How I Helped My Team Score Record Sales Numbers by Merging KPI’s with Qoreboard

Insights as a Service (IaaS) is one of the latest hot topics in big data, and it offers the potential to leverage data you’ve captured into specific performance improvements. If you’re unfamiliar, IaaS is the idea of web-delivered services that use your existing IT architecture and data. Whereas previous iterations delivered data, IaaS promises action. Insights are actionable results that fall within predictive analytics: if this, then that.

IaaS came about because while we love big data and the even bigger promises it offers, dealing with massive data sets is expensive. Consider that data is growing from massive to incomprehensible, and IaaS makes sense. After all, we have created 90 percent of the world’s data in just the last two years. Most Fortune 500 leaders agree that they need IaaS. In 2016, 70 percent of large organizations invested in IaaS. Surveys predict everyone will be on board by 2019, and IaaS market value could grow from $1.16 billion to $3.33 billion by 2021.

I’m not here to sell you on IaaS. Its value sells itself, and if you’re like most organizations, you already deploy it or you’re on your way to setting up shop. I believe that we can harness the value of IaaS and take it one step – no one giant leap – further.

I believe that we can transform the actionable insights offered by IaaS into performance management as a service (PMaaS). And it’s going to offer more than actionable insights, it’s going to customize those insights into the executable guidance for each employee to maximize their own performance.

PMaaS is going to change your company and everyone in it.

The Thing You Need to Know About IaaS

There are some incredible players in IaaS including the likes of IBM. I won’t knock IaaS, it does something important for a key group of people: C-level executives. Let’s return for a minute to the biggest issue plaguing performance at too many companies: goal alignment. When you get IaaS delivered, you get data-driven actionable insights that assist you in setting strategy, action plans and to set KPIs. But that’s where things start to break down. As I wrote previously, strategy, plans and KPIs get handed down from the executive suite to departments to managers to teams. As soon as they hit department-level, they start to break down.

Operations has different goals than Sales and Marketing. Yes, you’re using data-driven insights, but the old problem remains: you have two teams pulling in different directions. It’s not an analytics issue; the data is good. It’s a performance management issue. And it’s where PMaaS picks up the slack.

Why PMaaS?

Perfomance management as we currently use it is in desperate need of a revolution. I’ve talked before about goal alignment and the use of micro-goals. But let’s talk about a new pain point: performance management meetings.

Right now, we schedule 1:1 meetings between managers and employees that are time consuming and frankly expensive. I believe in the value of face time, but we need to wield it to our advantage, not use it as a bureaucratic system of snail-paced change. Let me explain. Your managers schedule a one-on-one with every employee. They meet, talk, and agree to circle back. A new date gets on the books, and they meet again to discuss the new insights. It goes back and forth over and over again ad nauseum with not just one employee but your entire staff. Your operating costs are insane because you need three 1:1 meetings to do what you can do in one – if you had PMaaS.

With PMaaS, we can take the foundations of IaaS and apply it to performance management to automate the whole thing.

PMaaS Means Automating Performance Management For Cost Savings

PMaaS offers four improvements on IaaS:

· Faster feedback

· Higher performance

· Instant turnaround

· Cost reduction

How do we do it? We call it a digital learning loop.

At first, we use data to take your best practices from your team, track performance, assess the scenario, and by leveraging on the ground knowledge we give new recommended actions or improvements. We then deploy all that through our Qoreboard system. Over time the system understands the impact of each of those recommendations and starts to develop the recommendations for each individual that return the highest ROI or performance impact.

Those insights don’t sit with your analytics team. They go straight to your leaders and your staff in real time. When I say staff, I mean each team member gets actionable insights customized to their performance. It’s the product of three 1:1 meetings – in real time and with real data. How does it save money? Your employees take all three of those 1:1 meetings away from the phone. Operations is mad because you need a smaller manager to employee ratio, and it costs more money. When you get everything done intelligently and in real time, your employees stay on the phone or in the field, and you need fewer managers to manage larger groups. Spend less on training but get more on performance.

Build an Intelligent Audience of One

You already use actionable insights. You may even have IaaS. Either way, I have an important question to ask you:

How do you give an audience of one the best training and actionable feedback on an ongoing basis to maximize their individual performance and at the same time, motivate and inspire them to maximize their potential? PMaaS does that by going granular. Qoreboard uses a system that takes those best practices offered by insight and applies them to individuals.

We take your best practices and your data, and we add them to your QOREBOARD to recommend those beset practices when certain conditions present themselves for an employee (i.e., revenue up, AHT down, or CLV down).

The computer then makes a recommendation: a 1:1 session, product training, or another intervention used in your organization. Once the employee completes the intervention, the system starts monitoring their performance automatically and makes further recommendations based on their individual performance.

Over time, the program uses machine learning to understand what actions and interventions drive the highest returns for the investment of time. It also identifies the highest return based on each employee’s unique learning style. Thus creating a customized performance improvement plan for each person that maximizes their performance.

Why Use Your Gut When You Can Use Data

You likely already use a system like this, but it’s slow and requires managers to take on small teams and demands more time off the phone for your team. That’s enough to drive up costs and reduce sales, but there’s another big problem here. I watch supervisors and managers try to implement an intervention system on their own. Too often, it’s based on gut instincts or a cookie cutter approach applied across the entire team.

Gut instincts are great when you need to make a split-second survival instinct, like if you’re being chased by a predator in the mountains. Your team, however, doesn’t benefit from gut instincts. More importantly, we can do them one better If your team doesn’t ask for the sale. So you gather your team and re-train them on closing. Why use your gut when you can use data? QOREBOARDS leverages data to make the right recommendation to the right person at the right time. It removes the guesswork, reduces workloads, and helps your employees – and your organization – earn more than they ever thought possible.

Turn Insights into Performance

IaaS has its uses; there’s no denying that it’s an incredible way to handle data. But in my experience, those insights don’t go as far as they should. They don’t give individual employees what they need, and they definitely don’t give it to them when they need it. I want you to take those insights turn them into performance. By using actionable insights from data that is aligned, you’ll help teams pull in the same direction and allow them to check-in in real time. Using PMaaS will drive your performance to new levels by aligning your goals and customizing your work. You’ll save money on operating costs, earn more in profit, and transform the lives of your team.

Now, those are insights worth buying.

We do all this and more through our Qoreboards. To learn more about our completely customized approach to performance management, send me an email at mike.midgett@qoreboard.com

About QOREBOARD, Inc.

QOREBOARD will accelerate performance and drive profit in your organization.