HQQA038 What KPI are you focused on?

What KPI are you focused on? – The right KPIs make you look good

Here’s what they mean…

KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. They are what you focus on to indicate the viability and potential of your company. In order to answer the question “What KPI are you focused on?”, you need to identify the right KPIs, track them and act on them religiously. If you have no clue, check out the free OKR, KPI and PPP tracker to collaborate with your team.

When you are asked this question “What KPI are you focused on?”, the investor not only wants to understand what your numbers actually are but how you think and what you focus on.

The KPI of your company will depend on the industry that you’re in and the stage of your evolution. Whilst everyone will have slightly different numbers they focus on, there are a lot of commonalities. Focusing on esoteric numbers, aka the wrong ones, may raise questions.

Listen to what they said. They have asked you what you are FOCUSED on. You are not to pull out a dashboard of 200 numbers. Give them the 3 to 5 key numbers that you are actually tracking daily. Examples of these could be sign-ups, revenue, growth rates, retention, referral rates. You should know what these are already, or you should not be raising. The earlier the stage you are the more top of the funnel you are likely to be focused on. The later stage the company you will be focused at the bottom of the funnel and then holistically be optimising it all.

A focus is really important. If you track a lot of numbers and you feel they are all important, don’t tell them that. Answer their question about how you think they want to hear it.

You’re going to have to say what those KPI actually are, so you better know the numbers off by heart and be able to explain the evolution of them. You should also know the implications of those numbers the interdependencies.

What you need to say

“We recently changed the KPI that we focus on since we are moving to scaling, rather than identifying product-market fit.

The ones we discuss daily, weekly and monthly are the following three: 
1/ 30-day customer retention, 
2/ sign-up growth rate, and 
3/ referral rates.

We picked these as we are heavily focused on retaining and getting our customers to refer us. Of course, we track the NPS through exit polls, and periodic in-app pop-ups, but this is a secondary KPI to us.

Now, I’d be happy to talk to you about these 3 KPI and how they have been evolving over the past 12 months.”