Having comprehensive insights into your company’s performance is a basic necessity for any organization. However, gathering these “company insights” quickly can be quite the challenge. This is ...
Having comprehensive insights into your company’s performance is a basic necessity for any organization. However, gathering these “company insights” quickly can be quite the challenge. This is especially true if the organization doesn’t have the structures in place to collect quick insights and report them easily. What performance insights does your organization need? What are the challenges to gathering performance data? More importantly, how can you leverage performance insights to optimize your organization and build long-term success? What performance data should you monitor? When planning to gather quick insights into company performance, it’s important to establish what performance data you need to track first. Choosing the wrong metrics to track can end up wasting precious time and effort. However, different organizations and departments within an organization may need to track different things. So, when choosing the performance metrics you’ll use to garner company insights, it’s important to: Consider your organization’s primary goals. What is it that your organization most needs to do to meet its goals? Any key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with those goals should probably be the first ones you consider when looking to create performance insights. Be sure to periodically reevaluate which metrics you track. Because your organization’s priorities may change, it’s important to take some time to evaluate which metrics you’re using to generate quick insights and reevaluate them against the organization’s current needs. Make getting quick insights easier by limiting your KPI list. There comes a point where, in trying to track everything to get more comprehensive performance insights, an organization ends up tracking too much information. This data bloat can actually end up causing leaders to miss important insights into their company. To avoid data bloat and get fast insights into company performance, it’s important to prune the KPI list to a manageable level—such as what can fit onto a single screen of a data dashboard. Top challenges to consider when gathering quick insights There are a few obstacles that may prevent an organization from gathering performance insights in a timely fashion. Clearing these obstacles is a must for gathering actionable business intelligence that benefits the organization as a whole: A lack of data collection methods. To fill a data dashboard or other performance reporting tool, it’s necessary to have a data source that is accurate, reliable, and timely. Manual data collection is often inefficient and unreliable (though it may be your only option sometimes), so having a data source that you can pull performance data from whenever you need can be helpful. When such data sources are lacking, it can be hard to gather reliable information when you need it. An overload of information. As mentioned earlier, it’s possible to try to collect too much information all at once. Keeping track of too many data sources and performance metrics can lead to decision paralysis as people struggle to make sense of all the information presented. Knowing how to narrow down the data feeds and KPIs you track is crucial for gaining fast insights that are still useful. Turning data into reliable company insights. Simply having access to performance data doesn’t mean that you have reliable company insights. It takes some time and effort to translate raw data into actionable performance insights that can be used to improve business processes and employee performance. This often requires looking at multiple data sets and correlating events with specific causes or taking a look at patterns within data (such as historical drops or increases in certain metrics at specific times of the year). The ability to turn raw data into an accurate insight into the organization’s performance and needs is one that should come with practice. Creating quick insights. Timeliness is important for leveraging insights while they’re relevant. If collecting, organizing, and interpreting data takes too long, the insights generated from that data may not be as impactful. For example, say that an employee’s performance is lagging, but it takes a full financial quarter to address the issue with him or her. At this point, whatever was causing the performance drop may have become a bad habit that is hard to correct (or resolved itself without the employee receiving any support). This exposes the organization to more loss from reduced productivity—potentially creating excessive expenses due to lack of action. Data dashboards are one tool that can help organizations gather quick insights into employee, team, and company performance with ease. How can you use data dashboards to gather fast insights into performance? How to use data dashboards The basic idea behind a data dashboard is that it is a dedicated report that displays only the most crucial employee or company insights into a single overview. By distilling KPIs into a data dashboard view, it is easy to avoid data bloat and quickly check on company performance (or employee performance). There are a few ways that you can use data dashboards. One of the most important is as a live feed for monitoring employee and company performance. Using live data feeds, a data dashboard can display information in real time, helping provide early warnings of potential dips in key performance areas. Data dashboards can also prove to be a vital employee assessment tool, allowing managers to identify both high- and low-performing employees. This way, top performers can be rewarded for their achievements, while underperformers can be given the opportunity to improve with training that is geared towards their specific needs. Another use for data dashboards is to monitor the financial health of a company. By tracking important information such as past due receivables, earnings, and accounts payable, an organization’s leadership can verify whether they’re in the red or in the black, and make changes accordingly. How to use client reports to assess services Sometimes, it isn’t just the organization that needs insight into how it is performing—the organization’s customers/clients may also need some quick insights so they can understand the value that they get from being a customer/client. This is where client reports can be useful. A client report is a great opportunity to share important performance metrics with a client, showcasing how the organization is meeting or exceeding its service obligations and providing value. When creating a client report (or a report template in BrightGauge for automatic updates and sends), it’s important to consider: Who the report should be sent to; What the report should include to provide quick insight without wasting the client’s time; When the report should be sent to avoid inconvenience or delay; and Why the report should be sent. Need help with gathering quick insights into your company’s performance or setting up data dashboards and client reports? Reach out to the BrightGauge team to learn how you can gather fast insights into key areas of your business.
Employee assessments can be crucial for motivating workers and helping them realize their full potential. During these assessments, managers have an opportunity to point out an employee’s successes as well as potential areas for improvement—and then collaborate with the employee to create a performance improvement plan (PIP) to help the employee meet future goals. However, many managers struggle with these employee performance reviews. For some, they simply lack the appropriate assessment tools to accurately gauge employee performance. Without the right information at hand, an employee assessment can flounder—and even prove to be counterproductive. Employee dashboards can be an incredibly useful tool for these assessments. What’s an employee dashboard? How does it help during an employee assessment? Before explaining employee dashboards, let’s take a look at some reasons an organization might need to conduct employee assessments. Why employee assessments are necessary First things first—why do companies need to conduct employee assessments in the first place? Why not just terminate underperformers without spending time (for both employees and their managers) on performance reviews? There are several reasons to conduct employee assessments with both high- and low-performing workers instead of simply punishing or rewarding specific people: To provide visibility to employees. Employee assessments help to give employees some insight into the company’s decision-making processes. This helps to make staffing decisions seem less arbitrary so they know they’re being dealt with fairly. It also helps to show employees where they can make improvements so they can be more successful in the future. To increase employee engagement. Employees who understand what’s expected of them are more likely to be engaged with their work (assuming said expectations are reasonable, of course). By having employee performance assessment sessions, employers can lay out what their expectations are and how employees can meet them. When done well, this can increase employee engagement and performance. To help employees fix performance issues. If there is a specific metric or task in which the employee’s performance is lacking, the assessment can be a great opportunity to make him or her aware of it. By bringing this issue up, and providing a plan for improvement, managers can help their teams to excel at their work. Alternatively, the manager can propose a change of job role to something that better matches the employee’s strengths—giving them a chance to exercise some lateral movement within the organization. To recognize top performers and show appreciation. Even the best employees can get burned out if their efforts go unrecognized. Holding employee assessments and congratulating top performers in them can help keep these high-value individuals motivated to keep working. Of course, other incentives are also important for keeping a high-performing employee motivated in the long term. To enable fair staffing decisions. There may be a time where the organization needs to scale back a team or department because of changes in demand for a product/service or a shift in company focus. Without detailed data on employee performance, it can be hard to make the best decision regarding who to keep and who to let go. However, with data from employee performance reviews on hand, it’s easier to identify top performers and those willing to make improvements. What’s an employee dashboard? An employee dashboard is a performance management tool that displays all of an employee’s most important performance metrics into a single, easy-to-read display. The specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that are tracked in an employee dashboard will vary from one organization (or department in an organization) to the next. For example, a sales team member’s employee dashboard might highlight the team member’s total number of closed deals, the average value of each deal processed, and other sales-oriented KPIs. Meanwhile, a service team member’s employee dashboard might display things like tickets opened/closed, average response time to a service request, and other service-focused employee performance metrics. By collecting this data and putting into a single-screen display, managers can review their team members’ most important performance metrics at-a-glance and provide live feedback when necessary. It’s a convenient performance management tool for any organization to use. What are the benefits of using employee dashboards for employee assessments? There are many benefits to using an employee dashboard during an assessment/performance review. Some examples include: Having important information at your fingertips. Having an employee dashboard on the computer or a large display puts important information front and center where the manager can see it. This avoids delays as managers sift through pages of notes or individual data feeds to find important information for the performance review—helping make the assessment process just a little bit faster and easier. Improving objectivity for the assessment. Employees are much more likely to accept feedback as being objective when there are clear performance metrics on display. Without relevant performance data to review, assessments can feel subjective to the employee—especially if they haven’t been able to track their progress towards goals prior to the meeting. Having clear metrics the employee can see can serve as a “wake-up” call to improve employee engagement. Creating a basis for better decisions in the performance review. Another benefit of having accurate data on hand is that it can be used to help the manager make better decisions regarding the employee’s performance. For example, the manager can see exactly which metrics the employee needs to improve, and focus on those specific items in their performance improvement plan. Helping highlight employee strengths. Aside from improving on weaknesses, another goal of employee assessments is to identify top performers. With an employee dashboard showcasing how well people are doing on certain metrics, it’s easy to provide praise for employees who are doing exceptionally well in one or more metrics. From there, managers can even ask top performers to share their strategies with others in the same department—which can help improve overall team performance. Overall, employee dashboards can be an easy-to-use and convenient tool for employee assessments. However, their utility goes beyond a quarterly or yearly assessment. By tracking performance metrics in real time, managers can identify trends outside of the company’s traditional assessment period and help their teams make course corrections as needed. By tracking historical data in an employee dashboard, managers can also identify patterns in employee performance. For example, is there a company-wide dip in sales the week after Thanksgiving? That could be because of consumer burnout from Black Friday. Keeping track of such patterns helps managers make fairer assessments of employee performance. Need help assembling an employee dashboard for your teams? Get started by contacting BrightGauge for tips on selecting data feeds and choosing metrics that matter to your teams!
Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be invaluable for learning about your organization’s internal processes and identifying opportunities for improvement. However, many leaders wonder what specific KPIs they need to track to achieve better performance. The answer is: “It depends on what your goals are.” There are many different types of performance metrics that you can track—and what you want to track should change depending on what your goals are. It helps if you know what kinds of goals you have, and what KPIs are useful for those goals. With that in mind, here are a few KPI examples you can learn from, as well as a quick explanation of what performance metrics are. Here are a few different KPI examples that you might find interesting for setting your own goals: KPI example #1: Past due schedules Being able to stay on schedule is critical for service delivery. Tracking process metrics such as past due schedules helps you assess how effectively you’re meeting your time-based service level agreements (SLAs). The easiest way to do this is to take a look at your open schedules and see how many of them are past due vs the total amount. If there is an excessive amount of past due schedules, then you know there is a problem with your processes that needs fixing so that you can: Complete tasks more efficiently to avoid running late; or Revise schedule estimates to make them more realistic. This process metric helps your organization meet its SLA obligations more consistently by identifying opportunities for improvement. KPI example 2: Profit margin percentage Financial metrics are important to any organization. In a for-profit business, a KPI like profit margin percentage is almost always indispensable information. Profit margin percentage is frequently used by business owners and managers to assess the overall health of the business and establish whether current efforts are generating a worthwhile return on investment. Gross profit margin percentage can be calculated by taking your profits compared to your total expenses for generating that profit. For example, if a team has profits of $100,000 in a month, and their total expenses for salary, office/retail space, fuel, etc. was $50,000 for the same period of time, their gross profit margin would be 200% (100,000 / 50,000 = 2). If financial metrics like profit margin percentage are too slim (or are negative), then that’s a strong indication that changes need to be made. KPI example 3: Kill rate percentage For a service-oriented organization, performance metrics such as kill rate percentage are a great tool for monitoring how productive employees are. Kill rate percentage is an employee performance metric that measures how many tickets are opened vs the number of tickets that have been closed for a given employee or team during a set time period. Ideally, kill rate percentage should be at 100% or more. How can you have a kill rate percentage that is over 100%? By closing leftover tickets from a previous period. For example, say Shift A (9 am – 5 pm) opens 250 tickets, and closes 200 of them. Then Shift B (5 pm – 12:00 am), opens another 200 tickets, but closes 250 (completing the tickets left over from Shift A). Shift A’s kill rate percentage would be 80%, while Shift B’s kill rate would be 125%. What does this employee performance metric teach you? It could help you identify when a person or team is underperforming compared to their peers. In the above example, one shift is completing roughly 25% more work while being an hour shorter. This could be because of a number of reasons, such as disparities in team size, task complexity, and overall team motivation or skill. Using kill rate percentage to identify the discrepancy and investigate its cause could help you find ways to increase team productivity in the future. KPI example 4: Lead attrition In any sales process, there will be a certain amount of attrition as leads drop out. Tracking sales metrics such as lead attrition is crucial for ensuring a healthy sales process. For example, say your sales funnel has a 90% rate of lead attrition from initial contact to qualifying a lead. Such a high rate of attrition so early in the sales process could be an indication of a problem with the process. This could be caused by issues such as misaligned lead generation efforts (drawing in potential clients/customers who are a poor fit for your products and/or services) or sales team members making critical errors during their lead nurturing efforts (such as actively offending potential customers). By tracking lead attrition and identifying the cause, it is possible to improve your sales process and increase revenue generation. KPI example 5: Customer acquisition cost Marketing is a key activity for any business to attract customers. However, it’s important to balance the money spent on acquiring customers against their lifetime value to ensure that marketing efforts aren’t cutting into profits. This is where tracking marketing metrics such as customer acquisition cost becomes important. Marketing department leads can track spending for all of their efforts and compare that to the number of new customers generated by said marketing to determine their customer acquisition cost. For example, if the total spend for the marketing department is $100,000 dollars per year, and the department generates 100 leads during that time, then the customer acquisition cost would be $100 per customer. However, this alone doesn’t tell us whether the expenditure is sustainable or not. If the total value of a customer is less than $100, then the company is losing money on its marketing. If the lifetime value of a customer is significantly higher than $100, on the other hand, then spending $100,000 dollars to get 100 customers makes sense. Tracking customer acquisition cost and other marketing metrics can be immensely useful for optimizing your marketing and improving your return on investment for marketing spend. What are performance metrics/KPIs? Performance metrics, also known as KPIs, are a method of tracking or benchmarking specific activities and outcomes. They record a specific statistic so it can be used to measure progress. There are countless different KPIs you could potentially use to measure performance for your organization—far too many for any one person to track them all. Some performance metrics are simple to track (with the right tools, at least), while others can be harder to quantify accurately and objectively. The best KPIs tend to be ones that are: Easy to track; Possible to improve with effort; Relevant to your business’ goals; Simple to explain to employees; and Able to be completed in a timely fashion. Need help tracking performance metrics or want to learn more about KPIs? Reach out to the BrightGauge team for help and insights.
BrightGauge is looking for a rockstar outbound Sales Development Rep to join our rapidly growing team! As a Sales Development Rep (SDR), you will be part of our Sales Team. At BrightGauge, we make an awesome Software as a Service (SaaS) product that helps customers grow their business by understanding their data. You can also describe our product as a business intelligence platform that focuses on the global IT Service Provider and Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry. It’s important to also understand our office environment. We’re not the type of company to dictate a buttoned-up dress code, throw around busy work or put up with overbearing personalities. But we are the type of company where you’ll have hands-on access to the whole team – including the folks who manage our marketing, sales, software development, data customization, customer success, and everything in between. You’ll not only play your specific part on our team but we’ll also expect you to contribute to anything that can be improved. No egos here, we’re all learners and hard workers. We pride ourselves on being a very close-knit team. We spend a lot of time having fun at weekly happy hours (if you’re 21 or older, of course), team lunches, brewing beer together, visiting food festivals, and exploring all that South Florida has to offer. Need more proof? Check us out on Twitter, and Insta, We love to let loose just as much as we love growing the incredible software platform we build each day. The right candidate will: Absorb the onboarding manual and be ready to start contacting new prospects 10 days from start date. Become an expert at using lead generation tools to routinely extract contacts and create accurate and targeted lists of prospects. Conduct sales development best practices with email, phone, and social drips using Hubspot CRM to connect with new prospects. Utilize smart, targeted questions to speak knowledgeably with decision makers. Skillfully build interest and create opportunities with new prospects. Coordinate consultations on account executive’s calendar and log activities in our CRM. Make 50 dials a day. Exceed quota of qualified appointments on second full-time month. Top characteristics and traits consistent with success in this position: Sincere customer empathy Strong written communication, phone, presentation, and interpersonal skills Experience selling technology and/or software Highly organized and strong time management skills Ability to work in fast paced, changing environment with minimal direction Hustle and persistence Here’s what we can offer: Awesome commission structure with no cap (based on performance) Competitive salary based on experience with full benefits / 401K / etc A beautiful office in the heart of downtown Coral Gables A strong support system of passionate co-workers who are driven to succeed Tremendous opportunity to expand your role and grow within the most innovative movement in Business Intelligence Are you ready to join our team and help take our company to the next level? Apply now. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and are committed to a workplace environment that encourages growth and respect for all current and prospective employees based upon job-related factors such as their educational background, work experience, and ability to perform the essential functions of a particular job. It is our policy and practice to prohibit any form of discrimination or harassment based on race, color, age, national origin, religion, sex, military or veteran status, disability, pregnancy, pregnancy-related condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other status protected under applicable federal, state or local law.
When I think about the line graphs the first picture that comes to mind is the hospital. The vitals, and specifically heart function, is measured by a line graph moving across a 1-2 second time frame. It makes for a quick representation to the caretakers of what the trending health is for the patient. In the same respect, this is the strength of the line graph; trending visualization. For example, you may have seen a line graph that shows the average time to response on a day-over-day basis over a period of time. Days run from left to right across the horizontal (x) axis and minutes run bottom to top along the vertical (y) axis. Data points (in this case, the time it takes to respond to a ticket request) are plotted and then the dots connected. Line graph usage makes sense for this kind of data for several reasons: It’s easy to spot general trends over time, such as an ongoing increase or decrease in the resolution time; It’s easy to spot anomalies that might bear a closer look, such as a significant increase in response to ticket time during a month where times are improving; It’s easy to locate specific information, such as the day of the week in which the lag time was the highest; and If there is a recognizable trend, it is possible to extrapolate values not covered in the graph. Another advantage of a line graph is that it is easy to clearly represent multiple data sets for comparison. For example, if we wanted to compare the daily ticket response time with the number of engineers working in the NOC, this could be accomplished by simply plotting a second line. Different data sets are typically represented by visually different lines: either different colors or one solid line and one dashed, for example. Of course, that’s just one illustration. A line graph can be used in the same way to show the relationship between any two variables: Sales versus pending sales pipeline, for instance, or average time to resolution versus ticket count which you can see in the image below from one of our gauges. The power of grasping trending information with a quick look at a line graph is very beneficial to a business owner or employee. It lets you forecast where assets need to be deployed in the future. Being able to do so will turn a typical business weakness into a strength that will leave competitors behind.
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