KPIs that matter for technology solution providers

Technology solution providers (TSPs) are always looking for ways to improve their performance to increase profitability, secure more clients, and grow their businesses. However, it’s difficult to accomplish those goals without ways to analyze operational performance to see where you can make improvements.

Many companies look to hire an expensive business management consultant or spend a lot of time compiling information about their performance. You can save a lot of time and even more money with the right tools. ConnectWise Manage®, ConnectWise Automate®, ConnectWise Sell®, and BrightGauge®, a ConnectWise solution, all allow you to collect, manage, and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how your TSP is functioning.

There are three KPIs all TSPs need to use to effectively manage their business: sales, service, and finance. Let’s look at each KPI and see how ConnectWise products make it easy to track them.

1. Sales performance

Sales has always been the backbone of every business, including TSPs, serving as a way to secure new clients and grow revenue. In an ideal world, every salesperson would meet their quota every month or quarter, without having to monitor their performance. While we might not live in that world, tracking the right sales metrics can help you get to a version of it.

Right from the beginning, tracking your sales opportunities will allow you to get a ballpark figure of how many new clients you’ll have coming in and ensuring your sales reps have enough people to reach out to. Along with the number of sales opportunities, you’ll want to keep an eye on how old the opportunity is. The more you track this, the better you can recognize patterns to prioritize opportunities, which can lead to increasing your close rate.

One more KPI to keep tabs on is your quote-to-close ratio. This is the average number of quotes sent out before one is closed. Knowing your quote-to-close ratio will help you find potential issues with your quotes, which could include price, timing, or other factors.

You can easily track all of these and other sales KPIs with ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Sell integrations in BrightGauge. You can use this information to refine your sales process, so your sales team gets the best results. When your sales team succeeds, your business succeeds.

2. Service performance

It’s one thing to secure new clients through your sales process. It’s another for your service team to match what your sales team sold and retain clients through quality service delivery. If employees constantly say they’re swamped, it can be difficult to know if the team is less productive or if you need to hire another employee without concrete metrics to back it up.

Fortunately, there are service performance metrics that can help answer some of these questions. First, it makes sense to evaluate the types of tickets coming in against how long it takes the tickets to be closed. Are there any trends here? Are routine tickets taking too long to complete? By closely analyzing these factors, you can identify opportunities to streamline or automate some of these processes.

Speaking of tickets, servers or workstations with outdated software or patches routinely result in higher ticket volume. With the ConnectWise Automate integration in BrightGauge, you can monitor and track workstation and server patch status to ensure they are all up to date, not only to reduce the burden on your techs but to keep them secure.

With BrightGauge dashboards, it’s easy to understand and see the progress of certain service metrics over a specific time. A Managing to Zero dashboard lets you see a variety of service KPIs, including unassigned tickets, high-priority tickets, offline servers, and more, and work with your service team to get those numbers down to zero by the end of the day or week. You can also filter the dashboard to show individual techs to make sure everyone is on the same page and working toward a shared goal.

3. Financial performance

Ultimately, the most important metric to track in your business is your financial performance. Without revenue, your company can’t survive. This means you have to carefully monitor expenses and profit. If things start to fluctuate and your cash flow is disrupted, you’ll have to make some drastic changes, but only if those changes are backed up by data.

Expenses, revenue, and profit are important financial metrics to track, but if you just look at those numbers, you’re only scratching the surface. You can go even further and see what categories or which specific clients are providing the most revenue to find ways to increase your profits. On the other end, you can see which clients are taking up a lot of your time and end up costing more than the revenue they bring in.

BrightGauge and ConnectWise Manage integrate to keep a constant eye on all your financial KPIs and data through dashboards to provide real-time updates that lead to data-driven decisions for your business’s future.

It can seem overwhelming to measure all these different KPIs, especially if this is the first time you’ve thought about tracking them. But ConnectWise is here to help you along the way with products designed to provide complete visibility into every facet of your TSP.