The ‘One Person, One KPI’ System for Efficient, Trackable Marketing
By: Lewis Love
Tags: Business, Marketing, SEO, Growth, Startup

The ‘One Person, One KPI’ System for Efficient, Trackable Marketing

Stop drowning in data

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

I have had the displeasure of working for a company that insisted on producing a 30-page daily KPI pack. It was sent to around 40 employees every day, and if you didn’t know one of those numbers by 10 a.m., you’d need a very good excuse.

While this may be an extreme example, I’ve spoken with plenty of peers who tell tales of similar situations. Often it’s a result of gradual change. One manager wants to see X metric added to a tracker, and it was never questioned why it’s still being tracked. Quite often, that manager will have moved on, yet the business is still tracking that metric — whether they’re doing anything to affect it or not.

I have been lucky, though. Prior to this, I worked with a well-known UK retailer who adopted a radically different and new approach: one person, one KPI.

The idea stemmed from an earlier decision made by the board to scrap all metrics and KPIs that did not have an action plan attached to them. If there was no strategy for improving organic revenue, what was the point in tracking it?

The basic premise for the ‘one person, one KPI’ initiative was that if an individual is only charged with moving one number, their sole focus will be on moving it.

The method was inspired by a story from Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Body,” in which Phil Libin is introduced as a 258-pound man who manages to lose almost 30 pounds to achieve his ideal weight of 230, without any exercise or conscious change in his diet.

Nothing amazing so far, until you learn that to achieve this, Phil didn’t actually do anything other than track his weight.

Phil worked out how much weight he wanted to lose and in how much time, and simply plotted the two points on a graph in Excel. Every day for two years, Phil simply plotted his current weight on the chart, and as long as he was in the safe zone, he was on track.

The result was Phil lost the weight, not by a miracle, but because he was actively tracking a single figure, which in turn led him to make lots of small changes he didn’t even know he was making.

When the board of directors instructed us (the senior management team) to roll this out, there were many of us that thought it wouldn’t work. Me included.

And to begin with, it didn’t. We were told by the board we were obviously tracking the wrong numbers. It was our fault this new way of working wasn’t working.

So, back to the start we went. Picked some new metrics to give to each of our reports… and then something happened.

The numbers started to move.

Some of the gains were so impressive we were sure we were doing something illegal. We made sure we were comparing like-for-like. We made sure seasonality was nullified. We made sure our colleagues weren’t cheating the system.

What we found was we’d stumbled across a few key metrics for our business that, when moved, dragged others with it. I’ll divulge one example, the rest I’ll keep as trade secrets.

We used to target our in-store colleagues on three metrics: revenue, transactions, and average order value (AOV). We then asked them to track these at a category and brand level too. We’d also have customer experience feedback (NPS) scores that we’d share with them on a weekly basis. They had targets sent down by head office daily, and they’d do their best to meet expectations.

When we introduced ‘one person, one KPI’, we got rid of all of that and instead asked them to track how many customers they were able to upsell at the till. The upsell was low value (£2) and the business had been offering it for years. It was our version of “Would you like fries with that?”

When we asked colleagues to track the number, they were determined to improve it. They wanted to be the best store in their region. As a result, the upsell helped to drag up our revenue and average order value. While it was only £2, our average basket used to be around £18. As a result, the upsell had the ability to increase the AOV by more than 10%.

Most stores also worked out that if they greeted customers and gave them excellent service, they’d be more likely to purchase the upsell, thus increasing their NPS score.

Revenue, AOV, and NPS all increased exponentially as a result of tracking one seemingly irrelevant metric. We saw our revenue increase overnight, and profits increased steadily.

More importantly than the money, I learned that when people focus solely on one number, they feel in control. They feel like it’s within their power to move it.

The example above is just one of the success stories we saw. We saw amazing growth from our SEO team, warehousing teams, and even our finance department.

Obviously, the numbers we were tracking were different for the different roles. The trick is to find out what that number should be.

Revenue, profit, traffic, sales. These don’t count. They’re too vague. Find the one KPI that moves the others.

Don’t be afraid to change the KPI, either. Sometimes, the metric you originally picked isn’t working anymore. Or it might not have been right in the first place. Or you’ve already improved it as much as you can. After all, you can’t improve on 100%. Equally, there are industry standards on most KPIs.

Sometimes, it’s best to target easier-to-move numbers. If you’ve moved the easiest all that it can be moved for now, swap the KPI.

Changing it isn’t a bad thing.

What is bad? Sending your colleagues 30 pages of data on a daily basis that they are either not trying to affect, or simply can’t.