unfocused, unspecific metrics and in with the new.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that it would be easier to meet your revenue goals by bringing on Ideal Clients than those that might not fit your Ideal Client Profile.

What metrics are you tracking in your business to ensure your team is focused on bringing the right clients into your business?

To learn more about how other entrepreneurial companies are optimizing their revenue scorecards schedule your explore meeting.

 

Need help determining the impact of some of your pipeline metrics? Check out our Worksheet!

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A Smarter Way To Grow Revenue

A Smarter Way To Grow Revenue

“What are we going to do to hit our 3-year goal?” Leadership teams regularly ask this question in quarterly planning meetings. The way this question gets answered determines whether the company will hit the goal or whether they’ll arrive at a future quarterly saying, “Well, that goal wasn’t realistic in the first place.”

Traditional ways to hit revenue goals include:

  1. Do more marketing
  2. Hire more salespeople
  3. Buy some technology

These strategies sound good on the surface but often fail to deliver for two reasons.

First, the company threw activity, people, and technology to the problem without considering the process.

Second, most of these activities tend to be focused on net-new business to the exclusion of cross-sell revenue. “We need more new customers!” Yes. And, you also need to sell more to your current customers.

The Smart Way: Process

Boil a business down to its most basic level and you have three things:

  1. People
  2. Processes
  3. Technology

Sales and marketing tend to focus on people and technology to the exclusion of process. As a result we have sales teams that struggle to onboard new reps and are held hostage to high-performing reps. Marketing becomes a series of unfocused activities. Technology gets used at only a fraction of the potential. All of this adds up to mediocre results.

What’s missing? Process. Working together, marketing, sales, and operations consider the buyer and client journey from the perspective of the client’s experience. At each stage they consider the goal, the friction, and the motivation to move forward. Then the team determines the experience they want to create. This results in a defined process backed with content. Technology supports the process by providing automation and feeding real scorecard metrics.

These processes live in playbooks. Now the people in marketing, sales, and operations know what to do to drive revenue growth. Current employees see the big picture. New team members onboard quickly as they understand their role in the process. Prospects and clients enjoy a great experience.

How To Know You Need Processes

Why do so many companies struggle with building and optimizing revenue processes? It depends on the size of the company.

You know you need processes when you are hitting an invisible revenue ceiling. This happens to small and medium sized companies.

Smaller companies have depended on the founder to wear the sales hat. Marketing was a nice accessory, but the bulk of revenue came from the relationships of the founder. Over the years, this company tried to hire some sales people but they ultimately failed because they didn’t have a process.

Medium sized companies often depend on the sales manager to drive revenue. Their role is to hire experienced (expensive) sales people and keep them engaged. When less-experienced salespeople are brought on board they often fail because they don’t have a track to run on. After six months of prospecting (and at least $50,000 of expense to the company) they give up. The few accounts they did land get passed off to the experienced reps.

Both of these scenarios tend to ignore cross-selling. The founder is too busy to cross sell. The sales manager is too focused on hiring reps and hitting quota to think about account management.

What’s needed? Processes that become playbooks. Small companies need this to scale. Growing mid-sized companies need it as well.

How Do You Build Processes?

Given the demands of day-to-day business and monthly quotas, the chances of building processes on your own are slim. Most companies will not risk de-focusing their team to work on building processes. That’s why it often makes sense to engage a third party to lead the effort.

Bringing in a third party like Convergo allows you to build processes without interrupting the daily requirements of business development. You also get the added benefit of an outside perspective from a team of experienced Growth Guides.

To learn more about how other entrepreneurial companies are solving the problem of growth by building processes, contact us today to set up a 60-minute explore meeting with your team.