5 Steps on How to Select Your Business Key Performance Indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for monitoring the success of your business and deciding whether or not to reevaluate your current strategy. When it comes to the life sciences industry, carefully selecting KPIs for your commercial and medical teams will benefit your organization in the long-run.
KPIs are more than just a business metric. They can drive competitive advantage for your organization when selected strategically, and also allow senior leadership to recognize indicators of underlying issues. More often than not, the ability to select KPIs in an organized way will increase your chances of long-term business success.
When it comes to selecting your KPIs for your commercial or medical team, it is important to keep these 5 steps in mind:
Step 1 - Align with goals
When selecting KPIs, the first step is to make sure that they align with the overall objectives and goals of your business processes. For example, if the overall goal of the business is to tap into niche markets or increase market share of a particular drug or medical device, then KPIs for your team will need to align accordingly. KPIs that are both performance-oriented and strategically-aligned will be critical in achieving organizational success.
Step 2 - Quality not quantity
Instead of creating a long list of KPIs that are loosely related to the business goals, focusing on a few key metrics that are highly critical will benefit your business in the long-run. High quality metrics for life sciences companies may include product volume, market share, and market access. Ultimately, the quality of the critical few KPIs, rather than the quantity of them will emphasize what metrics should be prioritized by team members.
Step 3 - Remember the customer
Keeping the customer at the forefront when selecting your KPIs is critical to effective customer relationship management. The quality of relationships with key stakeholders such as physicians, IDNs, and GPOs will help senior leadership understand which KPIs will help increase ROI but also provide the best customer experience. Remembering the customer will help inform the strategy behind selecting KPIs and will also make the customer service process more efficient.
Step 4 - Leading vs lagging indicators
Choosing a healthy mix of leading and lagging indicators will help you get a better understanding of the entire performance landscape for your life science organization. Leading indicators, those that look at future outcomes, are harder to measure as they are based on predictive thinking. Examples of leading indicators include new product pipelines and growth in new markets or sales channels. Lagging indicators, those that look at whether the result was achieved, are easier to measure as they are based on actual past performance. Examples of lagging indicators include number of customers or number of units sold. Overall, selecting a balance of these two types of indicators will allow you to better understand your performance and ways to improve it in the future.
Step 5 - Controllable, reliable, and repeatable
KPIs that are controllable will ensure that individual commercial and medical team members are empowered to make changes in order to obtain strategic objectives. Second, KPIs that are reliable will produce the same results over time and allow senior leadership to better understand the relationship between KPIs and overall business goals of their life science organization. Lastly, KPIs that are repeatable will prove their validity and effectiveness needed for rational decision making.
Understanding the five main steps when selecting your business KPIs will help you become more strategically-focused when thinking about your business’ performance.
Once your KPIs are selected, it is important to have the right digital tools in place for you and your team to monitor actionable KPIs. Especially in the life sciences industry, where KPIs are vastly important to commercial and medical affairs teams’ success, a digital tool designed specifically for the life sciences is needed.
TikaMobile has a breadth of offerings for sales reps, MSLs, NAMs, and key stakeholders in the life sciences industry. The intuitive CRM platform makes selecting and monitoring your KPIs a seamless process. Your preferred KPIs are at the forefront of your commercial and medical teams so that they can better understand how their personal performance impacts the overall business strategy.
Citations
https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1405
https://status.net/articles/business-metrics-qualities-define-kpi/