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Campaign Manager, Publishing
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MD, Online Service Provider
"You are successfully applying your experience and methodologies to my specific field of email marketing and making the all important link between email and website response behaviour and RFM data"
Director, Healthcare
"You’ve been very effective at translating our intelligence needs into a set of manageable projects designed to prove the return on investment at each stage. Your professional service and partnership approach are excellent."
Director of Marketing and Publication, Publishing
“Numerous touchpoints mean it’s crucial to centralise data to deliver great customer experience and meaningful insight. You allowed us to progress quickly without prohibitive investment.”
CRM Director, Media (Finland)
“Thanks to this insight that I could show to management team, I got permission yesterday to start re-contracting activities towards these customers [Horizon Insight]
Business Development Director, Telco
“Thank you for your invaluable contribution to our discussions around these important topics [New Product Development]”
Head of Strategy, TV Broadcast
“Your work was extremely informative and very much appreciated”
Head of Planning & Analysis, Betting & Gaming
“….safe to say you managed to explode the myth of external consultants never actually delivering anything useful or practical”
CRM Director, Telco (Denmark)
“We’ve achieved record KPIs, not just for the region but for the whole group. By living the numbers as you taught us, we are able to understand and control our performance and for that we are very grateful.”
CRM Director, Media
“TCG’s open and motivating behaviour has been great for us all. The Management team now work with the numbers (insight from data and research), making decisions and setting priorities based on findings”
CRM Director, Telco
“It has resulted in us being much more focused. We feel able to handle challenges and solve them much faster”
Sales and Marketing Director, Media (Norway)
“They genuinely care about helping us achieve our targets and making sure we have the skills to sustain the change after they are gone. They’ve made a real difference to our KPIs”
Sales and Marketing Director, Telco
“What made TCG different was their willingness to come and work with us to execute the strategies they recommended”
It is over 15 years since the concept of cascading KPIs and the balanced scorecard became a hot topic in business circles and still a lot of companies feel that they don’t do this well and need to improve their own measurement capability.
It is our belief at TCG that the reason for this is that many businesses are spending too much time focussing on the hard mechanics of KPIs and have lost sight of some of the nuances that make good KPIs a great business tool.
First of all KPIs should be inspiring and act as a real call to action. Having done work with both Tesco (‘As big in non-foods as foods’) and BSkyB (‘10 million customers by 2010’) I have seen how a top level target can really galvanise a business and give it a sense of purpose.
However, more than that they served to empower the middle management level who knew how their own targets and recompense fitted to the attainment of top-line goals. These high level KPIs served as great arbiters for decision making and resource allocation and really made the business tremendously efficient.
Secondly, companies focus on getting their KPI definition and data sources 100% right for their current business model and capabilities. This means that they spend far too long getting the KPIs implemented and ready for use, often making them out of date from day one, and also after usage and understanding grows in the business they are not quite right and need to be re-defined, re-sourced and re-hardcoded, and so the cycle continues.
Instead – focus on a problem, grab some data, grab some decision makers and start using rough and ready KPIs quickly, this will generate real business benefits but will also improve our understanding of how good KPIs work and how you can really use them to drive your business. A KPI culture will soon spread as business areas see what KPIs can do for them.
Finally, the role of trust and focus is often overlooked. Execs try to look at all the cascading KPIs that tie in to a particular target. This can be a massive burden on valuable senior management time and this author has witnessed more than one board meeting where the definition of a level 4 or 5 KPI was discussed at length rather than focussing on what the overall trend was telling them about their business. Design your cascade so that the proxies at each level give the correct platform for the next tier and let the people you trust own those building block KPIs.
