Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure how effective your company is at achieving its goals, so it's important to find a high-performance software that gives you a comprehensive look at your overall business—not just individual departments.
Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program.
We asked 14 members from YEC, who have tried many programs to track their KPIs, for their top picks. These favorites feature everything from an integration of other company dashboards to third-party KPI reports. You may not realize how inefficient your current method is until you give one of these a try.
Related Article: Fast, Good or Cheap. Pick Three?
1. Geckoboard
We use Geckoboard to get a visual overview of where things stand with all of our firm's KPIs. We also use Google Analytics and Hubspot to monitor the performance of our marketing campaigns. – Lindsay Mullen, Prosper Strategies
2. Salesforce
We live off of dashboards in Salesforce. In fact, we've gone to great lengths to build personal dashboards for each employee so that both departmental and company-wide dashboards visually show the performance of every facet of life at Voices.com. This gives us a 360-degree perspective that keeps us all accountable and on the same page for meeting goals. – David Ciccarelli, Voices.com
[Learn more about Salesforce and other reviews of CRM software on our best picks page.]
3. Grow
Grow is a professional-looking dashboard that's easy to use. It allows me to hook into Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook, Quickbooks, etc. to create a dashboard that everyone can understand. – Eric Siu, Single Grain
4. Tableau
Tableau is a great tool for data analytics and customer/retailer engagement KPIs. It has an intuitive user interface and two features really set it apart: real-time reporting and data blending. Tableau connects to our database and develops timely insights using real-time data, and it can blend data from sources such as Excel, Google Analytics and Salesforce. – Dusty Wunderlich, Bristlecone Holdings
Related Blog Post: KPI 101: A Primer on Selecting Key Performance Indicators
5. Olation
There's nothing worse than expensive BI software that crashes. Usually, this means you'll have to shell out more money, and learn new software. Olation is a little different because it's OS agnostic, and works across multiple platforms. It puts intelligence into your business practice by including "predictive analysis," so instead of fiddling with copious spreadsheets, you have just one solution. – Cody McLain, SupportNinja
6. Simple KPI
Simple KPI is a very useful resource for helping my company track key performance indicators. At Fortune Cookie Advertising, it’s essential for us to have access to a variety of data to test our innovative marketing strategies. I like the cloud-based Simple KPI software, as this lets us access everything from any location. When I need to bring up some key metrics, I just pull up a graph. – Shawn Porat, Fortune Cookie Advertising
7. StatsMix
StatsMix lets you automate the reporting of KPIs, and it's easily shareable with other team members (including business partners). It tracks both internal and third-party KPIs. – Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
8. Asana
Asana is a great tool to track your company KPIs as it's accessible to everyone in the company. It also allows you to track the subtasks necessary to achieve a specific KPI. – Randy Rayess, VenturePact
9. Leadin for Wordpress
Leadin does a perfect job of lead-tracking—not too much analytics and not too little. I'd recommend it for most people doing lead generation on WordPress. – Patrick Vlaskovits, Superpowered
10. The Old-School Spreadsheet
For critical KPIs, a plain spreadsheet is my favorite. I can combine data from any number of sources, it's easy to share and everyone knows how to use it. I even like having to manually input the data. The update process gives me a chance to reflect on the KPIs every day and makes them easy to remember for an on-the-spot question. – William Hogben, Express Checkout
11. iDoneThis
Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone on the team got done. iDoneThis is a simple way to share and track what team members do on a daily basis to work towards critical company KPIs. – Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
12. Moz
Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz makes it easy. Its suite of dashboards and state-of-the-art analytics is a must-have for every business website. At $99, Moz Pro is a steal; the plan includes 12+ tools—including Moz Analytics, Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk and more—to track and improve your SEO, social, branding, link building and content marketing efforts. – Matthew Capala, SearchDecoder
13. Splashthat
Splashthat allows me to easily see KPIs on events and the surrounding social media. – Alexis Levine, Savvy Media
14. HubSpot
ZinePak uses HubSpot for all of our sales and marketing tracking. It's awesome to have our CRM and COS integrated into one smart tool. At any point, I can check to see what interactions anyone at my company is having with our customers, or if those customers are visiting our site or consuming our content online. My only regret with HubSpot is that I didn't start my subscription sooner. – Brittany Hodak, ZinePak