Season 2: Episode #7 | Top Business KPIs Every Company Should Track for Success
🚀 Tracking the right KPIs can make or break your business. In this episode, Vadym and Ievgen break down the most important KPIs every business should track to drive growth, optimize performance, and make smarter decisions.
🔍 What you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ The essential KPI categories – financial, customer, operational, HR, IT, sales & marketing.
2️⃣ How to identify the right KPIs and avoid tracking vanity metrics.
3️⃣ Proven methods to use KPIs effectively to boost business performance.
📈 Want to make data-driven decisions with confidence? Start tracking the right KPIs today and uncover growth opportunities hiding in your data.
Podcast listing
Vadym:
Welcome back, everyone, to The Data Crunch Podcast! I’m Vadym, Growth Marketing Manager at OWOX, and today, we have our Head of Marketing, Ievgen, with us to break down a crucial topic: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Ievgen, always great to have you here! How’s it going?
Ievgen:
Hey Vadym! I’m doing great. I'm excited about today’s conversation.
KPIs are such an essential part of business strategy
If used correctly, they act like the company’s GPS, guiding businesses toward goals.
However, a lot of businesses don’t actually utilize the data for its full power to reach their growth goals faster.
Plus, a lot of businesses are tracking fake KPIs instead of meaningful ones, so they might end up making decisions based on noise rather than real insights.
Vadym:
Right! And I think that’s a trap a lot of businesses fall into. There’s so much data available that they just start tracking everything without a clear purpose. Before we get into the specifics, let’s set the stage. Can you break down the different types of KPIs for us?
Ievgen:
Absolutely! Key Performance Indicators generally fall into a few major categories:
- Financial KPIs – These focus on profitability, revenue, and overall financial health.
- Customer KPIs – These track retention, in my opinion - the main KPI for businesses in 2025, is customer satisfaction and different metrics of how loyal your customers are.
- Operational KPIs – These measure how efficiently a business runs, ensuring smooth day-to-day processes.
- HR KPIs – These track employee satisfaction, hiring efficiency, and workforce management.
- IT KPIs – These measure the system performance, security, and technical efficiency.
- And finally, Sales & Marketing KPIs – These focus on sales, conversion rates, and marketing campaign success.
That’s too broad, I know, but we’ll talk more specifically later today. But one thing is important now - each of these areas is critical in its own way, and businesses need to track the right mix of them depending on their priorities.
Vadym:
That makes a lot of sense. But let’s be real—some business owners still rely on gut instincts and experience.
Why do you think KPIs are so essential?
Ievgen:
Great question! Experience and intuition are valuable, and I haven’t ever seen businesses that managed to grow fast without this.
But intuition is not always reliable.
Imagine driving a car without a dashboard - no speedometer, no fuel gauge, no GPS. You might get where you need to go, but you’re also risking running out of gas or missing an exit on a highway. KPIs give you real-time, measurable insights so that you’re making informed decisions, not just educated guesses.
And the depth of those decisions just depends on how well you utilize the data, that most likely your business is already collecting.
Without getting reports you need exactly when you need them, you might be investing in the wrong areas, missing potential red flags, or not even realizing when a strategy is working better than expected.
Vadym:
That analogy makes it so clear! Alright, let’s start with the most fundamental category - Financial KPIs.
Ievgen:
When it comes to running a successful business, nothing is more critical than financial stability. You need to know if you’re making money, how efficiently you’re using resources, and whether you’re set up for long-term growth.
Like P&L and Cashflow are great. But those rarely show how successful business truly is. And that’s where financial KPIs come in.
Some of the most important ones include:
- Gross Profit Margin – Measures how efficiently you’re producing goods or services.
- Net Profit Margin – This tells you how much of your revenue actually turns into profit after all expenses are covered.
- Return on Investment (ROI) – Whether it’s marketing, hiring, or expansion, ROI is that North Star metric that tells you if your investments are paying off.
- Operating Cash Flow – Measures how well your day-to-day operations generate cash, ensuring liquidity for expenses and future growth areas.
- Debt-to-Equity Ratio – so important for the current state of the economy - this shows how much of your business is financed by debt versus investor money.
- If you’re in the e-commerce or even a retail business - Inventory Turnover – Tracks how quickly you’re selling stocks.
And look, those KPIs are not just the quick metrics standing alone, they always come with some dimensions and cohorts, plus they are connected one to another.
Vadym:
So it looks like financial KPIs are like the foundation—you need them to ensure profitability and stability.
Ievgen:
Exactly! But having money is just one part of the puzzle.
If you don’t have customers who stick around, those profits won’t last forever.
If financial KPIs are about having money, customer KPIs are about keeping customers happy and coming back for more.
Here are a few critical customer KPIs:
- Customer Retention Rate – Tracks how many customers stay with you over time.
- Customer Churn Rate – The flip side—how many customers leave.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (also called CSAT) is about how happy are your customers. Surveys and feedback help track this.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Measures customer loyalty—if they’re likely to recommend your business to their friends or their audiences.
Basically, the beauty of the KPIs is that they are not just department-level. They might be cross-department or even company-level KPIs.
So for example, not only marketing influences the next set of KPIs which might be more in the Customer Success:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – Estimates revenue a customer will bring in over their lifetime.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - Measures how much your company spends to bring a new customer in.
- Average Order Value - Tells you how much customers spend per transaction.
Vadym:
That’s a solid list! So now we know how to track finances and customer loyalty, but what about the day-to-day operations?
Ievgen:
Yeah, let’s talk quickly about the Operational KPIs. So this set makes sure everything behind the scenes in the business runs efficiently.
Some key ones include:
- Employee Productivity – Tracks output per employee.
- Quality of your Product or Service – Ensures consistency and prevents costly quality issues.
- Time to Market – Measures how quickly you can launch new products.
- Supply Chain Cycle Time – Tracks how long it takes to move products from suppliers to customers.
- Inventory Accuracy – Ensures your stock levels match what’s actually available.
- Capacity Utilization – Measures how much of your production capacity is being used.
Vadym:
Wow! I see… That’s a lot of moving parts!
Ievgen:
Yes. But businesses aren’t just about operations - they’re also about people, which takes us to HR KPIs.
People are at the heart of every company, and HR KPIs help ensure a productive, engaged workforce.
Here are a few key ones:
- Employee Turnover Rate – Tracks how many employees leave versus stay.
- Employee Satisfaction – Measures engagement and workplace happiness.
- Training Effectiveness – Evaluate whether training programs improve performance.
- Time to Fill – Measures how quickly open positions are filled.
- Absence Rate – Tracks unplanned absences affecting productivity.
Vadym:
That makes perfect sense! They make the business more efficient, right?
Ievgen:
Yes, absolutely. And speaking of efficiency, IT plays a massive role in any business today.
IT keeps everything running behind the scenes.
And that does not necessarily fall under the IT department but is typically grouped under this name.
That might be a Website Downtime,
Might be the Project Completion Rate – Tracks how many IT projects finish on time,
Then the Data team performance is typically here under IT:
Things like data quality, number of New Reports Generated per Month,
Number of insights delivered to business teams,
How well the reporting system is set up?
I really like the next KPI, which is about which percentage of collected data was utilized in business reports.
It’s very important because we live in a world where businesses collect tons of information every day. This amount is growing as a snowball, but businesses typically don’t touch most of those data because they either don’t know how, because of the lack of communication between data and business teams, or just don’t have a reporting system in place, because they use old-fashioned BI dashboards, that are hardly customizable.
That is why we envision every business professional to operate data in spreadsheets, so they can utilize most of those long-tailed data points with the instruments they are familiar working with.
Vadym:
Alright, we’ve covered operations, HR, and technology, what’s next, Ievgen?
Ievgen:
Now let’s shift to the KPIs that directly impact business growth, let’s talk about Sales & Marketing KPIs and how they help drive revenue. So we have a few videos about that in particular - marketing & sales KPIs - on our YouTube channel, let’s leave the links in the description, but here are some of the key ones:
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – Measures how much is spent to generate a single client.
- For your business, it might be important to measure the cost per website visitor, cost per lead, cost per order, etc.
- Then it’s conversion rate – Tracks how many potential customers take action. And just once again, this may be super specific to your business. You might want to map out your entire sales funnel and then track conversion rates at each of the steps, plus add some cohorts by geo, age, traffic channel, landing page - you name it.
And then by tweaking some specific areas, you might significantly add more revenue to the business. - Then Brand Awareness is so important these days, that evaluates market presence, and metrics like reach and engagement. They don’t bring new revenue in today, or might not even bring in the future, but that also might be a supporting marketing strategy.
- And finally, metrics like ROI (Return on Investment) and ROAS (Return on the ad spend).
Vadym:
This has been such an insightful conversation!
Ievgen, I really appreciate you breaking down these KPIs in such a practical way.
Ievgen:
Absolutely, Vadym! Tracking the right KPIs can make all the difference in business success.
Vadym: To our listeners — if you’re ready to take control of your business performance, head to owox.com. Explore our tools for analytics, reporting in spreadsheets, dashboarding, analyzing, and making better decisions based on the most current state of your KPIs - and trust me - if done right, you’d quickly boost your business by uncovering small things you’ve been missing earlier.
Start free today, no credit card or a demo call required, and turn your data into smarter, more confident decisions.
Ievgen: Stay data-driven, stay ahead — make informed decisions that drive success. We’ll catch you guys in the next episodes!
