What Are Healthy Metrics for Business Trends?
When you get a checkup, a doctor will take your temperature, blood pressure, and other quick checks. She can quickly see if you are generally healthy by reviewing a few numbers. It isn’t a complete checkup, but the doc can promptly see general health trends.
What’s the analog for your business? Here are six healthy metrics I like to use.
- Do you have a leaky bucket? Are customers signing up again to buy your services or products? If they buy once and leave – something may be wrong. What’s your customer retention rate or trendline?
- Are employees resigning and leaving at a pace that’s affecting serving customers? If you can’t retain employees, do you understand why? Is your culture sick? What’s your employee retention rate or trendline?
- Are you meeting your revenue goals? If you consistently fail to achieve your sales goals, something is wrong. Maybe you are too optimistic and unrealistic? What does repeated quarterly failure to achieve sales goals mean? What’s your success rate for achieving quarterly sales goals?
- Are you losing more than you are winning? Whether it’s a declining conversion rate of leads or a finding competitor consistently beating you – there is a problem. What’s your win rate of deals or conversion rate of leads?
- Are your margins and profits growing or declining over the last 18 months? I like this metric because you’ll have a difficult time attracting capital and talent without profitable sales. What’s your trendline for margin and profitability?
- What’s the trend for the cost to acquire a customer? Your CAC is a vital sign of health if it is declining. If it is rising, something is wrong. What is your CAC trendline and what are you doing to reverse a negative trend?
What are you using to measure the health of your business? Do you use healthy metrics to monitor trends?
Maybe it is time to go to Urgent Care to get a wellness checkup.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Unsplash
