It’s been a while since the last time we gave some love to the blog, but before you lecture us, let us introduce you to the topic we’ve prepared for you this time. This is more of a continuation of the KBI’s, a subject we’d already commented very briefly in a past article.
Entering fully into the subject -and getting rid of your possible lecture- we can say that until a few years ago, large companies and small businesses based their performance measurements solely and exclusively on KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators), which provide us with data on the quality of the work carried out by the collaborators. But these measurements have a flaw: the results shown by these KPI’s are only numerical. We can only know the number of objectives completed by each of the employees.
A good example of this is obtaining a report on the sales made by all the salespeople in our store and seeing how only a few manage to achieve truly outstanding figures over the rest of the team. Wouldn’t you like to know how to make the rest of the sellers as good as those few? Well, unfortunately, this is impossible to know just by using the KPIs. These indicators are only numerical and they show us who’s selling the most, but not the real reason why this occurs.
In these moments you’re surely wondering what’s really wrong with that? Well, nothing really, as long as you want to stay totally behind in an increasingly competitive and globalized world, there is nothing wrong with continuing to depend on the often “outdated” KPI’s. As we mentioned above, these indicators have become very linear today. The business world’s currently much more complex and endless factors now come into play when providing a service or simply obtaining the right answer from potential customers of a company or brand. Once we take into account that a KPI is usually represented by a numerical value, now a tool enters the scene as a perfect complement or a total replacement, depending on the objectives pursued, since not all businesses and companies go after the same goals.
KBI’s (Key Behaviour Indicators) come practically to save our lives in those moments in which we’ve already begun to ask ourselves questions such as: How those few sellers have managed to sell almost double than the rest? What are their techniques to be so good at what they do? What tools do they use in their workday? Who ate the last two pieces of pizza I left on the fridge? Well, not exactly that one, but you get the point. What we’re trying to explain (and hopefully we’re not fooling around explaining it) is that KBI’s are the new metrics that look up why those few star performers do so well month after month compared to the rest.
But what exactly is a KBI by definition? Well, dear Padawans, a KBI is a Key Behavioural Indicator, which means that it looks for those patterns in the way of behaving that make one or several people achieve their goals in a really outstanding way. The KBI’s basically serve us to replicate the success of those few star employees in the rest of the team within that department or small business, for this we could monitor behaviours such as:
- Sending the store catalogue via mail or Whatsapp to customers who’ve already bought at some time.
- Courtesy phrases that show the importance of the client for the business.
- Having a slightly more informal relationship with the customer, making him feel like a friend rather than just a person who’ll buy.
- Be more than a salesperson for the client, be their personal advisor.
As you can tell, these are behaviours that tell us why star salespeople are so successful at the end of each workday, unlike their co-workers, who remain extremely linear and conservative. This is a good example of how we can detect behaviours that, although they may not seem to be important, do make a difference in the treatment of store visitors. Therefore, they also make a difference in the income you receive.
When it comes to KBI’s we have a wide range of possibilities, such as obtaining the aimed performance of a certain department, in which we are managers and we need to receive an exact number of reports per day. At the end of the day, we see how only few employees not only manage to deliver the established number of reports, but also exceed it by far, but the rest of the collaborators are left unable to complete this daily quota. In these scenarios, it’s also possible to use the KBI’s to be able to detect what exactly those few employees who manage to meet the daily report quota are doing, verifying what behaviours or techniques they apply in their day and motivate the rest of their employees or colleagues to implement those steps for better productivity in the office.
KBI’s are undoubtedly a fundamental tool to get the best out of our company or work group, because these indicators are not limited to informing us about “how much” is done, but also “how” and “when”. To be competitive we must look further and detect those small signs that make the difference between a bad performance and a really positive one.
Well, here we have come with another blog article, hoping to see you next time (which we hope will be soon) and on the other hand apologizing, since we must carry out an exhaustive investigation on two pieces of pizza that have been lost!
