The top KPIs for CEOs and executives in 2025

Data and analytics have never been more important for mid-market CEOs and executives to set the course to business success. The true value of your data is how your people use data insights and how it impacts strategic planning.

Given another challenging year ahead - with pressure on profits and product margins, and the constant need to change - data and KPIs provide the evidence that CEOs need to make the best strategic decisions for their companies.

Information aggregated from ERP systems and other data sources will provide a clear picture of your business performance and what needs to happen next.

In KPMG’s 2024 Global CEO Outlook Report , business leaders are optimistic about their company’s future despite geopolitical uncertainty and economic volatility. Internal challenges such as upskilling the workforce and hybrid working are pushing CEOs to be agile and adaptable in their stakeholder management while also keeping an eye on long-term revenue growth.

Respondents identified their top operational priorities as implementing generative AI across the business (64 percent), advancing digitization and connectivity across their business (18 percent) and to execute ESG initiatives (13 percent).

The need to be more data-driven

As more companies turn to data to help their business, it’s clear that for any analytical initiatives to be successful, the CEO must be actively involved.

An evergreen study by McKinsey & Company found that “senior leader involvement and organizational structure plays a critical role in how effective (or not) a company’s use of analytics are.”

The study found that “44% of high-performing companies said that most initiatives are sponsored by the CEO; only 16% of low-performing organizations make that claim.” Overall, the survey found that company leaders are “less involved in analytics efforts than they are in digital activities.”

Companies are investing billions in big data, AI and analytics, but many projects and programs are failing to meet expectations. If you’re like many CEOs, you don’t trust your data or how your teams are using it. For this to change, you must be engaged in the business intelligence (BI) initiatives of your company.

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Track performance

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Your involvement, in addition to defining and leading the strategic direction of your company’s analytics programs, should include monitoring several key performance indicators (KPIs). These will provide you with a clear picture of your business performance, from manufacturing production effectiveness to sales to customer satisfaction targets. Identifying the key KPIs - what is the key.

What should you regularly monitor on your CEO KPI dashboard? Are you aware of your company’s critical success factors? Is your leadership team aligned on these priorities?

As an executive, you need to know things such as:

1. Are we performing well financially? How is company’s growth and cashflow?
2. Where’s employee satisfaction sitting?
3. Is customer retention strong?

Ultimately what you decide to measure will depend on the goals and objectives of your business. Your KPIs can include financial and operational metrics, as well as relevant sales and marketing data. As CEO, you set expectations and establish the measurements that will help you steer the business. You need to work collaboratively with your c-suite and the individuals directly responsible for the analytics reporting to develop the right KPIs that will help you monitor the health of your organization.

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Financial ratios

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Your KPIs should:

1. Articulate the most important priorities of the board, reflecting the board’s strategic goals and concerns about risks facing the organization
2. Highlight both the desired outcomes, as well as the way you can achieve these outcomes
3. Use language that is meaningful to you and your board of directors and anyone coming into any of these roles in the future
4. Be revised on a regular basis (ideally quarterly) to reflect changes in the organization, government policy and the environment in which the organization operates.

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Management reporting

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The top eight operational and financial KPIs that you should be reviewing regularly are:

1. Revenue versus forecast

Most businesses establish revenue projections or a financial target that they are trying to achieve. These forecasts can be set for a specific branch, across a region or for the entire business, and they can be set for a specific period or sales team. They can also be established for a product or service within a specific industry. As you track actual revenues against forecast figures, you will have a better understanding of whether your financial targets were too aggressive or whether you underestimated the demand for your products or services.

2. Profit margins

Depending at what stage your business is in, if your profit margins are dropping, it’s usually a sign of an unhealthy business even for a start-up. In addition to seeing the big picture, or the overall profit margin of your business, it’s important to look at net profit margins across individual products, product lines, customers and lines of business. By monitoring profit margins regularly across these various areas, you will be able to adjust pricing as needed.

3. Progress towards long-term targets

CEOs and CFOs are responsible for setting goals for their businesses from short-term, time-sensitive objectives, to annual sales goals and hiring targets.

Measuring employee productivity is important and helps you understand the inner workings of your team. Poor employee engagement can have far-reaching implications, while on the other hand, high performing teams can be your secret weapon. Productivity ratios can be applied to almost any team in your business. The best way to measure productivity is consistently and constantly.

Revenue per employee: to calculate, divide the revenue by total number of employees. This helps evaluate what your team contributes to the organisation, what each employee contributes to the individual team and will help determine the costs of losing a particular employee.

Total cost of workforce: this is the sum of all the wages, benefits, superannuation, travel, contractors and other expenses in the team.

4. Inventory and efficiency KPIs

People often refer to inventory as cash they can’t spend. Stock deteriorates over time and is expensive to store and move. For distributors, it’s also a crucial component of success.

Cash conversion cycle: This KPI measures the time it takes to convert an investment in inventory or some other resource input into cash. This provides a measure for how long cash is tied up in inventory before the inventory is sold and cash is collected from customers.

Asset turnover ratio: The asset turnover ratio measures a company’s ability to generate sales from its assets by comparing net sales with average total assets. For example, a ratio of 0.5 would mean that each dollar of assets generates 50 cents of sales.

Sell through rate: Think of sell-through rate as your short-term rate of sales success. Of all the inventory you have on hand, how much was sold over what period of time? The sell-through rate is calculated by comparing the number of units sold during a period of time to the product available at the beginning of the time period.

5. Fixed vs. variable operating expenses

As an executive, it is crucial to understand your cost structure. Revenue can be difficult to predict. Costs are not.

Variable costs change with production volume, while fixed costs are a constant expense. Fixed costs are things like rent, management salaries, and insurance, which must be paid even if you aren’t producing anything. The rookie approach is to keep costs to a minimum. And while generally that’s more correct than not, there’s subtlety to it. It depends on what you’re optimizing for and the nature of your business. R&D budgets, experimental programs, marketing expenses, and technology costs are all technically fixed costs.

These are also the future of your company and things from which you’d expect a positive ROI. The trick is to understand what costs support existing and ongoing operations versus what is investment.

6. Customer KPIs

Retention of customers and increasing their share of wallet with your business are essential ways to achieve a successful strategy for driving sustainable revenue growth.

This is one of the most important KPIs to measure. It is both a financial and operations KPI because it represents the financial relationship with your customer, which is also a reflection on how well your team is doing at servicing that customer. While it may show how much your customers are spending with you over a period, the number may reveal that you have challenges or opportunities to improve. By building better relationships with your customers and improving loyalty, you can expect profit per customer to increase. Profit per customer KPI will also reveal your top customers, creating an incentive to focus additional attention to build and strengthen the relationship. Analysis of what is going well with these customers can provide best practices that can be used to replicate the success with other customers.

While you can make improvements within your organization, it may be determined through your analysis that an ongoing relationship with the customer is no longer beneficial to your business. You may find that some of these customers require more work than their business merits. Current and accurate customer profitability data will reveal a variety of details that will help you make more strategic business decisions on customer-by-customer basis.

Net Promoter Score

A leading indicator of customer satisfaction is the net promoter score. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers a single question: "How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?" A higher NPS indicates a higher level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can be a strong predictor of business growth.

Customer retention rate

The sales process has changed dramatically, and acquiring new customers is more challenging and more expensive than ever before.

Lowering your customer churn rate by just five percent can boost your profitability anywhere from 25% to 125%. In other words, focusing on retaining customers can produce significant financial benefits. Is there a trend of customer satisfaction with a specific salesperson? Whatever the reason for a decrease, or increase, in customer retention rate, it’s important that you tracking the data so you can make informed decisions to reap the benefits of customer retention.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. It is calculated by multiplying the average purchase value by the number of purchases per year and the average customer lifespan. Understanding CLV helps businesses make informed decisions about customer acquisition and retention strategies, ensuring long-term profitability and growth.

7. Growth rate

Ultimately what you want to know from your data is whether your company is growing. The board of directors want to know, and they want to be able to see the trajectory of that growth. Growth is a broad KPI and you can track growth for specific products, salespeople, customers, departments, branches or geographic regions. With the data, you are aggregating as part of your BI, you can build a strategic snapshot of your growth rate across all areas of your business.

8. Marketing KPIs

To measure the Return on Investment (ROI) in marketing, you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in generating revenue relative to the costs incurred. Here are some key aspects you can measure:

Revenue Growth: Assess the increase in revenue that can be attributed to specific marketing campaigns or overall marketing efforts. This helps determine the direct impact of marketing on sales.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Determine the cost of acquiring a new customer through marketing efforts. This is calculated by dividing the total marketing costs by the number of new customers acquired.

Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of leads or prospects that convert into paying customers. This helps in evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing strategies in driving sales. A good definition of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) (prospects who have completed a certain activity to show their interest in your product) help make tracking this metric easier.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as a crucial north star for CEOs because they provide a clear and quantifiable measure of a company's performance across various dimensions. By monitoring KPIs, CEOs can gain insights into financial health, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity among other areas. KPIs help CEOs steer their organizations towards long-term success by offering a comprehensive view of what is working well and what needs improvement.