CEO KPIs: 23 Critical KPIs Every CEO Should Have on Their KPI Dashboard

Having the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) CEO KPIs & Dashboards on your CEO dashboard is very important to ensure you drive the right behaviors in your business, monitor the right results, and make the right adjustments to grow your business and hit your targets. I often get the question, particularly with new clients that do not have KPI dashboards established, “What KPIs should we be tracking?”

And here comes the time-honored consultant response, “It depends.” I know—I am being a bit facetious, but it really does depend; it depends on the type of business, the maturity of the business, what problems you are trying to solve, what things you are trying to improve as well as who your stakeholders are. I could go on, but I am sure you get the point (read more: Why are KPIs important?). That said, I believe some KPIs should be on most CEO or leadership team dashboards.

Kaplan and Norton put themselves on the proverbial map with their work in The Balanced Scorecard. Their four perspective categories are Financial, Customer, Internal Business Processes, and Learning and growth. It is important to have the right mix of KPIs to run your business holistically and balanced. I believe it’s important to balance revenue growth, profitability, and improving processes and procedures while investing in your people. At Rhythm, we provide a scorecard view using the categories Employees, Customers, Revenue, and Processes (in addition to the option of customized categories and dashboards for your KPIs).

I recommend 3-5 KPIs in each of these four categories with a balance of leading indicators and results or lagging indicators. Personally, I think leading indicators are even more important to drive the behavior you need to get results you are looking for. With that in mind, take a look below at some suggested KPIs in each of the four categories that I think are important and have seen many of my clients use through the years.

Employee CEO KPIs

Employee satisfaction
Employee turnover
Employee training
# of High-potential employees
# of "A" Players
Attrition (voluntary)

Customer CEO KPIs

Customer satisfaction (Net Promoter Score)
# of Customer complaints
Customer retention
Customer churn rate
New account revenue
Customer lifetime value

Revenue and Sales CEO KPIs

Revenue
Gross margin
Net margin
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and amortization)
Innovation dollars invested
Cashflow runway

Process CEO KPIs

Revenue per employee
Operating efficiency
On-time delivery or fulfillment
Inventory turnover
Quality (rework, defects per XX, etc.)

**Here are a few bonus CEO KPIs that I offer for your consideration as well:

New Leads/Opportunities
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Sales calls made
Number of Face-to-face sales or customer visits scheduled
MQLs – Marketing Qualified Leads
SQLs – Sales Qualified Leads

For those of you creating your CEO KPI dashboard, please consider the suggestions above, and add to the list or edit it to fit your unique business and challenges. If you have other KPIs that you believe are non-negotiable, please share them so that others may learn from your experience.

Now that you know your numbers, where should you spend your time? What should a CEO focus on is an insightful blog post that will help you schedule your time. New CEO? New Middle Market CEO: 11 Tips to Get Started as a New CEO

Good luck, and grow with purpose. - Alan