How to Make a KPI Presentation [Tips & Guide]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- Apr 23, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 28, 2025
Emily, a client, asked us an interesting question while we were making their quarterly KPI presentation:
"Why does everyone fall asleep during these meetings when the numbers are actually good?"
Our Creative Director answered,
"Because your KPI presentation is a spreadsheet wearing a suit."
This blog comes out of the conversation above, and you'll find it worth your time because, as a presentation design agency, our insights are based on real client challenges and thousands of decks we build every year.
In case you didn't know, we specialize in only one thing: making presentations. We can help you by designing your slides and writing your content too.
What is an KPI Presentation
A KPI presentation is a structured summary of key performance metrics that explains results, highlights trends, and guides business decisions.
Who is it Presented to & Why
A KPI presentation is delivered to executives, team leaders, and stakeholders who are responsible for driving business outcomes and making strategic decisions. It helps them quickly assess performance, understand progress toward goals, and decide what actions or improvements are needed next.
Why Your KPI Presentation Looks like a Spreadsheet Wearing a Suit
Every time we sit down with a new client to review their KPI deck, we see the same thing: slides that look like they're designed to prove you did your homework. Rows of numbers. Traffic light colors everywhere. Charts that require a PhD to interpret. It's defensive design, and your audience can smell it from the parking lot.
This approach fails for three specific reasons, and once you see them, you can't unsee them.
First, comprehensive doesn't mean useful.
You think showing every metric demonstrates thoroughness. What it actually demonstrates is that you can't tell the difference between what's important and what's just measurable.
Second, you're optimizing for coverage instead of clarity.
There's this unspoken fear in most organizations that if you don't show a metric, someone will ask about it and you'll look unprepared. So, you include everything, just in case.
Third, data without narrative is just noise.
You can show me that customer acquisition cost went up 23% last quarter. Okay. But did that happen because you're targeting enterprise clients now? Because your best marketing manager quit? Because you ran an experiment that didn't work?
The Signal Framework: A Better Way to Build Your KPI Presentation
After building a few many of these decks, we developed something we call the Signal Framework.
It has three layers, and they work like a funnel...
At the top, you have your headline metrics.
These are the three to five numbers that define success for your business right now. Not forever. Not theoretically. Right now. For a SaaS company, this might be Monthly Recurring Revenue, Net Revenue Retention, and Customer Acquisition Cost.
For an e-commerce brand, it might be Average Order Value, Return Rate, and Contribution Margin. The key is that these metrics directly tie to your current strategic priorities.
In the middle layer, you have your diagnostic metrics.
These are the numbers that explain why your headline metrics are moving the way they're moving. If your MRR is up, is it because of new customer growth or expansion revenue? If your CAC is climbing, is it across all channels or just paid social?
These metrics don't go on every slide, but they need to be ready when someone asks "why?" And trust us, if your KPI presentation is any good, someone will ask why.
At the bottom, you have your operational metrics.
These are the day-to-day numbers that your team tracks but leadership doesn't need to see unless something breaks. Email open rates. Support ticket resolution time. Inventory turnover.
They matter, but they don't belong in a board presentation unless they're directly causing a problem in your headline numbers.
Most KPI presentations we see are built upside down. They start with operational metrics and hope you'll somehow intuit the strategic picture. That's backwards. Your presentation should start with what matters most and only go deeper when it's necessary.
Start With Your KPI Story, Not the Spreadsheet
Before you open PowerPoint, before you export a single chart, you need to answer one question: what's the story these numbers are telling?
Data is just a collection of facts. The story is what makes those facts meaningful.
Your opening slide in any KPI presentation should never be a dashboard. It should be a single headline that captures the most important thing your audience needs to know. "Revenue grew 18%, driven entirely by enterprise expansion" or "Customer acquisition costs are climbing faster than LTV for the first time in two years." Give people the punchline first.
Design Your KPI Presentation for Decision-Making
Every metric slide in your deck should answer three questions immediately:
What is this number?
Is it good or bad?
What should we do about it?
If someone has to squint at your slide to understand any of those three things, your design failed.
We use something we call the "five-second test" with every KPI presentation we build. If you can't grasp the main point of a slide in five seconds, it needs to be redesigned.
Here's how that translates into actual design choices:
One metric per slide unless they're directly related.
When you put three different charts on one slide, you're forcing your audience to do mental gymnastics to figure out which one you're talking about.
Use comparison intelligently.
A number by itself means almost nothing. Revenue of $2.3 million sounds great until you realize the target was $3.1 million. We typically show current performance, prior period, and target on every metric slide.
Make the "so what" explicit.
Too many KPI presentations show that customer churn increased by 4.2 percentage points and then move on. But what does that mean in dollar terms? Add a text box that says "This represents $847k in lost annual revenue." Suddenly that percentage has weight.
Stop using red and green for everything.
Not every metric that's down is bad, and not every metric that's up is good. If your customer support ticket volume is down, that might mean you've improved your product, or it might mean customers have given up on getting help.
Build in the Narrative Arc
A great KPI presentation has the same structure as a good article: a beginning that sets context, a middle that explores the details, and an end that points toward action.
Your first two or three slides should establish the big picture.
Are we growing? Are we stable? Are we dealing with challenges?
This section shouldn't take more than two minutes.
The middle section is where you explain what's driving changes in your headline metrics.
But here's the critical part: only go deep on what matters. If a metric is performing exactly as expected, you can say "Customer lifetime value is holding steady at $4,200, which is right on target" and move on. Spend your time on the metrics that are either exceeding expectations or underperforming.
The end of your KPI presentation should always include a "what we're doing about it".
If customer acquisition costs are too high, what are you testing to bring them down? If a particular segment is outperforming, how are you doubling down on it?
We typically end every KPI presentation with a single slide that lists the top three priorities for the next period. Include timelines and owners. "Reduce CAC by 15% by end of Q2, owner: Sarah, Marketing" is something people can actually execute on.
What to Do After
The presentation itself is only half the battle. What happens after you leave the conference room matters just as much.
First, actually send the deck.
Your presentation should be designed so it can be understood without you in the room explaining every slide. If your deck only makes sense when you're presenting it live, it's not finished.
Second, create a feedback loop.
Send a quick summary email that captures the key decisions and action items. This confirms that everyone heard the same thing and creates accountability.
Third, track whether your KPI presentation actually changed anything.
Did leadership make a different decision because of what you showed them? If your KPI presentation keeps happening month after month and nothing ever changes, you're not presenting information that matters.
You're performing a ritual.
FAQ: How Many Metrics Should I Include in My KPI Presentation?
The right question is: how many metrics does my audience need to make good decisions? A monthly operations review for your immediate team might need 15 metrics because you're managing the details together. A quarterly board presentation should have maybe five because the board cares about strategy, not operations. The best KPI presentations never show a metric just because it exists. They show metrics because those specific numbers illuminate a specific question or decision.
Start with your headline metrics from the Signal Framework, add diagnostic metrics only when they're needed to explain what's happening, and ruthlessly cut everything else. You'll know you've hit the right number when people stop looking overwhelmed and start asking smart questions about what to do next.
FAQ: Should I Use the Same KPI Deck Template for Every Audience?
No. Your CFO cares about different things than your product team, and your board cares about different things than your department heads. Building one universal KPI presentation and trying to make it work for everyone is like wearing the same outfit to a wedding, a job interview, and the gym.
What you should do instead is build a master KPI dashboard that contains all your key metrics, and then create audience-specific views that pull from that source. Your board presentation highlights strategic metrics and long-term trends.
Your executive team presentation balances strategic and operational metrics. Your team presentation goes deep on the operational metrics they can actually influence. The data source is the same, but the story you tell with that data changes based on who's listening and what decisions they need to make.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.
How To Get Started?
If you want to hire us for your presentation design project, the process is extremely easy.
Just click on the "Start a Project" button on our website, calculate the price, make payment, and we'll take it from there.
We look forward to working with you!