January’s gone and 2019 seems to be racing forward… New Year’s resolutions seem to come and go but there is still plenty of time to evaluate that list of goals.  Are your goals important to your business’ long term profitability and growth?  Are they strategic or just a litany of miscellaneous stuff you would do anyway?  Do they include digitalization? 

The right goals set direction, focus your actions toward the most important tasks and generally allow you to achieve more with less effort.  If you are reading this, growing and developing online sales are important to you.  But, for some reason many of the self-proclaimed experts in the field of B2B ecommerce feel the need to lace their advice with hard to understand technical “gobbledy-gook” and their examples of mega companies with dedicated teams of IT guys focused on their business don’t ring any bells for guys like you.  KYKLO takes a uniquely different; a distributor friendly approach.   

Here are three practical ideas for distributors to measure improvement and drive growth in their business.  We’ll call them Key Performance Indicators, KPIs for short.   And keeping with our jargon free philosophy:  A KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.  Use these and you will move toward you goal. 

KPI One:  Quotation Response Time 

Distribution experts tell us, the chance of closing a sale improves with the speed of response time.  Providing a near instantaneous quote generates more business than a quote sometime next week.   This KPI will demonstrate your team’s commitment to fast and efficient customer service.  Customers will respond with more orders; pretty simple.  

KPI Two:  Numbers of Customers using the Web-shop 

In the distribution world, customer are the life source of the business. You have worked hard to earn their business and, more importantly, their trust.  Put past efforts to good use.  Publicize your webshop, let customers know they have a choice, and ask/encourage them to place an order on your website.  Only after existing customers are comfortable placing orders through the web-shop will you reap the rewards of the Digital Era.  Improved efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, more visibility in the market and expanding sales will follow. 

KPI Three:  Sales Offline VS. Online  

Sales are part we love to talk about.  Nearly every distributor measures Sales and Gross Margin.  By measuring the online sales dollars versus traditional sales, the distributor can measure the adoption rate of the ecommerce store. Obviously, the higher the percentage going via ecommerce, the better.  Set a goal and work your plan to drive the number forward. 

 These three easy to measure but important KPIs are a practical indicator of how your organizations ecommerce shop is performing and will steer your business through its digital journey. 

Tell us what you think here.