Outsell — KPIs
Here in Cali, Apple launched the iPhone 16, kept the price steady, and announced the passkey and the one-day demise of the password along with it.
All that innovation. Yet in Sacramento where it’s been 115 degrees, we can’t get our act together on a state-wide water policy and are fixated on moving to electric vehicles by 2035 but can’t keep the aircon on as the brittle grid breaks. So, we get texts to keep dishwashers off between 4 and 9 pm and experience rolling brownouts in some parts while the outside temp is 108.
This made me think of KPIs. Wouldn’t it be good if our officials came with KPIs against their pledges and were rated not just by deed but by metric. That’s a blog for another day and is probably a phenom that won’t happen in my lifetime. Closer to home in the land of information services KPIs are ever more important as we pay attention to what to measure in a digital age.
In prior posts, I wrote about the Outsell Growth Framework and the stages of product lifecycle management and tying products to strategy. A well-oiled company has good product rhythms, ties them to strategy, and then goes through the steps we described in the blog series and then measures performance. We also have partners now who focus on training to optimize this ever-important function.
But how do we measure performance today? Our research shows that new sales, renewals, and profitability are still standby metrics. But I wanted to poke deeper into what leaders are doing and asked one of our analysts Randy Giusto, VP & Lead Analyst who covers a lot of sectors in our industry with renewable revenue streams what the industry is focusing on today. Especially as more companies blend revenue sources between marketers and end users or their departments.
He recently researched KPIs as part of a business model pivot analysis — those moving from mostly media to combination e.g., data and research, or even marketing services. Out with the old and in with the new — here’s what leading companies are measuring today.
Old KPIs
- Quarterly revenue
- Gross margin (overall)
- CPL
- Monthly bookings, profit, costs, margins
- Renewal rate
- Unique visits per month (website)
- Total pageviews per month (website)
New KPIs
- ARR
- CPM
- Gross margin (per product)
- Products per order
- $ value NRR (net revenue retention rate)
- ACV (average contract value) and renewal rate
- ACV growth
- Percentage of renewable revenue
- LTV to CAC (customer long term value to customer acquisition costs)
- Customer churn rate
- Net new logos
- New logo ARR
- Bid to close
- Days to close
- Average deal size
- Time on page/article (website)
- Newsletter signups per week or month
The most popular were ARR, NRR, net new logos, and ACV.
Yes, the list is getting longer and life is a bit more complex but at least we can measure ourselves here in the world of data, information and analytics. I guess the ultimate measure is making sure we can keep the lights on — but that’s foundational to even having something to run. Thankfully our industry is so much farther along.
If you need help putting a KPI plan together and getting the dashboards to go with it. Give us a call.