When you run a small business, there are so many days when you’ve had to put out fires, manage employee schedules or had so many people walk through the door that’s hard to know just how successful the day was. Your gut feeling is that it was okay, but can you answer the following?
- You were talking to customers all day, but did all your work convert to customer sales?
- It felt like a slow sales day but was it really?
- Customers are buying, but sales are low. Are they just buying the lower priced items?
For the most part, business owners base success on one metric: their daily revenue. But that’s not the whole picture. Your Business is multi-dimensional. You can’t measure success on one number alone. Today we want to provide three ways to look at your daily performance to know how successful you’ve been and how to keep it going. Tracking your business in multiple dimensions will give you a better sense of how the day really went, not just how it felt.
1. Daily revenue total
The day’s total sales revenue is probably the most universally monitored number for small business owners, as well it should be. However, day-to-day comparisons can fluctuate with the day of the week, the month and time of year, which doesn’t always make it the best number to track to gauge success.
How much money your business makes is a vital number to know. But by itself, it doesn’t tell you how many customers came in to purchase, which brings us to our next way to measure the day’s success.
2. Transactions
We’ve all had those days where it seems like you’re juggling multiple customers. You’re running a mile a minute and helping customers left and right. Then the day ends, you look at the total daily sales, and it’s not as impressive as you’d have thought based on how busy you were. This is where transactions can help you see how successful the day really was.
Transactions tell us how many people purchased your store. While this may seem like a trivial number to monitor, it’s not. On a day like the one we just described, knowing how many people actually went to the register to buy after you helped them will let you know how well your sales floor is working. If your store feels busy, but you do not see the transactions increase, you may need some more help on the floor.
On the other hand, it may seem like it was a low sales day, but if you have a lot of transactions, you had a good day, because any day you win the trust of the customer is a good day, as is acquiring new customers.
3. Average order value
The average order value, or average ticket size, is a great blend of the two and provides another great view into your daily success. Knowing how much your store or restaurant made is great. Knowing how many people purchased is even better. Knowing how much people are spending on average gives you opportunities to optimize upsells and cross-selling.
Perhaps it’s been a day where sales were okay, but traffic felt lower than average. Again, from one point of view, that would look like just an okay day. But what it’s really telling you is that even though you didn’t have a lot of customers visit the store, those that did are spending more than they would on average. And that’s a great thing.
See your business in 3D
Each of the above numbers is key to understanding your growth, the health of your customer base, and the strength of your business, but they don’t tell you the whole store in and of themselves. This is what makes seeing your business in multiple dimensions, not just daily sales, so valuable.
If anyone of these numbers is above your store’s daily average, that’s a good sign and a reason to count the day as a success. When you run a small business, it’s easy to get distracted and feel stretched too thin or a bit run down. Knowing you’re succeeding will keep you and your staff motivated, not to mention how it will help you make more informed decisions as you’ll start to understand your store as the multi-dimensional business that it is.
Take action
It’s hard keeping track of all the important numbers you need to monitor to keep your business thriving. Womply’s small business platform gives you access to your daily, weekly, and monthly sales performance, and so much more. You’ll have the tools you need to measure your seasonality as well as provide a benchmark for how good of a day it really was. If you’d like to learn how to understand your day-to-day business performance better, check out Womply’s solutions for small businesses. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!