Small Business Brief

Business Advice

What Business Metrics Should You Keep Your Eyes On?


In order to ensure that your business runs as smoothly as possible, there’s a handful of business metrics that you need to keep an eye on. Not only will this provide insight into your company’s performance, but it can also highlight problem areas that need your attention.

Let’s explore a few of the most important that you need to keep in mind.

Total Revenue

As you might expect, having a strong grasp of the overall revenue of your business is essential. After all, you can’t expect to reach peak levels of performance if you aren’t consistently aware of how your business is currently doing.

In general, it’s important to consider both the total amount of revenue that your company experiences as well as the sources of this revenue. For example, your company might make the majority of its sales through its website as opposed to its brick-and-mortar location.

However, it might make the largest sales at your physical location. You can then use this data to readjust various different segments of your sales and marketing strategies.

Of course, your total revenue is also essential to record accurately so that you can convey to your investors or partners why they should continue to work with your business.

Customer Retention

In many cases, it doesn’t make sense to focus on one-time sales. Instead, you’ll need to prioritize establishing a long-term relationship with your customers.

Customer retention refers to the percentage of your target demographic that continues to interact with your brand after making their initial purchase. As you might guess, a company with low customer retention will likely struggle to maintain a consistent level of performance over a long period of time.

Fortunately, gaining insight into customer retention issues can allow you to rectify them as quickly as possible. This can typically be achieved through sales promotions, loyalty programs, etc.

Customer Acquisition

Retention isn’t the only factor related to your customers that you need to prioritize. The cost of customer acquisition is one of the most important business metrics that you will work with. This is particularly true when it comes to maximizing the value of a customer relationship that you establish with your target demographic.

To elaborate, let’s assume that the overall lifetime value of a customer at your business is $100. On paper, you might assume that you will eventually receive $100 from them on average once they become a customer.

However, let’s also assume that you have a particularly high marketing budget that focuses on customer acquisition. If you end up spending roughly $40 to acquire a single customer, your profit will not be nearly as high as you anticipate.

This can adversely affect many different areas of your business, particularly your relationship with your investors.

Net Profit Margin

For those who are unaware, calculating your net profit margin is relatively straightforward. You simply need to determine your monthly revenue and subtract all of your sales-related expenses.

This will allow you to determine whether or not the cost of operating your business exceeds the amount of money that you generate.

Increasing your net profit margin is also a straightforward process. By generating a larger amount of overall revenue, you will see larger profits assuming that your sales costs remain stagnant or only slightly increase.

Call centers are known to be one of the most profitable businesses that you can own. You can visit this resource to learn more about how to calculate call center metrics.

Overall Conversion Rate

Just like how it is important to establish the cost of acquiring a new customer, it’s also imperative that you have knowledge of your overall conversion rate. Put simply, a company’s conversion rate is the percentage of users who become customers from the pool of people that are targeted by your marketing strategy.

For instance, many companies will send marketing emails to a group of 10,000 recipients. If approximately 1,000 of these individuals end up becoming customers, then your conversion rate is around 10%.

As you might guess, boosting your conversion rate will often directly result in a larger amount of revenue. This is assuming that you don’t have to invest a significant amount of money to do so.

Employee Satisfaction

Unfortunately, this is a metric that many business owners tend to overlook. In reality, employee satisfaction plays a large role in the overall productivity that each employee has at your business.

It should also come as no surprise that a more productive team will generate better results. You can measure employee satisfaction through a handful of different ways, but one of the most effective is to simply ask them.

This can be in the form of a survey, a one-on-one meeting, etc.

After you obtain this information, though, you’ll need to take steps to make any required changes. Some employees may feel that certain areas of your internal processes can be run far more efficiently.

You might also discover that the majority of your employees have an outstanding issue with a particular manager. As long as you keep your employees satisfied, you are unlikely to encounter performance issues in the future.

The Above Business Metrics Are Essential to Keep in Mind

So, it’s imperative that you always take them into consideration. The above information will help ensure that you can seamlessly use business metrics to better understand your organization.

Want to learn more useful info that can help you out in the future? Be sure to check out the rest of our blog.



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