A few months ago we talked about what a sales dashboard should look like. However, now we want to delve deeper into this subject, which is of particular importance to any company wishing to maintain a thorough, updated monitoring of the main KPIs of their business in a balanced scorecard.
As you probably already know, a balanced scorecard is a tool that allows you to get an overview of the company at a glimpse. This tool is composed of the main performance indicators of the company, which are displayed graphically and automatically for the Sales Director and other executives in the company to quickly identify the needs of the business and make decisions.
Before implementing a balanced scorecard, the following questions should be answered:
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What is the purpose of my company?
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What do I want to accomplish with my company in the near future?
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What do I have to do to accomplish it?
These three questions allow the mission, vision and strategy of the company to be defined, in such a way that the main KPIs will be able to be identified more easily. With this information in your power, you will be able to start working on designing the balanced scorecard for your company. But you may wander what indicators it should contain. We will tell you below.
“A balanced scorecard is a tool that allows you to get an overview of the company at a glimpse”
Main indicators of a balanced scorecard
Any balanced scorecard should have the following 4 business indicators:
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Financial indicator
Conveys the company’s financial goal. In other words, it measures how to get the most out of investments made by the company. It also controls the ability to generate value the business has and allows you to draw conclusions to maximize revenues and minimize costs.
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Client indicator
This KPI answers the following question: in order to reach our goals, how should we be seen by customers? In a business, it is essential to have customer satisfaction, which is why this information focuses on how the company is positioned in relation to its competition and the perception the consumer has of the brand.
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Internal business process indicator
In order to accomplish company goals it is important to maintain the ability to progress and change; therefore, it is important to also focus efforts on people and technology. This indicator is related to the importance that learning and training has in companies, in order to avoid stagnating, evolving and perfecting the various services offered by the company instead.
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Learning and growth indicator
These metrics provide information related to the degree of development of the various business areas. They are indicators that focus on analyzing processes involving productivity, innovation and quality within the company and the way in which they affect the commercial and financial aspect.
It is important for all of these goals to be SMART:
- Specific: all of them should be clearly defined and identified.
- Measurable: can be analyzed.
- Attainable: set goals can be attained.
- Realistic/Relevant: the established level of change can be accomplished.
- Time-related: there is a deadline for these goals to be attained.
You might be interested in: Why you should add SMART goals to your sales method
Benefits of having a balanced scorecard
Now that you know what an integral dashboard is and what indicators it should contain, it is important to remember the benefits it can offer your organization. The balanced scorecard will be useful to optimize the decision-making process within the company, not only at a strategic level, but also at a tactical level, such as production, logistics or marketing and sales.
The benefits offered by a dashboard are many, but they can be summarized by two major conclusions:
- The Balanced Scorecard provides a detailed vision of the performance of the business, since it encompasses many concepts and allows you to see the different decisive variables for an optimal company performance.
- It provides an overview of the company, allowing you to plan medium and long-term strategies and generate the necessary information to make timely decisions and avoid undesired situations.
In brief, the indicators that compose a Balanced Scorecard will provide you with a quick look of your management performance and the situation of your company with respect to the competition, in addition to giving you the ability to detect threats and know where there is a problem in order to solve it in time.
“The balanced scorecard will be useful to optimize the decision-making process within the company, not only at a strategic level, but also at a tactical level”
Define your dashboard with inaCátalog
inaCátalog is a complete, versatile sales tool that, in addition to offering the ability to take orders, show products and make reports, has a dashboard feature that provides key information about the status of the business: analysis of the main KPIs, sales stats, comparisons, etc.
Furthermore, inaCátalog lets you not only have a global balanced scorecard – since the Sales Director is provided with a dashboard where he can see indicators for each agent and supervise their commercial activities –, but also gives each salesperson the ability to have their own. In other words, with inaCátalog, every salesperson will be able to monitor his monthly sales and goals in order to have a more detailed control of his work.
