Key performance indicators (KPIs) mean nothing without a system of accountability in place to track and manage your team’s efforts. The entire goal of KPIs, after all, is to use them as building blocks to reach a goal. So, if you have KPIs but fail to hold your team accountable to meet them, it’s kind of like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Here are the pros and cons of KPIs and how you can use them to be more effective, productive, and efficient.

How to Grow KPI Accountability

KPIs are the drivers of productivity. They give your teams clear measurements to achieve. These benefits are critical to helping your organization reach its overarching business goals. However, if you fail to create accountability around your KPIs, they will mean absolutely nothing. 

Start by working with your team to create that overarching goal.

You should do this from the top and work your way backward. Say you’re setting an annual sales goal. You should break down this goal by quarter and by month. You can even break it down into weekly and daily goals. Your sales managers and sales teams should know exactly how many contacts and closed deals it takes to hit these numbers. There should be ramifications for the sales reps that don’t hit the numbers. They may need additional training or help, for example. But the accountability for hitting these numbers should be just as defined as the fallout if they don’t hit them.

The process of accountability for these numbers is incremental.

For example, a sales rep that misses numbers several months in a row, despite additional training and support, should go on a probationary plan. If you’re paying your team’s commission, these reps will obviously not be making as much as their peers. You can also use the human characteristic of competition to help drive lower-producing staff to catch up to their higher-producing peers. 

Accountability sometimes means that hard conversations happen.

That’s fair if you’ve developed a culture of accountability where everyone knows where they stand in the organization, what their KPIs are, and what the ramifications are of not hitting the numbers.

But it’s not just the sales team that should be held accountable. You can also use a culture of accountability to hold employees that are habitually late to a correction standard. Or any other part of your business can benefit from KPIs, too. From your back office staff to the front-line production team, everyone can benefit from KPIs and accountability for these metrics.

However, we should mention that KPIs should not focus just on the punitive. Your wins should be wildly celebrated. Think about it; when one team wins, everyone wins. When sales wins, paychecks are paid. When marketing hits the numbers, it may yield sales leads. When the production team kills their KPIs, more units go out the door—and so on. 

KPIs are important metrics, but they’re also complicated to manage, particularly if every team has them. That’s precisely why you need Exelare. We’re more than an applicant tracking system. Our powerful analytics can evaluate the numbers you’ve been tracking and share them with managers. At a glance, you will know exactly where your teams stand. If you’ve never seen Exelare in action, there is no better time to find out how we help companies measure their metrics and keep teams accountable to their goals. Click here to set up a demo of our product today.