5 KPI Management Best Practices to Consider in 2021

At the beginning of each new fiscal year, you and your team set goals.

Your goals might range from a certain dollar amount in sales to a specific site traffic goal tied to a conversion metric. Whatever your organization cares about, you plan performance metrics for each team to meet and exceed every year.

But creating KPIs – key performance indicators – is only one piece of the larger puzzle. You can’t simply come up with KPIs and let them float aimlessly as the year progresses. You need to manage them by tracking progress and analyzing what the results of your KPIs mean for overall business goals.

To make things easier for you, we’ve compiled the most essential KPI management any leader needs to know to better help their team:

• What is KPI Management?
• Why KPIs Matter?
• KPI Best Practices: How to Use Data to Drive Business Performance
• How to Choose the Right KPI Management Solution

What is KPI Management?

KPI管理层涵盖了开发，执行，跟踪和分析团队的关键绩效指标的过程。它用于帮助公司衡量一段时间内设定的业务目标的成功。

In layman’s terms, KPI management is how a company measures the goals set forth at the beginning of the year by the year’s end.

Editor’s note:Did you know that with Databox, there is no need to manually share links to relevant KPI dashboards? Justschedule automated snapshots of your dashboards to any Slack channel. You can also get notified whenever your most important KPIs are trending up or down withDatabox alerts. See how today.

Why KPIs matter

Key performance indicators matter to every business, regardless of what you call them. You have dedicated performance metrics attributed to your entire team and individual team members as well. But why do they matter?

KPIs help teams track the progress of long-term projects, new process implementations, and find out what’s working and what’s not, so they know better where to spend time, money, and resources. With this in mind, we’ve laid out the best practices for managing your team’s KPIs beyond using a spreadsheet for tracking and annual reviews for follow-ups.

KPI Best Practices: How to Use Data to Drive Business Performance

To approach setting KPIs that bring a business benefit to your company, you need to follow a few key best practices that will keep your team on track for success year over year. Here are the five most important KPI management best practices to follow in the upcoming year:

1. Align KPIs to business goals and decide which are most important to track
2. 用高度可见的KPI透明
3. Make sure your KPIs are realistically achievable
4. Incentivize hitting your KPIs
5. Schedule check-in meetings to ensure your KPIs on track

1. Align KPIs to business goals and decide which are most important to track

您的KPI不会与您组织的其他团队相同，也不一定会与您最好的竞争对手相同。决定哪些指标对您的团队最重要。显然，您需要跟踪收入，潜在客户生成，利润，封闭交易 - 所有基本内容。但是，哪些KPI对您的团队很重要？多少足够？

Our data shows that most teams (70%) track between 10-20 KPIs at one time, while only 30% track more than 20 KPIs annually.

It can be overwhelming to track more than 20 KPIs annually, but if you discover that you (really) have 20+ extremely important performance indicators, by all means, do track them. But, if you’re able to whittle your list down to something more realistic, it’s likely this will help you provide more accurate benchmarks, predictions, and outcomes on your goals at the year’s end.

2. Be transparent with highly visible KPIs

The best method for making sure your team hits their KPIs? Accountability. And being accountable requires one key thing: visibility. The more visible your KPIs are to the larger organization, the more likely you’ll be held to completing what you’ve set out to achieve.

Declan EdwardsBU Coachingdoubles down on the concept of visibility when talking about KPI progress: “One of the most effective ways to manage the performance of KPIs is visibility. Whether it’s a shared file, a series of written KPIs in the office space, or something more tech-driven, like aKPI dashboardensuring that your KPIs and the progress toward them are visible to everyone in the organization, is a fantastic way to encourage a culture of transparency and accountability.”

Is it a bit intimidating to have multiple eyes on a project or deliverable you’re not done with yet? Absolutely. But in the back of your mind and the minds of your team members, you’ll know that other people are watching, tracking, and cheering your team on to meet and supersede goals you’ve set.

安德烈斯·奥萨（Andres Ossa）Mudangoexplains how their team uses transparency for goal-setting and clarity across teams. Ossa explains, “About a year ago we decided to make our KPIs public to everyone in the company – even people outside of the sales team. We present this information on the homepage of our internal platform after you login so everyone sees these numbers every day, several times a day. This has improved accountability and transparency. We have used this to create competitions between employees and keep the sales team motivated and performing. Our sales have increased dramatically since we introduced this change.”

Instead of thinking of it as someone hovering over your shoulder, think of public KPI sharing as having a team of cheerleaders with your best interest in mind – holding you accountable for the goals you set for yourself. Plus, using fun activities like friendly competitions among team members or across various departments gives a little pep in everyone’s step, encouraging productivity for everyone.

3.确保您的KPI实际上是可以实现的

We all want to dream big. But when setting goals and benchmarks for your team, you want to dreamrealistically. Your company execs might have big ideas and expectations about what your team can deliver, but your proximity to the staff and daily work means you have a better idea of realistic benchmarking for goals and expectations.

威廉·泰勒（William Taylor）VelvetJobs阐述了在这一点上:“确保这些KPIs are achievable by the team is very important to the company’s total performance. Setting achievable goals and constantly motivating your employees are key to managing the KPIs. Reevaluating the progress is seen helpful and will allow the team to find their problem areas and have a resolution.”

Taylor is right. Shooting for the absolute highest peak of the mountain is ambitious – maybe too ambitious. Make sure you take your team size, individual bandwidth, and factor in extenuating circumstances to leave yourself with some wiggle room.

While you may start the year with 20 employees, consider that some may move on to different opportunities, leaving your team understaffed and overextended. Or maybe a team member needs to take an extended leave of absence halfway through the year. You never know exactly what outside factors will affect the KPIs you set back in January, so try to plan ahead for the worst case scenario and only set your goals within that frame of deliverability.

您想确保您的KPI在财政年度内取得了团队的能力，其原因是另一个原因：吹牛的权利。如果您达到目标并超出了目标，那么您将带来次年报告的收益超过100％的完成或成功的收益，这将使您看起来更好。

4. Incentivize hitting your KPIs

Whenever you incentivize hitting a goal, people will be more encouraged to work their hardest. If they know there’s a bucket of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, the motivation to succeed will be sky-high. Jordan Brannon ofCoalition Technologies对此表示赞同。

Brannon’s team “encourages ownership and management of KPIs simply by tying them to our team members’ promotions and profit-sharing. Consistency in achieving set KPIs is the biggest determinant of whether or not team members get promoted, taking precedence over tenure and role or position in the company. We keep it simple: achieve your targets, and you’ll have better chances of getting promoted.”

It might seem like a novel idea, but it’s not. Every year, your employees have benchmarks and quotas to hit, and the more successful they are, their eligibility for bonuses, a raise, or a promotion doubles. So framing hitting KPIs in the same way is a tried and true method for motivating your team to be successful.

Editor’s note:努力了解您公司的进度？和18beplay , receive regular updates on mobile via push notifications, Slack, or via email, and track how your business is performing wherever you are.

5. Schedule check-in meetings to ensure your KPIs are on track

如果您的团队每年在一月份设定KPI，那么避免签入这些绩效指标的状态六个月或更长时间是有意义的吗？一点也不。大多数人会同意。数据表明，超过87％的团队每月或每周开会，以检查年度KPI的状态。

Elizabeth Weatherby ofTOD Proselaborates on this, noting the importance of regular meetings: “To manage the KPIs we set, we mainly rely on our data, our reporting, and our weekly/monthly meetings to discuss where we’re at. To know whether or not we’re reaching our goals, our detailed reports coupled with the team discussions of our efforts can tell us whether we need to pivot, whether we’ve met our goals, or areas in which we need to increase efforts.”

Simply meeting on a regular basis can be the difference maker in hitting or missing goals, and using data to show where your team stands with its deliverables week over week will help snuff out any problems early on.

Hiba Amin ofSoapbox对此表示赞同。阿明指示读者“谈论的目标s every single team meeting and one-on-ones. For a lot of teams, it’s easy to set quarterly goals and review how they did at the end of the quarter. However, when you’re able to track your progress at every team meeting and one-on-one, you’re able to address roadblocks as they come up instead of retroactively.”

这是非常有用的建议。您越多地讨论各个团队成员的目标以及团队范围内的KPI的进度，您就会越早发现问题并将其削减在芽中。等待太久将不可避免地会引起问题，因此每周检查几乎没有变化的签到要比等待每个季度或更长的时间检查的压力要小得多，然后注意到您可以阻止您无法控制的问题你早点抓到它。

On top of catching errors or missteps before they snowball out of control, checking in on a weekly basis, Dimitris Tsapis of科拉talks about how weekly and monthly check-ins and targets can help with re-focusing goals and adjusting them as time goes on.

Tsapis notes, “Most companies set KPI goals on a quarterly, 6-month, or annual basis. We have found that the best way to manage these goals is to break them down into weekly/monthly targets (make them more attainable). This keeps everyone fixated on achieving just a small milestone on the way to the big goal. For example, if your goal is to hit 10,000 clicks for your blog on a monthly basis, you may only need to increase the number by a tiny bit each week and let compounding do its work.”

Rather than waiting three, six, or 12 months to know what to tweak and enhance, checking in and revising KPIs on a regular basis will absolutely help to hit that “realistically achievable” note we mentioned before. It’s a marriage of transparency and realistic planning. What could be better?

常见的KPI错误要避免

“设置并忘记它”并不是您要如何处理KPI的方式。实际上，在KPI管理方面，您不应该做很多事情。我们将绝对避免使用一些常见的KPI管理错误，包括：

Focusing on the past, not the future

While using historical data is a great way to get a general idea of the right KPIs to set for the current year, focusing on things that worked in the past won’t always result in success going forward. Evaluate what worked before and establish criteria to help you set goals for the current business climate and the projected future of your business.

Not holding team members accountable for missed benchmarks

无论您是经理，团队领导还是仅仅是团队成员，每个人都有责任互相负责。单个KPI通常集体计数。如果每个人都有一个季度配额要命中，但是一个团队成员始终缺少该标记，这会影响整个团队的整个成功指标。

Max Whiteside ofBarBendis a big fan of accountability. Whiteside says to “Hold your team accountable. Not holding your team to their KPIs is the quickest way to derail progress on any project while simultaneously eroding your credibility as a leader.”

That’s another consideration to keep in mind. If you, as a leader, allow milestones to be missed, people may question your leadership abilities. And who would want that?

KPIs, when done right, are challenging but achievable. If your team isn’t performing it needs to be addressed right away. Treat KPI management like a leaky faucet: it can be fixed once the slow drip becomes a bigger issue (multiple months of underperformance) it’s just easier to take care of it as soon as you notice the leak.”

It’s important to note that not all KPIs are individually set goals, and it all depends on your team’s structure. While nearly 65% of goals are shared among teammates, you can still hold your entire team accountable for missing benchmarks.

That said, whether an individual or group goal, holding everyone accountable with the success of your entire team in mind is one way to make sure everyone’s doing their best to hit their own goals for the greater good.

How to Choose the Right KPI Management Solution

There are so many tools out there that claim to help you manage your team goals, but with oversaturated markets, how do you know which are the right ones for your needs? We’ve compiled a quick rundown of a few useful solutions.

在进入特定的解决方案之前，让我们快速了解人们在仪表板中包含的最受欢迎的视觉元素。

The leaders are line graphs and bar graphs thanks to their easy-to-read nature. The winners on this list are the ones that are clearest, cleanest, and easiest to produce and consume. You want to have visual elements that enhance your data – not make it more confusing.

Priya Kumari ofValasys Mediaemphasizes the importance of presenting information in an easy-to-read and easy-to-understand format. Kumari says: “Having a visual appeal is important when reporting business KPIs, which is what compels marketers to look beyond traditional Excel reports or PDFs. Effective KPI reporting involves engaging everyone in the business with projected metrics so that your businesses can drive desired outcomes.”

*Editor’s note:Databox has a wealth of仪表板模板you can choose from to help you manage your KPIs throughout the year. See which ones you can integrate into your strategy to start saving time and stress today.

1. Retail Dashboards

Using ane-commerce funnel dashboardto track your successes and failures will keep you informed on where you need to optimize and what’s working for your business. Track things like revenue growth, average order value, purchases across channels, and more. Get insights to help you hyperfocus on products and channels that draw in more revenue than others so you can align your KPIs to those channels going forward.

2. Sales Management Dashboards

You can use asales management dashboardthat integrates with other tools to help you track how many new customers you’ve acquired, how long it takes to close deals, how much those deals are worth in total and per customer. Having asales dashboardreveal this information to you will help your team tweak KPIs to focus on acquiring customers via the right channels, knowing what stage each is in, and which are most likely to convert at a higher rate.

3.营销仪表板

Amarketing dashboardallows you and your team to track metrics such as landing page conversion rate, goal conversion rate, MQL-to-SQL ratio, traffic sources, bounce rate, engagement rate, CTR, cost per click, marketing ROI, and much more with ease and in one place. By tracking your successes and failures, you can quickly identify where and what you need to optimize and what’s working (or not working) for your business.

4. Finance Dashboards

Afinance dashboardallows your team to monitor metrics like monthly recurring revenue, gross volume month over month, and customer/revenue churn rate. You’ll be able to identify daily, weekly, monthly, and long-term revenue growth and fluctuations, which gives insight into adjusting KPIs on revenue goals for the upcoming quarters.

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有了正确的KPI，您的团队可以为短期和长期设定更现实，可实现的目标。通过定期的办理登机会议，以确保您在财政年度开始时设置的KPI稳步上升，您将能够以更高的准确性实现并超越目标。