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Fuzzy Metrics Lead to Problems – Not Profits
As marketing professionals, it is one of our core responsibilities to measure our success. Right?
My colleague and friend, John Reese, once taught me that Internet marketers only need to measure two things: YES or NO? and MORE or LESS? I now call these two measurements the core duality metrics.
Pretty simple, eh? Uh … not so much.
It’s true that you can only improve what you measure, but your measurements or “metrics” as we call it at MarketingOnline.com members call it, must be clear, specific and actionable in order to lead to improvements and profits.
Brent Dykes of Digital Marketing blog writes: (more…)
Do You Measure Your “Critical Drivers” Daily?
“Drivers” are key metrics that can expand (grow) or collapse (kill) your business or any business. Critical drivers are those key metrics, tested and tracked daily, that assist you to anticipate the future.
As I once heard Tony Robbins say, “Anticipation is power.” And I agree. When you look into the past – each day – you can predict the future of your business.
I’ve read many business management books over the years and one of my favorite quotes comes from Tom Peters says, “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.“
The age-old management adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” was probably first uttered (and discovered) by some bazaar merchant thousands of years ago in Babylon.
Yet it’s still positively accurate today!
In my experience, the easiest step to improve any business to begin measuring the critical drivers in the business and then celebrate and amplify what you want to see more of. Case closed.
For retailers like Sam’s Club, a core critical driver may be the “dollars-per-square-foot” generated in each store.
For a real estate management organization like Remax, it may be the “number of new agency offices” opened each month. For an insurance agency, it may mean the “dollars-per-policy” generated, or the “revenue-per-agent.”
The species or types of critical drivers you want to measure is (more…)