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Building a Commercial Indicator
Andrew Priestley © 2011
© 2009/2012 The Coaching Experience Indicators 1 of 1
www.andrewpriestley.com Contact blpcharts@hotmail.com

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Contents
3 Introduction: Why Indicators?
Creating the Indicator
Logos
Fonts
Colours
Images
Contact Details
PDF Friendly
4 The Questionnaire
Respondent Details
The Questionnaire Instructions
The Questions
5 Your 25-50 questions
The Key Categories
6 Category Questions
The Answer Options
The Preferred Answer
The Reason Why It’s the Preferred Answer
7 Create a Questions Schedule
The Overall Category Review
8 The overall scales per category
Overall feedback per category
9 The Basic Report
The Bespoke Report
10 The Bespoke Feedback Schedule
Top and Tailing your Report
11 Summary
The Key Benefit of an Indicator
Next Steps
12 Appendices
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Introduction: Why indicators?
When a prospective customer makes a sales enquiry they ask you a lot of
questions. But you also ask them qualifying questions to determine if they are in
fact a potential customer. Sometimes this can take a few moments but often –
especially if it’s a high value, multi-step sale - this can take some time. Usually
that is time you have to invest at your expense.
A commercial indicator is a product for prospects. It helps the customer more
accurately determine their needs and the strength of those needs. Better still
they pay for this as a value-add service and as a bonus provide you with high-
grade information about their buying needs.
Ultimately you get paid for a service your provided for free.
Creating the indicator
We collate everything we need to create the look and feel and branding of the
indicator.
Logos
We need your company/business logo/s, and any essential logos (i.e.,
memberships, accreditations etc)
Fonts
You need to nominate your preferred fonts and styles.
Understand we work in Excel and Word software with standard PDF friendly
fonts i.e., Arial, Calibri, Verdana, Tahoma, Times.
Colours
You need to identify your preferred colour scheme. Again, we use Excel and
Word software with standard colours with very little PMS colour control.
Images
We need any JPEG images that you need including (i.e., screen shots, book
images, headshots etc). These need to be resized for inclusion in the final PDF.
Contact details
You need to supply all the correct best contact names and details (i.e., phone,
web, email etc).
PDF friendly
The end report for the beta phase will be a PDF and the maximum preferred file
size for a finished report is about 1.2MB. This equates to about a 20pp x A4
report.
NB: To meet obligations under various privacy laws, ALL reports are password
encrypted PDFs. The base password will be qwerty but you will be able to
change that password if needed.
All data is confidentiality assured under various data protection laws.
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The Questionnaire
The questionnaire includes
a) respondent details
b) questionnaire instructions
c) the questions
d) the categories
e) answering and filing instructions
Respondent Details
The respondent is the person completing the questionnaire.
What basic information do you need to know about the person filling in the
questionnaire?
Name
Date
Mobile
Email
URL
Physical address
DOB
Other
You can get a respondent to also answer other background information. That
information can be coded to be used in the report as well.
So what would be very handy for you to know that you can ask in the very start
of the questionnaire that would help you better qualify your potential new
client?
As an example on the sales profile we asked what their top two frustrations with
selling were and these answers were used later in the report. We asked what
they sold and how many salespeople were on the team.
In the profit indicator we asked for revenue ranges, if they were tax registered
(GST, VAT) etc.
The Questionnaire Instructions
Essentially we tell the respondent how to fill in the questionnaire, back up the
file and where to email it.
The Questions
Indicators are NOT psychometric tools. This means they are not intended to be
academic instruments that are administered by a qualified assessor and having
robust validity. They are not intended as formal technical assessments.
They are intended to give a general indication only and on this basis they can be
created easily for commercial application. The information is only used to clarify
common needs or issues you have with clients and their answers are used as a
starting point for further discussion.
Basically indicators in this context are a qualifying tool.
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So the starting point is: what questions do you (or your industry) normally ask a
prospective client to qualify a prospective customer’s explicit needs?
How do you normally know if someone you meet is a potential new client?
Or, if someone makes an enquiry what questions do you typically ask to quickly
assess what their pain points are; and if you can help them?
As an observation most prospects can be generally qualified in about 12
questions – believe it or not – and their answers generally place them in the
ballpark of being a potential customer.
In my experience most customers can be accurately qualified in about 25-50
questions. I have taped many qualifying sessions and most of the information
you’ll need has been elicited in about 25 questions. The remaining 25 questions
usually add greater confirmation or additional and needed distinctions.
So start thinking about the questions you typically use to qualify a prospect.
Your 25-50 questions
You need to come up with a list of pre-qualifying questions that you typically
ask a new client. You might already know these. So start writing them down.
As a guideline somewhere between 25-50 questions is fine.
Key Categories
You will notice that some questions are really about the same topic. They go
together.
For example, on the sales indicator questions such as ‘Have you been formally
trained in selling?’ and ‘Do you receive ongoing training in selling?’ and ‘Do you
attend sales training industry events?’ and ‘Do you read sales books?’ are all
about Training.
So under the category of Training I have four key questions I typically ask a
potential sales person to assess how well trained they are in selling.
So think about what category your questions relate to. Your questions will
normally relate to a number of key categories.
And you need at least three categories.
For example the Think Know Feel Indicator has three categories – think, know
and feel.
The KPI Indicator has 8 categories. We measure Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile,
Partnerships and questions that relate to your Niche and ability to take action
(GSD) and an Overall category.
The Property Investor Profile has 6 categories.
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The Sales Profile has 10.
The more categories means more questions in the questionnaire.
If you have ten categories and 5 questions per category you have 50 questions.
Category Questions
You need about 3-7 questions per category. The ideal is about five questions.
Here’s an example. All of the questions below are about a Privacy Policy.
Does your business have a Privacy Policy?
Is the policy current?
Is it on your website?
Have you inducted your staff about their obligations under the Act?
The Answer Options
In most cases we are using a basic three item Yes, Maybe or No Likehert Scale.
You can have five (Yes, Usually, Maybe, Not Usually, No) or seven point scales but
the coding time and cost to code these additional variables dramatically
increases the end cost of creating the indicator.
The Preferred Answer
We need to know the preferred answer to every question. For example:
Does your business have a Privacy Policy?
The preferred answer for this question is YES. That is the optimum answer for
smart business owners. Get the idea? You don’t want them to answer Maybe or
No.
The Reason Why It’s the Preferred Answer
It may help to know why it’s the preferred answer.
“… because that’s what prudent businesses should have. And because
you are highly exposed if you collect customer details … a customer
complains to the Commission … and the Commission audits you … and
discovers you don’t have one. Big fines!”
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Create a Question Schedule
To make life easy we get you to a) group the questions under categories and
then b) set up question schedule that looks like this. Note: don’t overdo the
questions. Just the ones that help you benchmark your potential new client.
We’ve use an example from the KPI Indicator.
No Category Question Preferred Why
Answer
1 Publish Have you published a book? Yes KPIs have a book.
2 Publish Is your book on Amazon? Yes KPIs have a book on
Amazon.
3 Publish Is your book for sale on your Yes KPIs sell their own
website book
4 Publish I have written over 10000 Yes KPIs have online
words in blogs content
5 Publish Etc No KPIs do not …
So, based on your preferred answer of YES, if your respondent answered NO to
Publish question 1 that is now important information. If all their answers are the
opposite of optimum behaviour it means they probably need your product or
service offering i.e., the KPI program, sales training, investor education etc.
NOTE
You can write a list of questions first and work out the categories later or visa
versa. But it has to end up as an orderly schedule of questions. We can help with
this.
The Overall Category Review
The KPI Indicator has nine categories. Each category has about 5 questions. We
code the responses per category so that you end up with an overall category
result expressed as a percentage out of 100.
As an example pretend you have a category called Publish and there are five
questions. If we average the scoring of all the questions you will end up with a
percentage out of 100 as your overall score.
The ideal is around 75% - give or take 5%.
As a rule of thumb you do NOT want 100% as your preferred outcome. You want
around 75% optimum for success on most indicators. Think of it this way, there
are no perfect people and no one is 100% anything. 100% suggests that things
are too good to be true. It can also indicate that the respondent tried to put their
very best foot forward or engineer the result in some way.
We will help you construct questions that help your respondents avoid this
outcome.
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The overall scales per category
We create an overall feedback scale per category. A sample looks like this:
86-100% Too high, too good to be true
76-85% High
65-75% Optimum
50-64% Average
25-49% Fair
<25% Caution
Overall feedback per category
So you would help us construct brief feedback for each of these % ranges. For
example:
Publish
86-100% This is an unrealistically high score. This suggests that you are a published
bestselling author with a killer marketing strategy that consistently
propels your books into the A-list. Is this accurate? Your score suggests a
review of your actual progress.
76-85% Your score is high and suggests that you are a published author with
some impressive book sales. Is this the case? Your score suggests a review
of your actual progress.
65-75% Good score. This suggests you are publishing online (blogging) and offer
downloadable reports and whitepapers and you are a published author
or about to publish. Room to improve of course but on the whole you are
making nice progress.
50-64% This score is OK but suggests that while you are active online through
blogs and e-letters etc you need to be more consistent and focus on your
marketing. You’ll need more help with this aspect.
25-49% This is a low score and suggests there is a lot more you can be doing to
market yourself through online and offline publishing. You need help
with this aspect.
<25% Caution: You are not using publishing effectively or at all. Your efforts are
not consistent or effective. You need help with this aspect.
We code the indicator so that it gives the appropriate feedback dependant on
the overall % score. So if the respondent scored 33% on the indicator used in the
above example the report is coded to display:
Publish Measures how effectively you use on and offline publishing
33% This is a low score and suggests there is a lot more you can be doing to
market yourself through online and offline publishing. You need help
with this aspect.
And that would also be displayed graphically as a bar chart or pie chart etc (TBC).
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The Basic Report
Once we have the questions; and the categories; and the preferred answers and
the category feedback we can build a basic indicator.
A basic indicator would include a graphic representation of the overall trends of
the categories and some overall feedback per category.
The sales profile started life as a 4-page report and included a title page and
three pages of graphs and some simple notes.
The basic report is easier to create but we have found that the perceived value
of the report – to the respondent - is lower than a bespoke report.
The Bespoke Report
The bespoke report still has the graphs and categories overviews but it now
incorporates bespoke feedback to how the respondent answered every
question.
So in addition to overall category feedback they also get feedback to a YES,
MAYBE and a NO answer for each question – depending on how they answered
that question.
Take one of your qualifying questions and let’s say the preferred answer is YES.
How would you respond if they answered YES? You’d say something like, “That’s
great! Successful clients do xyz …”
You might also want to add some clarification like, “Just make sure that you are
doing xyz …”
If they answered NO you’d probably say, “You said you don’t currently have xyz.
This is not a good idea because …”
If they answered MAYBE you’d probably say, “Your answer suggests you are
abot to do xyz or still considering doing xyz. Most successful clients have made
that decision and …”
Get the idea? You have developed a response for every possible scenario.
What gets generated – therefore - is a more substantial and personally relevant
16-20pp report.
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The Bespoke Feedback Schedule
To help create that substantial outcome, we get you to create a schedule that
looks like this:
Publish
1. Have you published a book?
Y You said you have published a book. That’s great. You will have more credibility
if you have a published book …
M You said ‘Maybe’ you have a published book. This can indicate its written but
not produced yet or its still in a digital format such as an e-book …
N You said you don’t have a published book yet. You are missing out on an great
opportunity to position yourself as a KPI …
2. Can your customers download reports?
Y
M
N
x. Can your customers … etc.
Y
M
N
Get the idea?
It takes a little more time to construct this for every question and category but
the perceived and actual value to the customer is massive and the results tend
to show that a customer is highly predisposed to becoming a client because
they indicator was so detailed and personally accurate.
They still get the graphs, overall category feedback and then feedback for each
question per category.
Top and tailing your report
Either way, you can top (start) and tail (end) the report with additional
information about you, your team and your business, next steps, bonus offers
and product and service information.
It’s also the place to add in important contact details
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Summary
So in this case we need:
The questions
The categories
The preferred answer per question i.e., Yes.
Overall category feedback
Bespoke feedback to a Yes, Maybe and No response for each question
Any top and tail information
Contact details
Once we have this data we can create an impressive report that your clients will
value. Plus they will provide you with high-grade information that is collated
into a meaningful report … and that they have provided to you.
The Key Benefit of an Indicator
In most cases you need to find out this information anyway. But invariably you
spend a lot of time gathering this information and at your cost.
Paid indicators mean the prospect has paid to give you the same information.
And they want the feedback and they value it highly.
Next steps
If you would like to proceed with creating your own indicator email me at
blpcharts@hotmail.com
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Appendices
Example of How to read page
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Example of Bar Chart: The Sales Profile
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Example of Overall Feedback Scale
Example of Bespoke Feedback
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