One of my favorite business books is “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” or “4DX” for short. It lays out a specific technique for how you can achieve your business goals. If you haven’t read the book (or listened on Audible), I suggest you start today!
The 4DX steps are:
- Focus on the Widly Important
- Act on the Lead Measures
- Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
- Create a Cadence of Accountability
My goal isn’t to write a summary of the 4DX steps; I just want to focus in on steps #2 and #3.
Step 2 details how you should know your key performance indicators (KPI), and break them into two groups.
- Lag Measures – KPI that you can only measure after the sale
- Lead Measures – KPI that you can measure before the sale
Step 3 details how you should display your specific KPI (Lead and Lag) on a scoreboard for your entire organization.
But… How can you actually do that?
This is where most businesses give up. They either don’t know how to track the data, or they have lots of data but don’t know how to effectively “wrangle” it into a cohesive dashboard. DBM Grow can help you:
- Decide what data to track
- Build a data model and a platform to facilitate tracking
- Manage the roll out of KPI dashboard using analytic tools
Here are two affordable tools that we use to create KPI dashboards for our clients.
Klipfolio
In Klipfolio you make data widgets called “klips” and put klips together to form dashboards. Klipfolio connects to all major data sources, and is affordable ($70 – $570 / month). It does have a learning curve, but it doesn’t charge for different integrations. More about Klipfolio
Clicdata
Clicdata differs from Klipfolio in that you make each dashboard independent of the other dashboards. You don’t create widgets and place them, you build the dashboard as one complete unit. But, Clicdata is much more of a “drag and drop” kind of platform. Its learning curve is much smaller than Klipfolio, which usually means the time to create a couple dashboards is much shorter. It is similarly priced ($29 – $499 / month), but if you want to use a MySQL data connector you will need one of the more expensive packages. More about Clicdata
I Want One! Now What?
If you have a tech savvy person on your team, you can pull your data together and build your KPI dashboards yourself. Or, take advantage of our nerd team and contact us for a free consultation on what the best plan is for your situation.