By Gary Dean, managing director of strategic consultancy, The Truffle Pig Consulting Co.

What do you think are the factors for success for your business? What insight and wisdom do you need?

Tennyson said ‘knowledge comes, but wisdom stays’.

How do you measure ‘success’ might be a place to start, because it’s not the same answer for everybody.

For you it might be sales turnover, money in the bank, a good gross margin, market share, assets on the balance sheet, the number of new customers each quarter, number of people you employ – or driving a Ferrari.

For me it might be incoming sales order numbers (what I call order velocity), customer satisfaction levels, employee satisfaction levels, customer retention levels, positive cashflow, meeting strategic objectives on time, having to move to bigger business premises, or going on holiday to Mexico.

However, knowing key success factors, KSFs for short, is knowing the essential things an organisation needs to get right in order to truly satisfy a customer’s purchasing criteria and at the same time run a profitable, secure and long-term business.

Some of the typical KSFs are product quality, consistency, availability, product range, product relevance, and product innovation. Others are service focused, such as distribution capability and control, sales and marketing effectiveness, technical support, customer service quality and interaction, ease of transaction, how complaints or issues are handled and the quality of the management of the business.

Still further environmental factors can play a big part too, such as your location, scale and scalability, accessibility of the operation, opportunity to recruit talent, operating process quality, and of course the attractiveness of the company culture.

The list is quite extensive, but not all KSFs carry the same value in every business or every market, therefore it is important to identify what really matters for your success.

Identifying the must-have KSFs related to what you offer is the critical place to start. Then comes the deeper work.

Once you have worked out which are the most important key success factors for your organisation you need to rank them in order of importance, and the weight them.

In my opinion, it’s important to have a systematic approach to weighting your KSFs. If you try and make them fit your ‘wished for’ outcome, then the whole process is pointless, so stick as far as possible to the must-have KSFs and be brutally honest.

Be careful of ending up with too many, as you won’t be able to see the wood for the trees. Try to keep it down to around 10 or so after you have filtered your initial list.

While the systematic approach to achieving weighted KSFs can seem a bit complex, coming up with a correctly weighted list is absolutely worth the effort.

Here’s how I would do it:

Use your best judgement to find a market share figure. Call this figure ‘i’.

Assess the importance of price to the customer, express this as a percentage, with low importance being 15-20%, medium importance 20-25%, high importance 35% upwards. Call this figure ‘c’ per cent.

Review the importance of the organisation, including creative and management factors, and especially marketing. You should try and stay within the 0-10 % range. Call this value ‘m’.

At this point you have a percentage figure for your weighting so far, which is the sum of(i+c+m).

The figure regarding the total influence of service factors will be the balance of 100% – (i+c+m) %

Now look at the service KSFs and score them from one to five, where five is if the highest importance. Add up these scores to give a sum we can call ‘S’.

To create your weighted scores, assign a weighted value to each KSF score by calculation 1-(i+c+m)/S.

Take those figures and round up or down to the nearest 5%.

You are looking for the total of all the percentage figures to come to 100. Adjust, if needed, to get that total by applying common sense, and now you have your results.

It’s worked for me in the past and I recommend you use this tool always when reviewing both your business and new opportunities that cross your desk.

Once you have completed this systematic process go back and take a hard look at the results.

Now for the reality check.

If one or more of the KSFs is a ‘head and shoulder above others must-have’ because it’s so important, it also must be ranking high in your weighted results.

If it doesn’t, you’re in trouble.

Should you really stay in this business or this market segment? Can you really compete? Are you able to do something fundamental to change the weighted result of this leading must have?

If you can change something, do it, and start right away. If you can’t, get out.

If you are doing well, or better than well, in your KSFs ‘must have’ scores, do more of the same and become an expert at it.