Blog · Topic
Narratives with every figure cited, and the packs that survive the first question.
A method for writing the quarterly commercial narrative so every figure carries a citation to the calculation that produced it: the reconciled roll-up as the source, the narrative structure, the citation format that survives export, and why the model writes sentences but never numbers.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a wealth management firm measures the share of assets and revenue attached to each adviser, the client-level dependency behind it, the succession list of advisers whose books have no second relationship, and why the figure is reported per office and per team, not just for the firm.
16 Sept 20262 min readA practical path for a sales operations or finance team that assembles the monthly sales report by hand: what to automate first, the definitions that have to be written down before anything can be computed, the four exports the whole pack comes from, the identity checks that replace the reconciliation week, what stays manual, and the order in which the pack's sections move from spreadsheet to computed table.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a forwarder measures the time from shipment delivery to invoice issued, per customer and per branch, from the shipment milestones and the billing ledger: the median days, the shipments delivered and still unbilled past a stated age, the value waiting, the branches and customers where the cycle is longest and why, disputed accessorials, missing carrier costs, customer billing rules, and the working capital the delay ties up.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhy sales, finance and the board each quote a different figure for the same quarter, the three definitions behind them, the bridge from bookings to billings to recognised revenue with the timing and the adjustments that separate them, the identity that ties the three together, and the governance rule that every report names which of the three it is showing.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a freight broker or 3PL measures the share of loads on each lane carried by its top carrier from the load ledger, sets a stated threshold per lane volume band, finds the lanes where one carrier's exit would leave shippers uncovered, and pairs the concentration with the carrier's acceptance trend so the risk is seen before the tender is refused.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a commercial insurance broker measures the share of premium placed with each carrier per line of business from the placement ledger, why a concentrated line is both a leverage point and a risk, the trend that shows a market quietly taking over a line, and the clients whose whole programme sits with one carrier.
16 Sept 20262 min readConcentration is measured the same way everywhere, top-n share, count to half, the index, and what a high figure means depends on the desk: normal in a category with a few large buyers, a dependency in one with many. This hub gives, for twelve industries, what is concentrated, on which axis, what a typical top-ten share looks like, when it is a strength and when it is a risk, and the guide for each.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe complete customer concentration calculation on ten customers small enough to check by hand: the revenue per customer, the sorted shares, top-one, top-three and top-five share, the count to half, the Herfindahl index as the sum of squared shares, the same measures last year for the trend, the per-rep split that shows a rep whose count to half is one, and the identity, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own export.
16 Sept 20263 min readCost to serve is what it takes to serve an account beyond the product, and what that is differs by desk: drops and returns for a distributor, adviser hours for a wealth firm, support tickets for a SaaS company, pursuit hours for a consultancy, detention charges for a forwarder. This hub gives, for twelve industries, the cost components, the rate each is stated at, the source, and the measure it feeds, with the guide for each.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe difference between a ratio weighted by count, accounts, deals, inquiries, and one weighted by value, revenue, notional, premium, why the two disagree whenever the large items behave differently from the small ones, the six measures where the difference is largest, hit ratio, coverage, win rate, share of wallet, renewal rate and retention, the rule that a report shows both and ranks by value, and the case where count is the honest one.
16 Sept 20263 min readThree ways to measure customer concentration from a revenue ledger, top-n share, the Herfindahl index and the count to half, what each is good for, a worked example, why the measure is reported per segment and per rep as well as for the company, and how to tell healthy concentration from dependency.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow to compute customer lifetime value from data a B2B company actually holds: contribution per year per customer from the ledger and cost to serve, expected remaining life from the company's own churn by segment and tenure, and the two together, with the range rather than a point, the identity that ties it to the ledger, and the four assumptions that turn an honest figure into a marketing one.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a forwarder or customs broker measures customs exceptions from its entry data: entries held per customer and per lane, hold rate against the broker's own norm, days held, the reason codes, the share caused by the customer's own data, missing commodity codes, wrong values, incomplete descriptions, against the share caused by the broker or the authority, the cost in storage and delay, and the customer conversation about the fields that stop their freight.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a foodservice distributor measures whether deliveries arrive in each kitchen's agreed window, from the route telematics or proof-of-delivery timestamps and the account's window: adherence per kitchen and per route, the deliveries that landed during service, the routes whose adherence fell, the kitchens whose order frequency dropped after a run of bad windows, and why window adherence is a retention measure before it is an operations one.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a forwarder or carrier measures detention and demurrage from the container event data and the billing ledger: free time against actual dwell per container, charges incurred from carriers and terminals, charges billed on to customers, the gap between the two per customer, the customers whose containers routinely exceed free time, and the identity that ties charges incurred to charges recovered plus absorbed.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a commercial team sets the discount level at which a rep needs approval from what its own invoice lines show: the distribution of discounts given, the discount at which win rate stops improving, the reps and product lines where discounts cluster just under the current threshold, the revenue given away between the effective and the agreed discount, and the threshold per product line that follows, with the approval volume it will generate.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a customer service leader measures the support effort each account consumes, from ticket handling time and the account list: hours per account per quarter, effort per dollar of revenue against the norm for accounts of the same tier and product, the accounts far above it and the categories driving them, the accounts far below it that may be disengaged, and the two conversations, product and commercial, that the split points to.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a wealth management firm measures the margin on each client relationship, from the fee ledger and the service records: fees earned, the cost of the service the client actually receives in adviser and support hours at stated rates, the margin per client against the norm for its segment, the clients receiving a premium service model on a standard fee, and the two responses, re-tiering the service or repricing the fee.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a customer service leader measures repeat contact per account from the ticket export: tickets reopened or re-raised on the same issue within a stated window, the accounts whose repeat rate is well above the base, the categories where repeats cluster, and why an account-level repeat rate is a churn signal the team average cannot show.
16 Sept 20262 min readWhy gross revenue retention and net revenue retention are computed on the same customers and answer different questions, gross capped at 100 percent as the leak, net with expansion as the growth from the base, the four combinations a cohort can show, leaking and growing, leaking and flat, tight and growing, tight and flat, what each means for where the next dollar comes from, the identity that ties both to the bridge, and why reporting either alone misleads.
16 Sept 20262 min readA reading guide for a cohort retention table, rows by signing period and columns by months since signing: why the columns are read before the rows, the diagonal as the most recent data and the least settled, the cohort whose row falls faster than its neighbours, the too-young cohorts to leave alone, the difference between the gross and net versions of the same table, and the row to open, the one that broke the pattern in a column where its neighbours held.
16 Sept 20262 min readA reading guide for a customer concentration table: why the level of the top-ten share is the least informative column, the trend as the first read, the count-to-half as the second, the customer detail behind the top ten, contract, sites, contacts, as the third, and the per-rep and per-segment views that a company-level table hides, with the two rows to open, the customer that rose fastest and the rep whose count to half is one.
16 Sept 20263 min readA reading guide for the movements page of a monthly pack: why the first line to check is any failed identity, not the largest movement, how to tell a movement caused by a definition change or a re-upload from one caused by the business, the citation as the thing to click, the threshold column as the reason a line is there, the within-threshold line as the one that closes the question, and how long the page should take.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a supply chain team reads inventory ageing per SKU per site from the stock and movement files: days since last issue, value in each ageing band, the sites where aged stock concentrates, the SKUs aged at one site and moving at another, the transfer that releases the cash, the write-down exposure at stated bands, and the identity that aged plus moving stock equals the inventory ledger.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a compliance or internal audit team reports the findings that are open past their agreed remediation date, from the issue register: ageing bands per owner and business unit, the extensions granted and how many times, the high-rated issues past date, and the trend that shows a remediation programme slipping before the board asks why the same finding is on the pack for the third quarter.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhy a bank's league table position by product describes the market and not its clients, how to compute the bank's rank within each covered client's own fee wallet from public deal data and the fee ledger, the clients where the bank is top-three in the market and fifth at the client, the sector teams whose client ranks lag their market ranks, and the list of clients where one product mandate would move the bank from fifth to second.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhy the level of a measure, 52 percent concentration, 74 percent OTIF, 88 percent lock-up, is the least informative thing about it and the trend against the measure's own history is the finding, the four exceptions where a level is a hard threshold, the window a trend needs, the consecutive-period rule that separates a bad month from a deterioration, the trend of the reference itself, and the rule that every level on a report carries its trend beside it.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a law firm measures whether matters are staffed as they were priced, from time entries and the engagement terms: the fee-earner mix a matter was priced on, the mix actually recorded, the cost of the difference at cost rates, the matters and clients where partners do associate work, the practices where the mix drifts most, and the identity that matter costs sum to the practice's cost base.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a law firm measures lock-up per client from time entries, bills and receipts: work in progress days and debtor days, the total days between work done and cash received, the norm per practice from the firm's own book, the clients whose lock-up is well above it, the partners whose books carry the most, and the two levers, billing cadence and collection, that the split points to.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a commercial insurance broker analyses the business it lost at renewal from the placement ledger and the renewal outcome file: lost premium by line, by carrier, by account executive and by stated reason, the share lost to a named competing broker, the clients lost after a remarketing exercise against those lost without one, and the pattern that says whether the book is losing on price, service or coverage.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a distributor computes gross margin per account from invoice lines and cost, adds the cost to serve from delivery and returns, ranks accounts by margin rather than revenue, and finds the large accounts whose price agreements, delivery frequency and returns leave less than the small ones, with the identity that ties the account margins to the ledger.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a freight broker measures gross margin per load from the load ledger's customer rate and carrier cost, rolls it up by shipper and by lane, finds the shipper-lane pairs at or below zero margin that volume was hiding, separates contracted lanes priced wrong from spot lanes bought badly, and ranks the pairs by the margin that a repricing or a carrier change would recover.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a SaaS finance or revenue team computes net revenue retention per signing cohort from the subscription ledger, the four movements that make it up, expansion, contraction, churn and reactivation, the identity that ties every cohort's movements back to the ARR bridge, and why a single company NRR figure hides the cohort that is quietly failing.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a business telecoms provider measures the days from a service order to activation per customer and per site from the order and provisioning exports, the norm per service type from its own history, the customers whose recent orders took twice the norm, the correlation with contract non-renewal from the provider's own outcomes, and the list that reaches the account manager while the customer is still installing.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a consulting, advisory or law firm measures concentration per partner from billed fees: the share of fees from the top three clients, the count of clients to eighty percent, the trend over three years, and why a partner with a strong fee number and a concentrated book is the firm's largest unmanaged risk.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a manufacturer or distributor measures the discount each customer actually receives from invoice lines against the list price at the time: realisation per customer per product line, the approved discount from the price agreement, the unapproved discount that is the difference, the customers whose effective price has drifted down through overrides, and the identity that ties realisation to the ledger.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a law firm measures realisation per client from time entries and bills: billed value over worked value at standard rates, the write-downs and write-offs behind the gap, the trend per client and per partner, and the clients whose effective discount has widened year on year through a hundred small decisions that nobody made as a policy.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow an education provider measures what happened to its renewal price increases from the renewal proposals and the signed orders: uplift proposed per institution, uplift realised, the gap by account manager and by institution type, the institutions that renewed at a discount to last year, the correlation with utilisation from the provider's own data, and why the average uplift reported to the board is made of a few full increases and many that were given back.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe difference between renewal rate, retention rate and churn rate, which denominator each uses, why they do not add to 100 percent, how each is computed on customers and on revenue, the period and cohort rules that make them comparable, and a worked example where the three tell three different stories about the same quarter.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a CPG brand reads its retailer chargebacks and deductions from the remittance and deduction files: chargebacks by retailer, by reason code and by distribution centre, the share that is disputable against the brand's own shipment and delivery records, the reasons that recur at one retailer and nowhere else, the cost per case shipped by retailer, and the two conversations, the brand's own logistics and the retailer's compliance team, that the split points to.
16 Sept 20263 min readSeven kinds of revenue leakage that a B2B company's own ledger and contracts can find: unagreed discounts, contracted price not applied, unbilled deliveries, credits without a cause, contracted volume not ordered, early payment for no discount, and services delivered outside the scope. For each, the join that finds it, the identity that proves the figure, and a worked total that most companies would not believe until they saw the lines.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a customer service leader measures service level attainment per account against the response and resolution targets in that account's own contract, rather than the team's default, from the ticket export and the contract register: attainment by priority per account, the accounts below their contracted level with a credit clause, the credits owed, the accounts receiving a higher level than they pay for, and the identity that ties ticket outcomes to contracted terms.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten numbers a board of a sales-led B2B company should see every month, each with a one-sentence definition, the source it is computed from, the identity that proves it, and the trap that makes it wrong: revenue against plan, revenue by segment, customer concentration, net retention, coverage, share of wallet against norm, pipeline coverage, forecast against history, cost of sales per dollar, and the movements page that ties the other nine together.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe ten questions a chief financial officer puts to the commercial team, does the sales number reconcile, how concentrated are we, what is the base worth, is the forecast believable, where is revenue leaking, what does it cost to serve the top accounts, are credits under control, is the pipeline real, what did the discounting cost, and what changed, each with the computed table that answers it, the identity that makes the answer trustworthy, and the answer a CFO should refuse.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe ten questions a COO puts to the supply chain and service functions, which suppliers are deteriorating, where is single-source risk, what is the lead time really, where is inventory ageing, which sites are short and which are long, is the demand plan biased, what are we paying early for nothing, which accounts consume the most service, are we meeting the SLAs we signed, and what changed, each with the computed table, the identity behind it, and the answer a COO should send back.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe ten questions the managing director of a consulting or advisory firm puts to the practice leads, which clients use one practice, will the sold work fit the bench, which consultants are busy and unprofitable, which proposals cost more than they win, whose book depends on one client, which fixed fees overran, which practices hire while their neighbours bench, what is realisation per client, which clients have gone quiet, and what changed, each with the table from the time entries, the proposal log, the roster and the bills, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions the managing director of a freight forwarder puts to the branch and trade lane managers, what is lane share per customer and per mode, are TEU and kilograms ever added, which customer lanes lost reliability before the tender, what detention and demurrage did we absorb and for whom, how long does delivered freight wait for an invoice, which customs holds are the customer's own data, which customers are concentrated on one carrier, what is margin per file by branch, which customers went quiet by lane, and what changed, each with the table from the bookings, milestones and billing exports, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions the president of a freight brokerage puts to the shipper sales and carrier teams, which shipper-lane pairs lose money, where is one carrier the lane, which lanes are rejecting before the market does, where are we primary and where are we the backup, which shippers give us a fraction of their lanes, what does a rejection cost us, which shipper reps' books depend on one shipper, which carrier reps keep their carriers, what is the spot share of the book, and what changed, each with the table from the load ledger and the tender log, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe ten questions a head of customer service puts to the team leads and the account managers, which accounts are surging against their own baseline, which have gone silent, which have to call twice, which accounts consume the most effort for their revenue, are we meeting each account's own SLA, what credits are owed, which how-to questions would an article have answered, which categories repeat across accounts, which tickets have no account, and what changed, each with the table from the ticket export, the contract register and the account list, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions a managing partner of a law or accounting firm puts to the partners about the book, which clients use one practice, whose book depends on one client, which clients drifted in price, which have not started this season, where is the cash locked up, which partners send work across the firm, which proposals cost more than they win, what triggers sit in the compliance data, which matters were staffed above their price, and what changed, each with the table from the practice management system, the identity behind it, and the answer a managing partner should send back.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe ten questions the chief executive of a wealth management firm puts to the advisers and the operations team, which advisers' books leave with them, which clients keep most of their assets elsewhere, which clients have gone quiet before an outflow, where do new clients come from and what does each source keep, which clients receive a service model their fee does not pay for, which introducers does the firm depend on, which fact-finds are stale, which advisers are at capacity, what is fee margin per client, and what changed, each with the table from the client master, the assets and fee records and the activity log, and the answer to send back.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a compliance team measures whether each control was tested when its plan said it would be, from the control register and the testing log: cadence adherence per control owner and business unit, the slipped-test list ranked by the risk the control covers, and the trend that shows a testing programme quietly falling behind before the regulator asks.
16 Sept 20262 min readThe commercial data pack a private equity owner expects from a newly acquired sales-led company in its first hundred days: customer concentration and cohort retention, revenue by segment reconciled to the ledger, share of wallet against the company's own norm, coverage and pipeline, pricing realisation, and the definitions behind each. Why each is asked, what the answer looks like from exports the company already has, and the two questions that most companies cannot answer on day one.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhat a monthly commercial pack for a CEO or board should contain when every number has to be defensible: seven tables, the identity that ties each to the next, the one page of movements that replaces the narrative, and why a pack built this way takes an hour to produce on the first working day instead of a week.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow to measure revenue concentration across product lines from the ledger, the same three measures used for customers, top-n share, the count to half and the index, applied to products, the tail of lines that together earn little, the customers who buy only tail lines, and the two decisions the tail forces: which lines to keep because a core customer needs them and which to retire because nobody does.
16 Sept 20263 min readA structure for a sales team's quarterly business review in which every number comes from a computed table: the quarter's revenue against plan with the bridge, coverage and share of wallet per rep against last quarter, the base's retention and dormancy, the pipeline for next quarter against the needed multiple, the three commitments per rep with a measure and a threshold, and the review of last quarter's commitments against what the tables now say.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow to read quota attainment as a distribution rather than an average: the share of reps between 80 and 120 percent, the tails, the spread by tenure and by territory potential, and what four common shapes mean, a plan that was too easy, one that was too hard, one that was uneven across territories, and one that describes a team with a coverage problem rather than a quota problem.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a forwarder or carrier measures the reliability of its transit times per customer per lane from milestone data: quoted transit against actual door-to-door, the share of shipments within tolerance, the variability that matters more to a shipper than the mean, and the customer lanes whose reliability fell before the tender did.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a consulting firm reads two figures together per consultant, utilisation, chargeable hours over available, and realisation, fees billed over chargeable hours at standard rate, from time entries and bills: the four combinations and what each means, the consultants at ninety percent utilisation on work billed at half rate, the practices where the two diverge, the fixed-fee engagements that consume the hours, and the identity that ties both figures to the firm's hours and fees.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow an industrial manufacturer reads its warranty claims against the installed base register and the ledger: claims per unit per model, claim cost per customer against the revenue the customer brings, the customers whose claim rate is well above the model's norm, the models whose rate rose with a production batch, and the two findings, a product problem by batch and a customer application problem, that the same claims file separates.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow to decide which changes in sales data are worth telling a manager about on Monday: the materiality test, the explanation test and the value test, applied to coverage, revenue, share and range week on week, with the digest format that survives the meeting.
16 Sept 20263 min readThe complete carrier concentration calculation on ten loads across two lanes, small enough to check by hand: loads per carrier per lane, the top carrier's share, carriers used, the threshold by the lane's volume band, the top carrier's tender acceptance over the trailing eight weeks against eight weeks before, the two carrier subsidiaries that roll up to one, the shipper revenue exposed, and the assertion that loads per lane equal the sum across carriers, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own load ledger.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe complete retailer chargeback split on ten deductions from two retailers, small enough to check by hand: the retailer's reason code mapped to the brand's reason, the join to the shipment and proof-of-delivery records, valid where the records agree, disputable where they contradict, unmatched where no shipment is found, cost per case by retailer, the reason that recurs at one retailer, and the identity that deductions equal the three states and that remittance plus deductions equals invoiced, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own deduction file.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe ten client KPIs a law firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: practice areas per client against the norm, dormant clients by prior fees, billing and collection realisation by client, lock-up by client, partner book concentration, cross-referral between partners, matter profitability by leverage, client fee concentration, share of client legal spend, and new matter origination. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten client KPIs a sales and trading desk should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: hit ratio by client and product, size-weighted hit ratio, inquiry share, the quiet client list, client tiering by flow and profitability, axe hit rate, traded unsent, coverage recency by client value, revenue concentration, and response time on inquiries. Also the three measures most desks miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten client KPIs a wealth management firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: net new assets split from market movement, held-away assets, contact recency by client value, outflow watch, adviser concentration, fee margin by client after service cost, referral source value, client age and succession coverage, review completion, and household consolidation. Also the three measures most wealth firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a consulting or professional services firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: utilisation against realisation per consultant, proposal win rate by practice and source, sold work against the bench, cross-practice share per client, partner book concentration, repeat business rate, project margin against plan, backlog in weeks, client fee concentration, and day rate realised. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a freight forwarder or shipping line should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: trade lane share per customer, volume by mode kept apart, transit time reliability per customer lane, customs hold rate and cause, detention and demurrage per customer, booking to invoice cycle, gross profit per shipment, customer concentration by gross profit, quote conversion by lane, and dormant customer lanes. Also the three measures most forwarders miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a pharmaceutical sales organisation should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: reach and frequency among accounts that can prescribe, calls on blocked accounts, access-weighted territory potential, pull-through after a formulary win, call plan attainment by plan version, sample to prescription relationship, target list currency, new prescriber activation, share within accessible accounts, and off-plan call rate. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten commercial KPIs a sports club, league or rights holder should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: delivery ratio per partner, renewal value against delivered value, renewal timing, inventory utilisation per fixture, hospitality yield per partner, asset fit per partner, partner concentration, conversion from season ticket to hospitality, partner contact recency, and unsold inventory value. Also the three measures most commercial teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readTwo ways of measuring how concentrated a customer base is. The concentration ratio adds up the revenue shares of the largest few customers: top one, top five, top ten. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index squares every customer's share and sums them, giving one number that reflects the whole distribution. This page sets out both formulas, computes them on three customer bases that share a top-ten figure and differ underneath, explains the effective number of customers, and says which to use for a board, a lender, and for tracking one book over time.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete contribution-after-cost-to-serve calculation on ten accounts small enough to check by hand: revenue and cost per account from invoice lines, gross margin, drops, returns and pick lines from the delivery log at stated rates, cost to serve, contribution and contribution rate, the revenue rank against the contribution rank, the components behind the account that drops furthest, and the identity that account margins sum to the ledger's gross margin, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own exports.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten coverage KPIs an investment bank should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: share of client fee wallet, pitch to mandate conversion, coverage recency by wallet, league table position against client wallet, senior contact breadth, product penetration per client, revenue concentration, pipeline of mandated and pitched deals, coverage officer transitions, and return on balance sheet committed. Also the three measures most banks miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten customer base KPIs a B2B SaaS company should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: net revenue retention by cohort, gross revenue retention, seat utilisation before renewal, whitespace reconciled to ARR, expansion pipeline against whitespace, untouched accounts by ARR, time to value, renewal calendar coverage, expansion by source, and ARR concentration. Also the three measures most SaaS teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten customer KPIs a multi-product financial services firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: one customer view coverage, products held against the segment norm, products opened and unused, tenure against depth, segment migration, primary relationship indicators, balance and activity attrition, contact recency by value, complaint and service recurrence, and revenue concentration. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete customs hold calculation on ten entries from two customers on one lane, small enough to check by hand: each entry's filed and cleared dates, held flag, reason code and correction source, hold rate per customer against the lane norm, days held, the cause split into customer data, broker entry and authority selection, the two fields on one customer's invoices behind most of its holds, the cost in storage and delay, and the assertion that entries equal cleared plus held, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own entry data.
17 Sept 20263 min readThree ways of delivering the same analysis. A dashboard shows current state at a glance and waits to be opened. A report explains a period to a reader and is sent on a schedule. A list names the rows that need action, each with an owner, and is worked. This page sets out what each is for, who reads it, why dashboards are built most and used least, and how to turn one measure into all three so that the right person gets the right form.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten distribution KPIs an asset manager should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: net flows by client and strategy, gross sales and redemptions separately, share of an intermediary's flows, redemption watch, coverage of intermediaries and consultants at cadence, channel share per strategy, flow concentration, fee yield on flows, strategies held per client, and consultant rating coverage. Also the three measures most distribution teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete support effort ratio calculation on five accounts, small enough to check by hand: handling hours from the ticket export, quarterly revenue, effort per thousand dollars of revenue, the norm as the median among accounts of the same tier and product, the ratio to norm, the category split that separates a product fault from onboarding from a commercial mismatch, the account whose effort is near zero and whose tickets fell, and the assertion that effort hours sum to logged handling time, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own ticket export.
17 Sept 20263 min readCustomer profitability is reported at three levels that are often confused. Gross margin is revenue less the cost of the goods. Contribution margin takes off the costs the customer's own behaviour causes: deliveries, order handling, sales time, returns, rebates and credit. Net margin takes off a share of fixed overhead as well. This page sets out the three definitions, computes all of them for three customers, shows why the ranking changes at the contribution line and why it should not be taken further, and says which decisions each level is for.
17 Sept 20264 min readMeasure, metric and KPI are used as synonyms and are three levels of the same thing. A measure is a number computed from data, such as revenue or a count of accounts. A metric is a measure given a definition and a context, such as revenue per active account over a trailing twelve months. A KPI is a metric that someone owns, that has a target, and that a decision depends on. This page sets out the three, gives the test that separates a KPI from a metric, and shows how to cut a forty-tile dashboard to the five that matter.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten KPIs a B2B customer service or support team should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: contact volume per account against its own baseline, first contact resolution per account, repeat contact rate, SLA attainment against the SLA each account signed, effort per account against revenue, silence as a churn signal, deflectable tickets by category, time to resolution by severity, backlog ageing, and cause categories that recur. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten KPIs a compliance function should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: obligation to control coverage, regulatory change coverage, control testing on schedule, test failure rate and repeat failures, issue ageing by owner, training completion against role requirement, incident reporting against activity, policy attestation, time to close findings, and evidence completeness. Also the three measures most compliance teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten KPIs a supply chain function should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: supplier OTIF against each supplier's own baseline, lead time variability, customer OTIF under each customer's rule, forecast bias by SKU and site, inventory ageing, single-source exposure, days of cover against target, expedite cost, supplier deterioration watch, and cause of service misses. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readLagging indicators in sales report results after they have happened: revenue, churn, win rate. Leading indicators move earlier and can still be acted on: coverage at cadence, dormancy, pipeline created, utilisation before renewal. This page sets out the difference, lists common pairs, and gives the test most teams skip: checking on the business's own history that the supposed leading indicator actually moved before the lagging one, by how long, and how reliably.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete lock-up calculation on five clients of a professional firm, small enough to check by hand: worked value from time entries, billed from bills, received from receipts, unbilled WIP and outstanding debtors, average daily billing, WIP days, debtor days, lock-up days and lock-up cash, the split that says whether the delay is billing or collection, the practice norm, and the identity that WIP and debtors reconcile, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own practice management exports.
17 Sept 20262 min readA template for a monthly sales report that a leadership team will actually read: a five-line summary, revenue against plan and the same month last year with the bridge between them, the existing customer base, new business and pipeline, the forecast with its track record, the named risks and opportunities, and the decisions requested. This page gives each section with the table that belongs in it, the reconciliation line that makes finance trust it, the common contents to leave out, and a copyable outline.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe complete net and gross revenue retention calculation on ten customers small enough to check by hand: ARR a year ago and now per customer, the four movements, expansion, contraction, churn and reactivation, per customer, the cohort split, gross retention capped and net uncapped, the reconciliation to the ARR bridge, and the identity that the movements sum, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own subscription ledger.
17 Sept 20263 min readOTIF, fill rate and on-time delivery are three delivery measures that are reported as if they were one. On-time delivery tests the date only. Fill rate tests the quantity only, and comes in line, case and order versions. OTIF requires both on the same order. This page sets out the definitions, computes all of them on the same ten order lines, shows why OTIF is always the lowest, and explains which one a retailer's scorecard and chargebacks are based on.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten practice KPIs a tax or accounting firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: service lines per client against the norm, fee per client against the norm for its size, season watch, deadline load per manager, advisory triggers acted on, realisation by client, client retention by fees, lock-up by client, scope creep on fixed fees, and new client onboarding time. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete price realisation calculation on ten invoice lines small enough to check by hand: the list price on the invoice date from a dated price list, the agreed discount from the customer's agreement, list value, agreed value and invoiced value per line, the unagreed discount as the difference, realisation per customer and per rep, the line that crossed a price change, and the identity that list less agreed less unagreed equals invoiced, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own export.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe ten relationship KPIs a commercial bank should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: products held against the sector norm, lending-only relationships, deposit flight, facility utilisation, share of wallet by product, relationship manager coverage at cadence, referrals between business lines, return per relationship, portfolio load against capacity, and primary bank indicators. Also the three measures most commercial banks miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete repeat contact calculation on ten tickets from three accounts, small enough to check by hand: each ticket's category, opened and closed dates, reopen flag and linked ticket, the repeat rule as reopened or raised in the same category within fourteen days of a closed one, the state per ticket, the repeat rate per account against the team's base, the minimum ticket count that keeps a small account off the list, the category where repeats cluster, and the assertion that tickets equal first-contact resolved plus repeat plus open, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own ticket export.
17 Sept 20263 min readFive sales dashboard examples, one for each reader who actually opens one: the chief executive, the sales director, the frontline manager, the rep, and sales operations. For each, this page lists the five or six tiles that belong, the comparison each tile needs to mean anything, the list each tile should click through to, and the tiles commonly included that should be removed. It also gives the four design rules that separate a dashboard that is used from one that is admired once.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe ten sales KPIs a B2B sales team should run on, whatever it sells, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: value coverage at cadence, dormant accounts by prior value, share of wallet against similar customers, win rate from a stated stage, pipeline coverage against required, forecast bias per rep, time to first touch on new accounts, rep load against capacity, meeting to opportunity conversion, and customer concentration. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a B2B telecoms or managed services provider should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: estate currency, site penetration, product attach per site, renewal calendar coverage, order to activation time, sites near capacity, revenue retention at renewal, orphan and ghost services, account contact recency, and customer concentration. Also the three measures most providers miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a builders' merchant or construction materials supplier should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: category share by trade, account activation, dormant trade accounts by prior value, credit limit headroom, project pipeline matched to accounts, quote conversion, branch coverage of key accounts, price realisation against terms, delivered against collected mix, and contribution per account. Also the three measures most merchants miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a commercial insurance broker should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: retention by count and by income, renewal watch, placement share per client, lines held against the norm, new business against lost, carrier concentration per line, remarketing activity, claims experience against retention, income per client after servicing cost, and account executive book mix. Also the three measures most brokers miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a consumer goods brand should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: distribution and range penetration by channel, distribution voids, sell-in against sell-out, weeks of cover at the retailer, out-of-stocks inferred from sell-out gaps, promotional net lift, trade spend return, retailer chargebacks by reason, OTIF under each retailer's rule, and rate of sale per store. Also the three measures most brands miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a company selling to schools, trusts, colleges and universities should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: licence utilisation per institution, renewal rate by count and value, renewal watch, price uplift realised against proposed, programme or product fit, group and trust penetration, adoption by purchase cohort, budget cycle coverage, onboarding completion, and customer concentration by contracting entity. Also the three measures most providers miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a foodservice distributor should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: category share per kitchen, drop frequency against the kitchen's own pattern, average drop value, order guide compliance, share at chain and at site level, delivery window adherence, substitutions and shorts, new account ramp, contribution per drop, and lost kitchens by prior value. Also the three measures most foodservice distributors miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a freight brokerage or 3PL should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: lane share per shipper, primary tender share, margin per load by shipper and lane, tender acceptance and rejection, spot against contract mix, carrier concentration per lane, shipper concentration, quote win rate on spot, dormant shippers and lanes, and days to pay against days to collect. Also the three measures most brokerages miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a hotel group's commercial team should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: pace against the same date last year, corporate rate production against commitment, property penetration per corporate account, segment mix per property, group conversion and wash, meeting space utilisation, account coverage at cadence, channel cost per booking, displacement on group business, and corporate account concentration. Also the three measures most hotel sales teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs an industrial or MRO distributor should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: category penetration by branch, dormant accounts by prior value, quote conversion by count and value, lost lines from stock-outs, counter sales without an account, account coverage at cadence, price realisation against contract, share of spend at key sites, reactivation rate, and contribution per customer. Also the three measures most industrial distributors miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs an industrial manufacturer should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: aftermarket attach on the installed base, installed base register completeness, service contract renewal by fleet age, quote conversion by count and value, catalogue fit per customer, direct and distributor sales without double counting, warranty claims by customer and product, customer concentration, price realisation, and order intake against backlog. Also the three measures most manufacturers miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a medical supplies or healthcare products company should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: contract compliance per facility, product depth per facility against the system norm, invoiced against contracted price, tier earned against tier priced, agreement expiry coverage, facility mapping completeness, standardisation opportunities, facility coverage at cadence, backorder and substitution impact, and system concentration. Also the three measures most suppliers miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs an oilfield services or equipment company should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: operator wallet share by basin, activity-weighted coverage, service lines per operator, rental fleet utilisation by operator, operator mapping completeness, bid win rate, price realisation against master service agreements, operator concentration, days sales outstanding by operator, and job margin by basin. Also the three measures most companies miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe ten sales KPIs a wholesale distributor should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: account coverage at cadence, dormant accounts by prior value, category share against similar customers, contribution after cost to serve, price realisation, average drop value, order channel mix, fill rate and lost lines, customer concentration, and new account activation. Also the three measures most distributors miss, the vanity figures to drop, the identity behind each table, and who should own what.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe complete supplier deterioration calculation on ten suppliers over six months, small enough to check by hand: each supplier's monthly on-time rate, defect rate and lead time from the receipts and quality files, its own twelve-month baseline per measure, the deterioration rule as two consecutive months worse than baseline by a stated margin on any measure, the state per supplier per measure, the deteriorating list ranked by spend, the supplier that looks bad against the group and fine against itself, the one that looks fine against the group and is deteriorating against itself, and the assertion that receipts equal on-time plus late, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own receipts and quality data.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe complete transit time reliability calculation on ten ocean shipments for one customer on one lane, small enough to check by hand: quoted transit at booking, departure, arrival and delivery milestones, actual door-to-door days, the tolerance, on time per shipment, reliability, the interquartile variability, the delay split into origin dwell, on-water and destination dwell, the shipment with milestones out of sequence, and the assertion that every delivered shipment has a delivery milestone after departure, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own milestone data.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe complete utilisation and realisation calculation on five consultants, small enough to check by hand: available and chargeable hours from the roster and time entries, utilisation, fees billed on each consultant's hours from bills allocated by engagement, chargeable hours at standard rate, realisation, the two fixed-fee engagements that have overrun and the share of each consultant's hours on them, the four quadrants, and the identity that hours and fees sum to the firm's, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own practice management exports.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what cost to serve a distributor or supplier should run per customer: the 8 to 15 percent of revenue figures quoted depend on which costs are allocated, on the driver used to allocate them, and on whether cost to serve is read against revenue or against gross margin. This page gives the ranges by desk, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one business, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what a good top-ten customer share is: it depends on the industry's normal, on the trend at each of the top accounts, and on whether the share is concentrated in one buyer or spread across ten. This page gives the ranges commonly quoted, when each is meaningless, the three measures that turn the question into a table, and the figure to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe honest answer to what on-time-in-full rate a supplier or a distributor should reach: the 95 to 98 percent figures retailers demand and the 85 to 90 percent many suppliers achieve are measured by different rules. This page gives the ranges by channel and the definition each uses, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one desk, the definition of on-time and in-full, the level per customer against its own history, and the cause split, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min read