We're looking at the kinds of measures that can be set right at the start of a project when we want to give some parameters by which success might be measured. Yesterday we looked at personal measures. Now to turn to harder measures - here's a list. We can start with the 'hardest' of measures the financials expressed as sales and gross margin, closely followed by product sales. We can turn to customer based measures such as transaction value, year to date or moving annual total customer spend, lifetime value. Or customer's share of basket - in other words are they buying more of our products than those of our competitors. We can look at frequency of purchase. We can look at new customers, incremental expenditure. We can look at loyalty and loss of business or customers through attrition. Closer in we can look at sales through different distribution channels - and the availability of the product. We'll come back to the softer brand and communication measures tomorrow.

The point I am making is that this is a huge list of measures. ROI does not begin to cover all of the things you could measure. It is useful in showing how you multiplied your investment but the guarantee of future sales comes from other factors entirely. Here's a chart I used a very long time ago to convince a hardbitten M&S director that he had a major sales opportunity. At that time they measured wine sales by total value. And boasted they killed products in minutes based on the rate of sale. Using observation (on instore security cameras) I was able to find that it was taking up to 15 minutes to buy a single bottle of wine. And using TGI that customers were only buying a quarter of their wine there. It only needs a calculator to demonstrate the impact of the business if customers bought half their wine at M&S.  These measures were simple to obtain but invisible to the cash till.

The measures you select will give the task you set yourselves a particular character. That's why it is so important that you agree up front what you are trying to do and what change you are bringing about. Using a long candidate list of measures also helps to address the kind of project manager or client who wants to win on every single kind of measure. It can't be done - so we have to prioritise the most important measures and may have to leave out some of the others.

For the client who says there is no budget to research anything so we have to stick to financial measures I would still say that there should be a discussion about what constitues success. Otherwise you won't know what you are setting out to do. So agree measures anyway - it makes it easier to then persuade someone to spend some money to see what actually happened.