How Many KPIs Do You Need?

I get asked frequently about the number of KPIs a business needs. Unfortunately, there is no magic number. The key is focus. You want to focus on the most important results and their drivers.

Let’s say you have an audacious revenue growth target, you want to align everyone’s work to support growth. The marketing would need to run effective campaigns that fit the target market, sales would need to know how to work with these customer groups, contact centre agents would need to be actively identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, the procurement team would need to be prepared to address increased demand. You can identify one or two performance indicators for each area. For this example, you have one high level KPI, the revenue growth, and potentially 4 or more performance indicators for monitoring the key supporting activities, which I call drivers for success.

Depending on the goals you set for the business, you determine the corresponding KPIs. The issue is not about the number, but the priorities you set. As we know well, more is the enemy of high performance. So resist the temptation of doing too much at the expense of delivering exceptional outcomes.