How to Achieve Your Business Goals with the Right KPIs [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 49]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

Allison Riggs
0:00:00
KPIs or key performance indicators are critical for businesses to implement and put into place before they can even get started. Now, there are three really important things that you need to do, and if you don't do them, this is what you could run into.

Allison Riggs
0:00:16
♪♪

Alex Winter
0:00:25
Join us for Impact Live 2024 in Hartford, Connecticut, this October 14th through the 16th. Over three days, business owners, CEOs, and marketing and sales leaders will learn proven strategies to drive business growth. Attend expert-led sessions on marketing, sales, leadership, and AI, and get a chance to network with industry pros just like yourself.

Alex Winter
0:00:46
Discover how companies like yours are dominating their markets. Secure your spot at impactplus.com backslash impact-5. And for all of our endless customers listeners, we have an exclusive discount code that'll save you a hundred bucks. So when you're on the checkout page, just enter the code ECPOD100 in all caps for a hundred dollars off. And now through July 31st, we have our early bird special as well, which you get $200 off.

Alex Winter
0:01:14
So get in there before it's too late. We'll see you there at Impact Live 2024 up in Hartford, October 14th through the 16th. Welcome back to Endless Customers. My name is Alex Winter, and today we're joined by Allison Riggs, a head coach and trainer

Alex Winter
0:01:28
here at Impact. Allison, welcome back to the show.

Allison Riggs
0:01:31
Hey, Alex, always love to be here, dude.

Alex Winter
0:01:32
We love having you here and we love your insights.

Alex Winter
0:01:34
We have a lot to talk about today. It's a pretty hot topic, something that I feel like some people don't know the acronym, so we're gonna lay it out, we're gonna explain what it is, and then we're gonna get into the nitty gritty of it,

Alex Winter
0:01:45
but we're talking about KPIs, which are key performance indicators. So can you start us off by just laying out what that is and why they're important, and just kinda giving people the 30,000 foot view of what's up before we get into the weeds?

Allison Riggs
0:01:59
Yeah, so KPIs are really interesting where they're actually called a lot of different things in different organizations. So if you're an organization that calls it MBOs, metric by objective, there's lots of different acronyms and different ways that you can explain for ways to track your success and areas for improvement, right? So we measure KPIs not only to say like, hey, we're doing great.

Allison Riggs
0:02:28
Here's a goal. Let's go after it. But it also gives you the ability to indicate areas that you need to fix or put a focus on. So that's one big thing to think about here, Alex, when you talk about KPIs, is it really

Allison Riggs
0:02:40
is a guiding light to what do we need to fix and change in order to be successful. If it's going really well, if those KPIs are really high, how do we put more juice? How do we put more gas on that fire? And if they're not going really well, what do we need to analyze, optimize, and dive into?

Allison Riggs
0:03:00
So that's just like 30,000 foot view on why it's important to have KPIs is because it really does give us a guiding light for where we need to be moving as an organization. Now, one other thing I'm gonna add in here too is KPIs can be based in different areas

Allison Riggs
0:03:19
of your business as well. So you should have KPIs for departments as a whole, right? So your marketing department, your sales department, you should have KPIs for this whole group of people. That's how we determine whether the department, the division or the area of focus is doing well,

Allison Riggs
0:03:39
but then we should also have individual KPIs for roles and responsibilities themselves.

Alex Winter
0:03:45
I love that. So it really rolls up all the way from the individual level to team level, all the way up to like company values. So like it really cascades all the way up. That makes a lot of sense. And it's important to track,

Alex Winter
0:03:56
digital marketer in me is like, yes, tracking metrics so that we can measure success. I love, like those are all words I love to hear. So that's great. So with that, I think a lot of businesses just go off of like what metrics should they be tracking?

Alex Winter
0:04:09
And a lot of them are typically, I don't like to use the word basic, but they're just like, this is what everyone else seems to be tracking, or this is what Google told me to track, so that's what we're tracking.

Alex Winter
0:04:17
And that might be good and well, but like how can we get more specific when it comes to like what's important to track? And obviously on different levels, like what you track individually is going to be different than what you track as a company. So like just what that looks like, big picture.

Allison Riggs
0:04:29
Yeah. Now this is funny because, you know, a lot of times to your point, people think like, Oh, we should just do vanity metrics. Like we should do the easy stuff, like sessions to our website, like traffic or, you know, how many new contacts that we have, which are all good. They're good metrics, right? But how are they actually indicating success? And that's the part of KPIs that we really need to focus on when determining which ones are right

Allison Riggs
0:04:59
for your business is what is going to show us, right, or indicate success one way or another. So the first thing you got to do is like, you got to think about your goals, like your goals as a business. And that's the first place that I start with new clients is like, what are we trying to achieve? What are the big goals that we're going after? That's how we choose the KPIs that are going to help us decide whether or not

Allison Riggs
0:05:25
we're doing well in that specific area. So one example would be, I worked with a client one time that came into coaching to change their culture.

Allison Riggs
0:05:35
Right?

Alex Winter
0:05:36
Wow.

Allison Riggs
0:05:36
That's very cool.

Alex Winter
0:05:40
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:05:41
That's not something you typically hear. You go into coaching because you want to like, I don't know, do X, Y, and Z, but the culture piece is usually a secondary thought. So that's really cool that that was the focus.

Allison Riggs
0:05:51
I love hearing that.

Alex Winter
0:05:52
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:05:53
So that can apply, KPS can apply with culture too. It doesn't just have to be business or sales metrics. Okay, so, and I know you work with a lot of customers and clients that do this, so what was the, how did this roll out? As the, they're like, okay, I want to focus on culture.

Alex Winter
0:06:05
How do we measure? Like, what was that conversation like for you?

Allison Riggs
0:06:09
Yeah, so the first thing that we did with this organization was, okay, well, like what are we actually trying to change about the culture? Like when you say that you want to have culture change, that you want to see these new core values implemented, you want to see the day-to-day change,

Allison Riggs
0:06:24
talk us through like what that looks like. So we ended up building some core values, we ended up building a mission statement, and then we decided, we've built these, gosh, I'll say it's like six core values.

Allison Riggs
0:06:37
Well, how are we going to see how well we have implemented these core values? So we determined, well, the first thing that you need to do is let's put a number to it. It's got to be a number, that's the thing about KPIs is you want them

Allison Riggs
0:06:52
to be somewhat smart.

Allison Riggs
0:06:54
And quantifiable.

Allison Riggs
0:06:55
Yeah, right? So, well, I love this. Whenever we talk about KPIs, it's like, let's throw out some more acronyms that are super fun. So, SMART, SMART, SMART goals are specific, they're measurable, they're actionable,

Allison Riggs
0:07:10
they're relevant, and they have a timeframe around them.

Alex Winter
0:07:14
I love that.

Allison Riggs
0:07:15
KPIs work really well with smart goals. Some of you might be thinking like, hey Allison, hey Ali, I know some of those letters to be a little bit different. They're not much different than specific, measurable, actionable, relatable, or relevant, and timely.

Allison Riggs
0:07:33
Smart is a really great way to think about this. It helps your KPIs become tangible. So in the culture example, we talked about the core values and we thought we want every employee to have a last score for themselves.

Allison Riggs
0:07:50
They want to score themselves in a specific, I think it was like one through five for every single one of our core values. We wanna take all of those scores and we wanna average them out. We want every employee,

Allison Riggs
0:08:02
we want us to have an average score when we do these performance reviews of like, I think it was like a four, we want to have a four for every employee for their core values. So we talked about, okay, now that we've got this KPI that we want for the score for, for each of these core values, how do we then work backwards? And how do we actually achieve that score. So we realized, okay, we got to let everyone in the company

Allison Riggs
0:08:30
know the core values. We have to have multiple meetings about the core values. We have to do monthly check-ins with our core values. We have to incorporate them into performance reviews. We came up with a strategy on how we're actually going to implement the core values into their culture, right?

Allison Riggs
0:08:46
We ended up talking about like signs in the office and people, you know, having conversations, bringing it into your one-on-ones, then at the end of the quarterly reviews, that's when we did the scores. And if we saw that the scores were high,

Allison Riggs
0:09:00
perfect, hooray, celebration, pizza party, ice cream party, like we're in fifth grade again, that we did this really well. And then if we weren't hitting those KPIs in specific areas, like how do we actually incorporate them? So here at Impact, one of our core values

Allison Riggs
0:09:15
at one point in time was feedback is a gift. So for us, if we saw a low score and feedback is a gift, we would then have to go in and evaluate, okay, well, what's happening with feedback? Like, why are we getting such low scores as these individuals?

Allison Riggs
0:09:30
We would investigate, we put a plan together fixing it, and then come back around to do another scoring round to see can we get that score back up. So this can be, like you said, Alex, you can bring KPIs into operations, you can bring into culture.

Allison Riggs
0:09:46
Probably more specifically, you were asking about like marketing and sales and what type of KPIs can we have in marketing and sales. So let's take the marketing side here where vanity metrics are what we call, if you work in a restaurant,

Allison Riggs
0:09:59
think of them as like front of the house. So these are the ones that we very easily see that can be easily measured and are very much that like front lines. So those types of KPIs can be sessions to your website. It can be social media. How many social media followers do you have?

Allison Riggs
0:10:19
How many social media subscribers you have? Stuff like that. How many YouTube subscribers that you have, right? They're very, what we would call, like top of the funnel. You definitely need to track those.

Allison Riggs
0:10:33
Now, as you move through the marketing funnel, you then want to track APIs like marketing qualified leads. Well, leads, number of leads. How many of those become marketing qualified? How many of those become sales qualified leads? With email metrics, right, open rates are awesome. What's our open rate looking

Allison Riggs
0:10:54
like? But I want to hear things and see things like click-through rate. I want to even look at unsubscribes that are coming through. I want to see how many people actually become customers or new leads or move from marketing qualified to sales qualified leads because of email marketing. So those are some types of metrics that your marketing team, you want to be able to make sure that they can track them, see them, find them,

Allison Riggs
0:11:18
and then actually have the ability to move and change those numbers as well, right? So when we say something like number of new leads that come through, we have to be able to do something about it. We gotta change calls to action.

Allison Riggs
0:11:33
We've gotta create new calls to action, create new premium content. Those are all the tactical pieces that go alongside that KPI.

Alex Winter
0:11:42
That makes a ton of sense, and I like what I'm hearing. The one thing that really stood out to me in all of that, depending, it doesn't matter whether it's culture or whatever KPIs you're setting for whatever facet of the business, it sounds like getting granular is really important.

Alex Winter
0:11:54
So like, when it plays into, for me, it's like reverse engineering, which I love. I love going to the finish line, because it's like, this is the goal, this is the outcome that we all agree that we want to have, what are all the steps

Alex Winter
0:12:04
and little pieces that need to happen in order for us to get there, right? And then it sounds like getting as granular as you can and clearly defining those and ways to track and measure them is only going to set you up for success.

Allison Riggs
0:12:16
Yeah, and to your point, Alex, that's where you want those granular KPIs to always come back to your big goals, right? You always want to be relating it to what is the company trying to achieve as a whole. I had a client one time, I had a client that was like, oh gosh, if I can remember the exact thing that it was, but they were like, man, we want to do this webinar. We think this is going to be a

Allison Riggs
0:12:42
really cool webinar. We think it's going to get a lot of people. It's going to be really exciting. And we broke it down and it was like, guys, this isn't even a service. This is a webinar about a service that we don't even offer or provide. Oh, wow. It's a shiny, it's a shiny, cool, new thing that might make sense for us to, if our goal was to be to educate people more, that's great.

Allison Riggs
0:13:06
If our KPI is just to get number of new webinar, new people to webinars. That's great. You've hit that goal. But if that number of new webinars and number of new contacts for webinars, don't relate back to our big goal of like hitting revenue and we can't attribute those new people to that new revenue.

Allison Riggs
0:13:27
Is that truly a KPI that we should be tracking? And then are the initiatives that we're running, actual initiatives that are going to impact the real KPIs that we need to be tracking and impact the real goals that we need to hit. Because it's super fun to have super cool, fun, trendy, clean campaigns.

Allison Riggs
0:13:50
I love that journey for a lot of people, but when it doesn't come back to our business goals, then what are we doing? Don't waste time, energy, and effort on initiatives that aren't going to come back and impact those KPIs, that aren't going to show something

Allison Riggs
0:14:05
for the business as a whole. That's the biggest thing with KPIs, Alex, of when we're setting out with these initiatives, that's why the department, like your leaders of your departments, your leaders of your organization,

Allison Riggs
0:14:19
need to be a part of the KPI selection process, tracking process, and optimization.

Allison Riggs
0:14:29
Right?

Allison Riggs
0:14:30
If you're running on EOS, like we have a lot of clients that run on EOS, we have a scorecard. We choose our scorecard and some of the, what we would probably call APIs, right? Things that we're tracking, and we're reporting on those constantly. If we start to get off track, right? We're coming back to figure out why are we off track? Like, why do we even choose this initiative

Allison Riggs
0:14:54
to hit back to our BTO? Those are the types of things where KPIs need to be selected very intentionally with a purpose. They need to be trackable, and you need to be having conversations around them.

Alex Winter
0:15:08
It sounds so, when you say it and describe it that way, it sounds so, I don't say simple, but it sounds so simple that it's like, duh, yeah, of course we need KPIs. Why wouldn't people do this? Because it allows you to make those very important decisions that are like, does this roll up

Alex Winter
0:15:22
to our goals? Does this roll up to what we clearly define as a team and as a leadership group? And if it doesn't, you can make those decisions. But if you don't have those KPIs, it could become problematic because then you don't really know. You get into that shiny object world of you're chasing after things that you don't know if they're going to work. You can't even

Alex Winter
0:15:38
measure if they're working. So my question really for like CEOs and for business leaders, when you coach them and train them on this, how do you get people to have that light bulb sort of aha moment that's like, yeah, duh, we need KPIs. We need to track this stuff. We need to clearly define these things because I'm sure there must be some resistance or at least a point where like you have to get people on the train first that might not be bought into this idea. So how do you go about doing that?

Alex Winter
0:16:02
And I'm sure this will help a lot of listeners and people out there that may be struggling with this in inside their own organizations.

Allison Riggs
0:16:08
Yeah, it's really interesting when I have conversations with CEOs, especially when they're in that realm of between small business size and mid-sized businesses, is there's a scalability that needs to happen. Like we need to be able to scale our business

Allison Riggs
0:16:26
so that you can jump from that 3 million, 5 million mark and not just plateau out, but to hit the big one. And the one common theme that I find is setting goals and setting KPIs that we can track and really truly measure success. When you're in entrepreneur mode,

Allison Riggs
0:16:44
you're just like go, go, going, right? You're being so adaptable and you're switching things up and you're trying new things. And a lot of times when you get to the point in your business where you want to find the consistency, setting goals and sticking to those goals and sticking to those initiatives all the way through is a really key component to seeing success in the areas that you want to and hitting the numbers, right? That's it.

Allison Riggs
0:17:10
Business owners, we've got revenue goals that we wanna meet. We gotta pay people, we gotta pay our bills, we gotta pay our vendors, we gotta hit those revenue goals. So as a part of that, telling and showing your team

Allison Riggs
0:17:24
what they need to be focused on, that's the conversation that we lead into, Alex, is how do your teams know where they need to be spending their time and what they need to be focused on if they don't have clear indicators of success. So that's where we kind of like self-discover of how are your teams determining what they

Allison Riggs
0:17:51
should be working on? How are your teams determining whether or not they are being successful or contributing to those overall goals. And if a lot of times they say no, then that's where we take those big goals and then we break them down into specific teams, sales teams, marketing teams, operations teams. You build them out at that level next. What does the department need to do in order to impact and move move those main goals that we've set out, right?

Allison Riggs
0:18:29
Those conversations with the leaders, whether they're directors, VPs, whatever that is of their own departments, that needs to be a leadership and leader of that team discussion. Together, you get the input and the discussion

Allison Riggs
0:18:44
and the brainstorm to determine how that specific department right, with your leader as the captain, right, they're making sure the ship's going in the right direction, but it's got to be about the whole department, right? Then you get more granular with the specific roles that need to impact the department. Right, how it breaks out. So we've got, yep, that way, when you get to this level of specifics, each person knows how they are contributing to the organization as a whole.

Allison Riggs
0:19:19
They know what metrics they need to move. They know which of those KPIs they need to be actively looking at on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. And they need to learn how to change. And I know I keep saying the word impact, but it really is how they can impact that KPI.

Allison Riggs
0:19:42
So if it is, like, if we're not at a point where we can track new contacts or number of leads that are converting, let's just say we were to choose, well, let's, let's just say actually number of new contacts, right? You've got one person, your marketing manager, who is responsible for bringing new contacts and new leads to the marketing department. They need to know all of the factors,

Allison Riggs
0:20:08
all the levers that they can pull to change and move that number of new contacts.

Alex Winter
0:20:16
So true.

Allison Riggs
0:20:17
So that's KPI calls to action. See, I told you I'd get mixed up with all of the acronyms here, right? But the CTA is on our website. Where do we need to move them? Do we even need to do some A-B testing

Allison Riggs
0:20:32
to see which calls to action are working and which aren't? Using a tool like heat mapping with Lucky Orange and being able to see, hey, do I need to move it on the page? You know, is one color doing better than another? Is some copy working better than another.

Alex Winter
0:20:50
No, these are huge pieces that you're suggesting here. And Lucky Orange is one of my favorite. The heat map thing is a game changer. If you haven't tried it out, you should definitely look into it. But I love what you're saying because

Alex Winter
0:21:02
it's really important to figure out how to drive potential customers to take action. And I also think that there's a fear, at least I'll speak for marketing people, because I'm on the marketing team at Impact and I've worked in marketing organizations

Alex Winter
0:21:13
and in previous experiences where I feel like sometimes people are afraid to make quote unquote mistakes, where it's like we don't want the numbers to be low, because if it's low then it looks bad, but in reality, if you have those KPIs clearly defined and you know the numbers are low,

Alex Winter
0:21:28
then you have very good data that's like, hey, this isn't working, so we need to switch it up or try something else, and it allows you to get better versus like basically sweeping it under a rug and pretending like the ostrich with the head in the sand type of thing.

Allison Riggs
0:21:41
Yeah, well, but this is a great point though, you know, with, we talk about KPIs and specifically with marketing departments, that's why I don't like vanity metrics all that much. I love the fact that you can get 20,000 sessions to your website every month.

Allison Riggs
0:21:58
That's awesome, that's super cool. How many of those sessions are converting into real leads for your sales team? And then how many of those leads, right? How many of those leads are actually turning into potential customers? And that's where I love your point, Alex, and something for leaders to really keep in mind,

Allison Riggs
0:22:16
and even individuals to keep in mind is don't think about this as you have to have super high high numbers. I would rather my clients have five incredibly qualified leads that have read through content on the website, who have been through the whole buyer's journey, who are really ready to make that buying decision versus 50 so-so leads that have come through with a service offering or something that's really basic, but then we're gonna have to nurture

Allison Riggs
0:22:51
for a really long period of time, and we might be able to close one or two of them.

Alex Winter
0:22:55
Totally.

Alex Winter
0:22:56
It gets into that conversation of quality versus quantity. And it's funny, because I think we're trained that, you know, like the sales folks, and when I used to do sales, it's a numbers game. It's all about the numbers.

Alex Winter
0:23:07
So the more top of the funnel, if you have 1,000 and your ratios are this, you'll still come out in the wash and you're good, but that's not always true. And sometimes that's a lot of work for not a lot of reward. So trying to shift the mindset of like you're looking for quality, how do you position your website, how do you position your KPIs that you're tracking to really enable this sort

Alex Winter
0:23:29
of mentality and not just continue doing the same thing you've been doing? Because you said this earlier too, and this is so huge for CEOs and for business leaders, anyone who's ever started a business, when you're first starting out, you're doing everything. And the goal is to scale the business. But at a certain point in scaling, there's only so much you can do because there's too many moving parts,

Alex Winter
0:23:47
and then you really need to start thinking bigger picture. And we see people hitting that ceiling a lot, where it's like, this is a great way to break out of that ceiling and to clearly define where you want the business to go and what your goals are.

Allison Riggs
0:24:00
Yeah, and we've talked a lot about marketing, which is great, and marketing KPIs are awesome, and they are very front of the house, like we said in the restaurant, right?

Allison Riggs
0:24:09
They're something that you-

Alex Winter
0:24:10
Let's talk about the back of the house.

Alex Winter
0:24:10
I wanna hear more about the back of the house.

Allison Riggs
0:24:11
Oh, let's talk.

Alex Winter
0:24:12
Yeah, let's talk about the line cooks and the CDC and the people that are like hustling, cooking everything up in the kitchen back there.

Allison Riggs
0:24:19
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:24:19
There we go.

Allison Riggs
0:24:20
So, this is kind of where like our sales department or our customer service department come in, like sales and operations, I think are very much of like that back of a house here. And the sales side of this can be, of course, right? Number of qualified opportunities, your close rate,

Allison Riggs
0:24:38
number of referrals that you have coming through, the sales basic KPIs or metrics, those are always gonna stay the same, right? Being able to move people through the different pipeline stages, like increasing that percentage,

Allison Riggs
0:24:55
that is, those are like the non-negotiables for sales metrics that you should be tracking. Now, another piece of this that I've implemented with lots of companies is we create KPIs around number of pieces of content being used in the sales process.

Allison Riggs
0:25:16
Oh, I love that.

Allison Riggs
0:25:17
Number of templates being used in the sales process. I even had a client who really wanted their sales team to stop manually scheduling appointments and using their calendar link. So they had a KPI of number of meetings booked through their HubSpot meeting link.

Allison Riggs
0:25:39
Right, which did two things. One, it helped the team use the meetings link, but then it also showed us how many meetings they were booking.

Alex Winter
0:25:45
That's great, that's really great. But it's also, I know the back and forth before these calendar meeting links that are wonderful nowadays, where you'd go four or five emails back and forth to coordinate a half an hour meeting,

Alex Winter
0:25:56
and it's so much time that's wasted, and you have great sales folks that are spending all this time on something that isn't actually enacting any real change. You're just setting up meetings and doing ancillary tasks. So it hits those two points you said,

Alex Winter
0:26:09
and then also it's a great time saver too. It helps with efficiency.

Allison Riggs
0:26:12
Yeah, well, and also it stops them from manually using spreadsheets where their sales team were having to write down the number of meetings that they were having with potential clients, right? Where instead, now we had really easy to see dashboards in HubSpot, which of course, we're HubSpot partners,

Allison Riggs
0:26:35
so we're going to talk about HubSpot. But you can do this in Salesforce, you can do this in Zoho, any type of CRM that allows you to have a calendar link, you can create these types of dashboards to show you those metrics. So number of demos booked,

Allison Riggs
0:26:49
number of meetings booked at a certain stage. But I really liked the one where, especially for clients who are implementing they ask you answer and implementing the endless customer's journey is those number of pieces of content used in the sales process.

Allison Riggs
0:27:07
The number of one-to-one videos that were sent in the sales process. Those are indicators of success that your team is implementing the frameworks, right? We talked about, you know, this, you can choose like sales close rates. Awesome, great. But if you're trying to implement, they ask you answer and endless customers into your sales team,

Allison Riggs
0:27:26
APIs that can show you that it's working are number of pieces of content that are in there. You're going to hear me repeating it, these are really good ones, when you're trying to implement culture change within your sales teams.

Alex Winter
0:27:44
That's what I was gonna say.

Allison Riggs
0:27:45
Are the ones that are, yeah, go ahead.

Alex Winter
0:27:46
Yeah, that's what I was gonna jump into, is like, as a leader, when you make these KPIs a thing, like you have to have a certain amount of pieces of content in your sales process. For a salesperson, that might be like, well wait, I didn't have to do that, now I have to do this,

Alex Winter
0:27:58
but what it does is it forces a culture shift. It starts getting the people into the mentality of like, let's assign them sell. Let's start to give people content and educate them and build trust before we even talk to them. So when you do talk to them, your sales conversations are way better. But you have to start at that KPI level with leadership that's like, this is how we're going to enact change inside of the organization with everybody. And this is something that

Alex Winter
0:28:19
everyone's doing. So it's not like we're singling this one salesperson out. It's like the whole team is doing this, so let's get after it. And it does make real change.

Allison Riggs
0:28:30
It makes a huge, huge difference. In what you're saying, of course, it impacts the bottom line. It impacts the number of closes that you have, but it even impacts the sales teams. When they get super fired up about not having to say

Allison Riggs
0:28:44
the same thing over and over and over again, when people show up educated, they understand the product or they understand how the pricing model works or golly, they've done a pricing calculator on your website and they know already before they show up

Allison Riggs
0:29:00
how much it's potentially going to cost them but then we reinforce it with articles of the factors that impact that or the additional costs that they might not be thinking about besides just the software itself. So these are pieces for your sales team

Allison Riggs
0:29:17
to really start to embrace different types of frameworks. And if you're watching this too, and you aren't implementing the ask you answer in list customers, but you're maybe implementing other frameworks, or you're practicing other things within your organization,

Allison Riggs
0:29:33
you can put KPIs attached to those so that you can really see how much movement is being made within these different types of changes and shifts that you're doing within your organization. I had a client that implemented, like a new, it was an HVAC company,

Allison Riggs
0:29:48
and they have what they call the comfort club, and this is specific to maintenance, right? So, right, you repair or you buy a new HVAC unit, you're spending a fair amount of money on a new HVAC unit, right?

Alex Winter
0:30:05
Yes, indeed.

Allison Riggs
0:30:06
So, some of these are quite popular. So if you're going to come in and take care of your car, you're going to get your oil changes, you're going to get your checkups, you're going to make sure that your tires, all of the stuff, right? Why not do the same thing with your HVAC unit? So they created what they call the Comfort Club.

Allison Riggs
0:30:25
club. That's where you can get on a recurring monthly payment with the monthly maintenance that you need in order to keep up your HVAC unit so that you're not getting to the point where it is a little rusty old guy helping to keep your home cool or hot, whatever it is, where you're getting like that proactive piece. And so for them, one of their KPIs was, well, one, it needed to start with their dispatchers talking about the product and service on the calls.

Allison Riggs
0:30:56
So what they wanted was they wanted a KPI of 90%, 90% of their dispatch calls with new clients who weren't members, they just had to talk about the comfort club and send an article after. And of course, they had a checkbox, right? They had a checkbox after those calls to say,

Allison Riggs
0:31:20
did I talk about it? Did I send the article afterwards? Right? Now, of course, there's a, that's a leading metric, right? That's what you have to do in order to get a lagging metric, which is what we ultimately want to accomplish.

Allison Riggs
0:31:34
But we started with that one, as we wanted 90% of the calls to be able to send that article and have that conversation. We knew that if we could get 90% of that time to happen, we were gonna get more Comfort Club members

Allison Riggs
0:31:48
at the end of the day.

Alex Winter
0:31:51
And I'm guessing you got more Comfort Club members because of it, it sounds like.

Allison Riggs
0:31:55
We got more Comfort Club members at the end of it.

Alex Winter
0:31:58
I love this beauty and the simplicity of it too. You're clearly defining it, we want 90% of this, but it's not some crazy technical thing. It's very like, hey, did you talk about this on the call? Can you click this button and record it so that we can track this and make sure

Alex Winter
0:32:12
we're heading towards our goal? And I think that's another piece too, is making these things tangible for people so that it just becomes part of the process and they can see the value in it and how it rolls up. Which brings me to another question.

Alex Winter
0:32:23
I'm gonna throw out another acronym here, you ready? You've heard this one a lot. Anyone who knows EOS or has read the book Traction, you know this term, but it's called the BHAG, which is your big, hairy, audacious goal.

Allison Riggs
0:32:35
Right, right.

Alex Winter
0:32:35
So we've talked about individuals, we've talked about marketing, sales, even with recruiting, you can do KPIs, you can do it with every facet of the business. But the big question I have for business leaders and for CEOs and for people running these organizations, you can do KPIs quarterly, you can do KPIs for the year maybe but like how far out should people really be thinking when we

Alex Winter
0:32:53
Talk about the big hairy audacious goals is it three years is it five years? And how do you even go about mapping that out like what does that look like because I know you've done this with a lot Of companies, and I'm just curious what advice you can share for for people out there

Allison Riggs
0:33:05
Yeah, so you know your big hairy audacious goal am I right it's ten years right it should be done. Yeah

Alex Winter
0:33:11
It's Jimmy ten. I didn't want to scare anybody, but it is 10 years. You gotta be thinking long term.

Allison Riggs
0:33:17
I know, I had to fact check myself there for a minute.

Alex Winter
0:33:21
I think they do three, five, and 10. There's different checkpoints, right? And it's like the three, five, and the 10.

Allison Riggs
0:33:26
Three, five, and 10 is definitely right there. And here's the reason why you wanna go 10 years. So you do want to choose your goals as far as 10 years out. It's gonna sound silly, but you want to manifest, you want to build,

Allison Riggs
0:33:41
you want to create the longest path that you can with the least passive path of resistance. So you need to start 10 years out because you are going to be working backwards. Just like you said before, Alex is, if you want to build a business that is scalable and sustainable, you need to be thinking as far out into the future as possible.

Allison Riggs
0:34:06
Now, if 10 years scares you, and you just can't do 10, then do five. You can't do less than five. You gotta do five, it's got to be at least the farthest out that you can go. Then you can break it into three, into one,

Allison Riggs
0:34:22
but you can't just do three, you can't just do one, you gotta do five. You have to be able to build out far enough that you can actually impact that. I have some clients where, of course, short-term goals, six months, let's go, let's fix it.

Allison Riggs
0:34:40
But if you don't, yeah, if you don't know where you want to go, then you're not gonna know all of the things that you need to put in place and then be able to work backwards from it.

Alex Winter
0:34:51
Right, or that quick thing that you don't need to implement might not actually track towards the longer term goal that you really need to get to and it might be a shiny object thing. So that is a huge piece of this. That vision is really key because everything rolls up to that it sounds like.

Allison Riggs
0:35:04
It really does and that's where, you know, business owners, I get it. I've worked with so many business owners, you know, I've been in leadership roles in organizations where sometimes you just got to put the fires out. Sometimes it's a day-to-day, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month struggle that you're going through. But there's also a piece of camaraderie. There's also a piece of success that when you put a big goal in front of your team, that is achievable. Right? Now, here's

Allison Riggs
0:35:34
was like, how do you go about actually determining those? Is they need to be stretch, but not like broken, breakable for your team. Right, not completely like unreasonable goals

Alex Winter
0:35:47
that are never gonna be attainable, right? Yeah, yeah.

Allison Riggs
0:35:50
You're not going to grow at, you know, a hundred times, 200 times, 500 times. There is a threshold that you're gonna get to. And in the beginning, you're gonna grow a lot faster. And this is what happens with most businesses. We start to grow really fast, fast in the beginning,

Allison Riggs
0:36:12
and then we kinda hit a little bit of a plateau. And then you just see these marginal big jumps.

Alex Winter
0:36:19
Right, they start to bump up.

Allison Riggs
0:36:21
Yep, waves up from there. So when you think about a BHAG, when you think about big 10-year goals, or even like five-year goals, what you really want to think about is anywhere from about 30 to 10% growth year over year. That is on, like, that's probably the average amount in that range that you want to try

Allison Riggs
0:36:41
to stay with, is if you even 30% grow for five years out from now, what is that actually going to look like? Right? As you start to work backwards, tell yourself and your team and ask yourselves what needs to be true in order for us to hit that. And then what does that look like? Right? So let's say you want to get to this $30 million goal. What does a $30 million business in Write it out, right? How many employees is that?

Allison Riggs
0:37:15
How many, like, let's go with the HVAC, right? So how many service team members, how many technicians do you need? How many dispatchers do you need? How many internal staff? Outside of that, you're gonna need a marketing department.

Allison Riggs
0:37:28
Really build and paint that picture of what your business looks like at that five-year mark with a specific revenue within your industry. That's what you can work towards. Then you can break it down into, well, what needs to be true in order for us to get there?

Alex Winter
0:37:48
I love it.

Allison Riggs
0:37:49
Step-by-step, of, okay, well, now we've only got one dispatcher, now we've only got one technician. All right, well, if we grow at 30 percent, we're going to need this, we're going to need that, we're going to need this. Build it out.

Allison Riggs
0:38:02
Get your team excited about it. That's the other piece too, right? Is talk about these BHAGs, talk about these goals and talk about the ability to achieve it and to achieve it together as a team. When you give someone a path, when you give them a goal to go after and you get people behind it and they're excited and they're on the bus with you, they are going to be the best employees for you

Allison Riggs
0:38:28
because they believe in you and they believe in your business and they're going to do what it takes in order to help you meet those goals. They're then going to create KPIs. They're bringing it, bringing it full circle for you here, Alex.

Alex Winter
0:38:40
I love it. Yeah, they're bringing it home.

Allison Riggs
0:38:42
They're gonna, they're gonna create APIs that work towards those goals for you. They're going to be able to very specifically see what needs to be true, what needs to happen, what do I as an individual need to change, work on, improve, focus on, in order for us to hit every milestone

Allison Riggs
0:39:07
so that as an organization we can grow and learn together and be the absolute best that we can be.

Alex Winter
0:39:13
Yeah, I absolutely love that. I love what you're saying. And we talk about things rolling up. It rolls up individually too. If an individual has KPIs that they hit quarter over quarter, they're gonna feel really good.

Alex Winter
0:39:23
And they're gonna know that that's rolling up into the goals for their department. That rolls to the company and they're gonna feel like they're part of something instead of, sometimes people feeling like they're off on their little island and they're not sure

Alex Winter
0:39:33
if they're helping and if they're enacting change and if there's a growth plan for them, because people want to advance professionally too. So it checks all of those boxes in a very meaningful way. And it's really cool when it comes together like that. So for people out there listening and watching, if they have questions, they

Alex Winter
0:39:47
want to define their own KPIs. If they need help with this, what should they do? How can, can you give them some advice? Like what's the best, better, if they want to get in touch with you to talk to you about this, what should they do?

Allison Riggs
0:39:56
Yeah.

Allison Riggs
0:39:56
So, well, first and foremost is you need to have goals for your business and your organization. Most of you probably do, you'd be surprised, some out there don't, but what you really need to do is start big. Start with where do you want your organization to be in,

Allison Riggs
0:40:15
let's say three years. Start small if you need to. Start with that three years, where do you wanna be and what needs to be true in order for you to achieve that. Then go back and start as a team. I think it's got to start with your leadership team.

Allison Riggs
0:40:29
Get together and create those goals that you need and want to build as your organization. Start with one year. That's a really great place to start. Okay. And here's the other thing too. You don't have to wait until like, okay, January one, we're going to brainstorm and think about what our goals are for the year, start now. Right? Like, hey, how do we want to end 2024?

Allison Riggs
0:40:54
Like, what needs to be true? Where do we want to be? I know all of you have goals like that out there, of like where you want to be by the end of the year. So start there. Then go to your department leads,

Allison Riggs
0:41:07
bring them into conversations. Hey, this is the goal that we're trying to hit. What are metrics that you know and believe are going to help impact and influence that overall goal? Pick three or four, five tops of the most important metrics and indicators that each of your department needs to be focused on, right? Then have those leaders bring those back to their one-on-ones with their individual employees, or if it's a team meeting, right? Like team meeting, announce it to everybody,

Allison Riggs
0:41:41
but then have the individuals on those teams come up with their own KPIs and their own metrics that they are gonna be able to track and influence over the time period that you give them. End of the year, the full year, whatever it is, but you've gotta think about the business as a whole.

Allison Riggs
0:41:59
What is gonna impact the business? What do we have control over? What do we have the ability to influence and impact and change? And how can we break it down to an even individual level?

Alex Winter
0:42:12
Great advice, Allison, really great advice. For everyone out there listening and watching, if they have follow-up questions, they wanna pick your brain about KPIs, how can they get in touch with you?

Allison Riggs
0:42:21
Yeah, so you can always find me on the Impact website. I think I even got a cool bio video on there that shows all of the gazillion kids that I have. You can also reach out to me just directly through email. It's arigs, so A-R-I-G-G-S at impactplus.com.

Allison Riggs
0:42:38
Allison Riggs, everybody.

Alex Winter
0:42:39
Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your insights. We really appreciate it. Yeah, love being here, Alec. Well, we're going to have to have you back on the show real soon. Thanks again for being here and for everybody out there watching and listening. This is Endless Customers. I'm Alex. We'll see you on the

Alex Winter
0:42:51
there watching and listening. This is Endless Customers. I'm Alex. We'll see you on the

Allison Riggs
0:42:54
next episode.




Transcribed with Cockatoo