How to create a "metrics-centric" business culture - a topic that Jay Topper, Chief Customer Officer at Fabric, and Ray our host cover in great detail on this episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. During this episode, Jay and Ray discuss the following topics in detail:
- How to build a metrics culture
- Value of enterprise education and uplifting on metrics
- How to maximize the business impact of metrics
- Three key metrics pillars including Accuracy, Relevancy and Presentation
Jay started his career in the military and then became a Chief Information Officer in multiple retail businesses. He then launched the third stage of his career as the Chief Customer Officer at Fabric, a leading Omni Channel e-commerce optimization platform.
The first thing Jay shared was the need to fully immerse himself in the corporate world after leaving the military. His experience in helping to deploy an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system forced him to learn the basics of business processes from the ground up. This experience created his passion for learning, and seeking out ways to learn something new about business every day.
What are the top challenges when companies begin their metrics journey? First, you need to know what to measure and why you need to measure it. These might be the top 2 or 3 measurements that are most important to your company, and then begin to drill down into how those metrics are impacted by each level of the business. A common theme is to keep the metrics simple to avoid the complexity and noise of too many measurements, especially if they are not connected to each other.
Another best practice is to socialize the priority across the company to gain cross-department buy-in which leads to every organization having a common understanding and commitment to the same performance measurements.
How to create a "metrics-centric" culture? It starts with ensuring the entire company knows why a metric is important - not only internally but also for the customers you are serving! One step further can even be understanding what is important to your customers customers. In retail and eCommerce this is extremely important as the value you are adding to your "corporate customer" is to enhance and improve how they are treating/serving their retail customers.
The more people in your company who can articulate and understand the top measurements (metrics) for the company and the company's customers will inherently lead to a better-performing company as measured by revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Another key is to ensure that Finance and the Go-to-Market functions such as Marketing, Sales and Customer Success define, calculate, and discuss every metric using a commonly defined calculation foundation.
How to communicate your understanding or even assumptions of your customer's business and measurements of success? The number one trait is the ability to "listen" to your customers, especially in understanding the business process and measurements they are trying to improve. Though you may have your own perspectives and templates on the business process your solution automates and enhances - the value proposition should include the customer's priorities, measurements, and goals for their business...and the buyer's personal objectives.
If you are involved with how your company uses metrics or a senior leader trying to create a metrics-centric culture, this episode is a great listen!
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