What is a KPI?

This sale dashboard example contains KPIs and sales effectiveness metrics visual indicators: speedometer gauge, dial, slider, level meter and bullet indicators.
"Sales effectiveness refers to the ability of a company’s sales professionals to “win” at each stage of the customer’s buying process, and ultimately earn the business on the right terms and in the right timeframe.
Improving sales effectiveness is not just a sales function issue; it’s a company issue, as it requires deep collaboration between sales and marketing to understand what’s working and not working, and continuous improvement of the knowledge, messages, skills, and strategies that sales people apply as they work sales opportunities.
Sales effectiveness has historically been used to describe a category of technologies and consulting services aimed at helping companies improve their sales results.
Many companies are creating sales effectiveness functions and have even given people titles such as VP of Sales Effectiveness." [Sales effectiveness. Wikipedia]
The example "Sales metrics and KPIs" was created using the ConceptDraw PRO diagramming and vector drawing software extended with the Meter Dashboard solution from the area "What is a Dashboard" of ConceptDraw Solution Park.

This financila dashboard example was drawn on the base of the Enterprise dashboard from the Mecklenburg County Government website.
[charmeck.org/ mecklenburg/ county/ CountyManagersOffice/ OMB/ dashboards/ Pages/ Enterprise.aspx]
"In management information systems, a dashboard is "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."
For example, a manufacturing dashboard may show key performance indicators related to productivity such as number of parts manufactured, or number of failed quality inspections per hour. Similarly, a human resources dashboard may show KPIs related to staff recruitment, retention and composition, for example number of open positions, or average days or cost per recruitment.
Types of dashboards.
Dashboard of Sustainability screen shot illustrating example dashboard layout.
Digital dashboards may be laid out to track the flows inherent in the business processes that they monitor. Graphically, users may see the high-level processes and then drill down into low level data. This level of detail is often buried deep within the corporate enterprise and otherwise unavailable to the senior executives.
Three main types of digital dashboard dominate the market today: stand alone software applications, web-browser based applications, and desktop applications also known as desktop widgets. The last are driven by a widget engine.
Specialized dashboards may track all corporate functions. Examples include human resources, recruiting, sales, operations, security, information technology, project management, customer relationship management and many more departmental dashboards.
Digital dashboard projects involve business units as the driver and the information technology department as the enabler. The success of digital dashboard projects often depends on the metrics that were chosen for monitoring. Key performance indicators, balanced scorecards, and sales performance figures are some of the content appropriate on business dashboards." [Dashboard (management information systems). Wikipedia]
The example "Enterprise dashboard" was created using the ConceptDraw PRO diagramming and vector drawing software extended with the Composition Dashboard solution from the area "What is a Dashboard" of ConceptDraw Solution Park.