And how these affect you in your business.
I watched the Lions play the other day and was intrigued as to the coaches high up in the stands. They all had their noses in laptops throughout the game. Why? Well, they were monitoring statistics and metrics or KPIs as we call them. Key Performance Indicators.
KPIs show the coaching team how each player is doing. Players have a box of tricks sewn into the shirts, which constantly feed back live information to these laptops. Energy levels, heart rates and so on. It’s like playing a computer shooter game with all the stats in the top corner of the screen. So when a player gets tired, they can pull him off and replace him.
Now, if you employ or have salespeople working for you, then you also should have KPIs. Stats that you can monitor from your laptop tell you how your players are doing and give you information to go to the next stage in coaching them.
Many firms make this far too complicated, produce too much data; you need to be a computer scientist to decipher it all. They are often producing exception reports which summarise vital data. This is proof that the original data is just too complex for you and me.
These KPIs are all you need:
Development KPIs
- Customer Care Score
- Number of Coaching Sessions
- Number of 1:1 Performance Reviews
- Live Observation Assessment Scores (70%)
- CPD Goals and Time
Performance KPIs
- Enquiry to sign up at, say, 25%
- Predicted League of, e.g., £35,000
- Customer Care KPIs
- Activity Numbers – e.g. 4 hours on the phone per day
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
As for the Lions, was it the data that helped them beat the Springboks? Who knows, but I know that their coaching team has the same data available to them, so you’ll have to get used to the inane TV shots of coaching teams noses in laptops rather than down on the touchline shouting at their players as Gareth Southgate does.
