What Is The External Market Measures For Your Business?

It is written that "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there!"

For your business to be successful, you need measures of performance in, at the very least, the following key areas:

• External Market;
• External Influences;
• Market Segment;
• Customer Service;
• Profitability.

In this article, your attention is being specifically drawn to External Market which is composed of Market Place, Market Share, and Market Position. The actual measures for each component of External Market will depend on your industry, the nature of your products/services, and whether your enterprise is engaged in a business-to-business venture or a business-to-consumer undertaking.

Customer Population is the single key Market Place measure that you need. It provides you with a count of the total number of customers available in the external environment in which your company competes.

For Market Share, you need to get the following key measures:

• Customer Share - The share of the market place that your business has as a percentage of your Customer population;
• Customer Number - The actual number of customers that your business has;
• Volume - The volume that your business sell to the market place and expressed as a % of the total volume available in the market place;
• Number of products/contracts - The number of products/contracts that your business sell to the market place and expressed as a % of the total number of potential sales in the market place;
• Turnover - The turnover that your business generate in the market place and expressed in either GBP, or EURO, or USD, or local currency;
• Turnover Share - The turnover that your business generate in the market place expressed as a % of the total turnover available in the market place.

For Market Position, you need to get the following key measures:

• Price - Ranking of your business according to price and average bill;
• Financial Ratios - Standard accountancy comparisons (for each industry if possible);
• Regulatory Monitoring - Regulatory body comparisons of performance against regulatory legislation, standards and competitors;
• Brand Awareness - Measure of brand awareness and activity compared to competitors.
  
  

“Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”
Vincent T. Lombardi