Top 25 KPI's You Can Dashboard To Help Run Your Business

It's never been more important to measure and guide the progress of your business using KPI's or Key Performance Indicators. The glut of data out there can lead to analysis paralysis without an appropriate framework of KPI's to guide you. At the same time, KPI's should be there to guide your progress of setting up systems and processes that will create a long-term business competitive advantage, rather than be the end in itself.

It is doubly important therefore to consider what KPI's to track and how they would inform the progress of the set-up and implementation of systems to guide the progress of your organization. With that in mind here are 25 examples of KPI's you can use to help run your business and how you can use them as part of a KPI Dashboard. 

Calls Per Rep Per Day:

This is a Sales KPI for tracking an activity metric, in this case, calls made, per sales representative. Typically organizations track sales back to the activities that lead to them and use the activity metrics as early warning systems for progress to sales goals.

New Leads Per Week:

This is a Marketing or Demand Generation metric. Leads are the lifeblood of business and so this is an important metric. Of course, how qualified the leads are or become is equally if not more important. this can be sorted out through tracking number of leads that are "qualified" in some way, such as Marketing Qualified Leads or Sales Qualified Leads.

Avg Unit Price:

This is both of Sales and Finance KPI. For companies that have a varied pricing scheme, it is useful to track this average unit price to see if it is in line with planning and expectations.

Avg Trip Distance:

This is Logistics and Supply Chain KPI. For companies that do deliveries or shipping, this could be an important KPI to track in a dashboard.

Response Time:

This can mean everything from deliveries in Supply Chain to lead response time in Sales or Demand Generation. Generally, lower is better for this KPI. Research from InsideSales.com, for instance, showed that the average response time to a new lead dramatically impact that likelihood the lead would ultimately become a customer. 

Average Contract Value:

Somewhat related to Avg Unit Price, the Average Contract Value is a KPI popular with SaaS companies and service organizations that measure what it says, the average value of a contract, with SaaS this is typically the average annual value of a contract since many contracts are for 1 year. For companies that bill multi-year contracts, this can also be an important measure to understand, combined with a KPI suck as average contract length.

Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC):

This is mainly a Sales and Marketing KPI that measures the cost in terms of Sales and Marketing expenditure to acquire one customer. It is calculated by dividing the number of customers acquired by the total marketing and sales costs.

Lifetime Value (LTV):

This KPI is a Sales, Operations and Financial KPI that measures the total value of an average customer over the lifetime that the average customer does business with the company. It is calculated using a formula involving Churn Rate, which yields an Average Lifetime measured in Time Periods, and Average Revenue for those Time Periods, to arrive at an average value over the lifetime.

LTV to CAC Ratio:

This is a Sales, Operations, and Financial KPI that is arrived at by dividing Lifetime Value of a customer by the Cost to Acquire a Customer. The higher the better. Different industries would have different benchmarks. Anything over 3 is considered healthy in most subscription businesses for instance.

Avg Gross Profit Margin:

This is a Sales and Financial KPI that calculates the profit margin of Revenue minus Cost of Goods Sold. It is an important tracking metric for many businesses. Depending on the business a healthy margin can be a wide range of figures. For many types of businesses 50-80% gross margins is considered very healthy.

Sales Pipeline Growth in $:

A growing pipeline is a leading indicator of future revenue growth, which makes Sales Pipeline Growth in $ a popular Sales KPI.

Sales per Rep:

This is a Sales KPI that measures the average of a amount of sales per sales representative in the company.

Quote to Close Ratio:

This Sales KPI measures the ration between the number of quotes sent to prospects versus the number of those quotes that end up becoming closed sales.

Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate:

This is a Marketing KPI that measures at what rate visitors to a website or other property turn into leads. On a website this is typically measured through the number of visitors that fill out a form that includes their contact information, thus kicking off marketing and sales lead management efforts.

Net Promoter Score:

This is typically a Customer Success KPI but it can also be of interest to all functions across the customer lifecycle. It measures how loyal customers are to the company and how likely they would recommend the company to others.

New Newsletter Sign-ups:

This is a Marketing KPI that measures the number of new sign-ups to the company’s e-mail newsletter.

Click-through Rate:

This is a Marketing KPI that measures how often a link gets clicked, typically used for e-mail or pay-per-click advertising.

Bounces:

This is a Marketing KPI that keeps track of the number of emails that are sent out and ‘bounce’ because the e-mail address is not valid.

Opens:

This is a Marketing KPI that measures the number of e-mails that are sent out that are opened. The Open Rate measures the percentage of total e-mails sent out that are opened.

Daily Active Users:

This is a Marketing and Customer Success KPI that measures how many users of an online software product or site, such as a social network, that are active every day on average.

Monthly Active Users:

This is a similar KPI to Daily Active Users except that it measures it on a monthly basis. Since this can measure a login that happened anytime during a month, Monthly Active Users is typically much higher than Daily Active Users.

Social Media Follower Growth:

This is a Marketing and Customer Success KPI that tracks the growth in total followers across different social media channels.

Total Reach:

This Marketing KPI tracks the total number of people that can theoretically be reached by a company’s marketing message across all channels being measured.

Avg Uptime:

This Operations KPI measures the average percentage of time that systems are functional and working and is often used by Hosting and SaaS companies among others.

# of Training Hours Per Employee:

This Human Resources KPI tracks how many hours of training have been invested in the average employee, which can be important for a retention, continuity, and competitiveness perspective.

Those are just 25 of the many kinds of KPI’s you can use to build dashboards to help guide your business.