If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It– Peter Druker, Management Thinker
You’ve heard it before, if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.
What the heck does that mean? To me, it means more than just assigning a tangible and measurable datapoint to a process. It’s not tracking data and managing your company to make the data ‘look good.’ Data in itself, after all, is useless unless you can derive information from it to help you make decisions to help you achieve your overall goals. So how do you effectively measure something and manage it? Metrics.
What are Metrics?
Google says metrics are :
- The use or study of poetic meters; prosody. That’s not what I had in mind. The second definition is a little more fitting.
- A method of measuring something, or the results obtained from this.
That’s a little more like it! Metrics are a method of measuring something your business does (or doesn’t do), or the results obtained from measuring this. So metrics can be objectives your company creates, or standards generally accepted by your industry.
Here’s an example, if you’re in sales (we all are to a certain degree), 
you may set metrics designed to measure how many phone calls it takes to reach an prospect, how many contacts it takes before you can set an appointment, and how many appointments it takes to close on a sale. Understanding your sales ratios can help you, Mr. And Ms. Business Owner, better identify where your staff can benefit from training, resources, etc. Perhaps your statistics are off the chain and you’re doing outstandingly well. Congrats! Use these metrics to identify what is allowing you guys to do as well as you’re doing.
What if you THINK you’re not in sales, maybe your customers come to you. How can metrics help you out? Well, whether you run a SMB or a small business, say, a home based business, you can assign data points (a la Google Analytics) very easily. Here are some questions, I mean, data points you can start tracking:
- How many visitors does your website receive on average weekly
- Which are the most popular days of the week for traffic
- What content are your visitors
- Where is your website coming from? (Referrer)
Why are metrics important?
Based on the example provided above you can identify what content your audience gravitates towards, and perhaps expand on that 
offering. Maybe your audience best responds at 1pm on Wednesdays, but are virtually non-existent Saturdays. When do you think you should make website announcements? Like they say, fish where the fish are. I recommend publishing your content (shop announcement, social media posts, etc.) when you’re more likely to catch them online.
How do you assign data point for metrics?
Easy, ask yourself a few questions about your end goal, what you wish to accomplish (increase sales, increase interviews, decrease customer wait times, decrease unsubscriptions, etc.) Simply make yourself a few questions, assign them a datapoints by coming up with a relationship and correlation between each point and you’re there!
When Do You Review Your Metrics?
As often as needed! I recommend reviewing metrics in a somewhat 
consistent manner. I browse our website and customer site metrics daily, however, I pull reports on a weekly and monthly basis. I then sit down with my team and we discuss what we feel worked best during the week, and what we feel can use some improvement. You can review your metrics as often as you feel comfortable, but I recommend setting a specific time on your schedule to ensure you continue to review your objectives.
Now I ask YOU, what is YOUR Metric For Success? How Do You Incorporate Metrics Into Your Company’s Decision Making?
What are your metrics for success?
We’d love to hear about them. Comment below and thanks for sharing!
Until next time,
~Viva