Setting the KPIs for the CEO is one thing. They tend to be fairly generic. What about someone
real, like a sales person. And how do they fit into the reporting system?
If you're a fairly standard accountant you will, like me, find sales people second only in
incomprehensibility to marketing folk (the latter because they all seem at least 20 years
younger than me now, and talk a language I've never heard). In that case one of the primary
goals of the KPIs will be to assist communication. There is no doubt we accountants aren't
good at that, so the critical role KPIs can play in this is to help us determine what information
anyone needs to fulfil their objectives. I think it is essential to bear this in mind.
Yet not all the sales person's objectives will be financially focussed. When I've been
responsible for sales teams my first desire has always be that they are competent. By that I
don't just mean that they can close a deal (although that helps).
I want them to really understand what the rest of the company does, how it works, when it can
deliver product and what that product really costs. So my first goal for any sales person is that
they understand this. The related KPI is that they can demonstrate that they have undertaken
sufficient time on training courses and in internal communications.
The standards that will be set will almost certainly be related to time allocation by the
salesperson. This might not seem like an accounting issue in the first instance - but it is if
you're responsible for preparing KPI reports. The question you need to ask is whether you
have got central diary and time recording systems (which might just be Outlook) that let you
establish what has been done by each person subject to such ...