8 Steps to Beating the Big Brands – Step 7: Measurement

Now it’s time to talk all about you. Sure your sales were great the past three years, but they are down this year and you have no clue why. Maybe that’s because you weren’t measuring and tracking the right information. You can’t manage what you don’t measure; measurement throughout your business is crucial to success and beating big brands. It’s important to have goals so figure out what is most important to you and measure it.

What should you measure?
More than you would think. Obviously you are going to track your gross sales; you will also be tracking your gross profit and net profit. Although every business should be tracking those numbers, it is also important for some businesses to measure other factors.

Employee Retention
Many companies should measure employee turnover. They should strive to have a high employee retention rate because employee turnover can be costly since it leads to a strain on resources like time and money. If you are constantly hiring new people to replace employees who left, you will have to take into account that new hires will have to be trained and may take awhile to be fully productive. It also takes time and money to search for and interview new employees.

Online Reputation
In an earlier step we talked about managing your reputation online; you should also be measuring your satisfaction results. If you are getting more negative comments then positive comments, you are probably doing something wrong and will want to analyze and rethink some aspects of your business.

If you conduct a consumer survey at the beginning of the year to understand customer satisfaction, you may want to conduct another survey at the end of the year to see if the satisfaction rate has improved.

Digital Traffic
Another measurement you will want to focus on is digital traffic. Digital traffic includes the traffic on your website.
• How many unique and returning visitors are you getting?
• What pages on your website are they visiting?
• What time of day are they visiting?
If you measure these views and see that for some reason a majority of your customers view your website at noon on a Tuesday afternoon, you may consider placing a promotion on your website at that time for maximum exposure. Having knowledge of online traffic can lead to an increase in sales results without an increase in spending.

Purchase Frequency and Error Reduction
It’s also important to keep a customer database to track the purchase frequency and new customer purchases. By having a database, you are able to measure important information that can help you gain repeat business.

Measurement also helps businesses reduce errors, reduce cost of goods, and reduce overhead. If you are measuring your cost of goods and see a pattern of increasing prices, you may want to meet with the supplier to renegotiate prices or request rebates to help bring your costs down.

By measuring these aspects of your business and setting measurable goals you can be on your way to maintaining a successful business.

Tomorrow we will discuss the eighth and final step to beating the big brands. Don’t miss it!

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