This is a library of 103 commercial KPIs across six disciplines, written for companies that sell something physical through a channel. Every benchmark carries a named source and a year. Where no credible public benchmark exists, the page says so instead of inventing one, which happens more often than the rest of the internet admits.
Why another KPI library
Almost every revenue metric a board asks for today was invented inside one kind of company: a venture-funded, subscription-priced, direct-sold software business. Rule of 40, magic number, LTV/CAC, net revenue retention, monthly churn. Inside that world they are excellent instruments.
Then they escaped. They now sit in board decks of companies that sell capital equipment through dealers, on a seasonal cycle, with a backlog and an installed base that gets replaced once a decade. In that world some of these metrics are merely useless, and a few are actively misleading. Net revenue retention is the clearest case: with no contractual renewal event, a customer sitting mid-life on a fifteen year machine reads as churn.
Each ebook below states, per metric, whether it transfers to a physical and channel-led business, and names the replacement where it does not.
Every metric answers the same five questions
- What it is, in one sentence you can quote
- The formula, written out
- The benchmark, with the organization and the year, or an explicit statement that no reliable public benchmark exists
- How this KPI lies to you. Every metric has a failure mode: an average that hides a distribution, a denominator someone can manage, an incentive that produces the number instead of the outcome, a season that distorts the trend
- What to do with it
The fourth question is the one most KPI content skips, and it is the reason this library exists. A definition tells you how to calculate something. It does not tell you how you will be fooled by it.
The six ebooks
| Ebook | KPIs | What is in it that is hard to find elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Sales KPIs | 14 | Sell-in versus sell-through, territory coverage versus territory capability, and channel inventory aging. Machinery inventories-to-shipments data pulled from the US Census M3 series to show why a seasonal business cannot read a flat trend |
| B2B Marketing KPIs | 15 | Trade show and field day return, dealer co-op utilization, and spec-in rate. Plus why last-click attribution is meaningless on a nine month buying cycle |
| GTM and Revenue KPIs | 17 | The four SaaS metrics that break in a capital business, each with a named substitute, and a seven number board dashboard with a stated reason per number |
| Customer Service KPIs | 19 | Equipment uptime, time to part, warranty cost over revenue, first-time fix rate, and what to measure when support runs through the dealer rather than through you |
| Customer Success and Retention KPIs | 17 | Retention when no subscription exists: repurchase interval, parts and service attach rate, dealer retention, share of wallet, and contactable installed base |
| Channel and Dealer KPIs | 21 | The dealer scorecard a dealer will accept, the four numbers that decide whether he sells your line at all, and the twelve month seasonal calendar that sets the year |
The benchmark problem nobody mentions
Writing this library surfaced something worth stating plainly: a large share of the KPI benchmarks quoted across the industry cannot be traced to a primary source. Not disputed, not outdated. Untraceable.
Examples found while sourcing these pages, each chased to the original and excluded from the ebooks:
- The granular burn multiple table attributed to a well known investor is not in his published writing. The original contains only a qualitative sentence
- The widely repeated claim that fewer than one in four organizations forecast within ten percent, attributed everywhere to a major analyst firm, does not appear in that firm’s public material. Every citation traces to vendor blogs quoting other vendor blogs
- A dealer absorption benchmark attributed to a trade association appears in search summaries pointing to an article that does not contain the number, and whose author says he does not consider the metric useful
- Two frequently cited trade show cost figures have no dated, locatable primary report behind them
Where a number could not be verified at its source, these ebooks say so in the sentence rather than in a footnote. In the channel and dealer ebook, seventeen of twenty-one metrics carry an explicit statement that no reliable public benchmark exists, with the reason. That is not a gap in the research. It is the finding.
Who wrote this
Andre Magrini, fractional Chief Revenue Officer based in Chicago. Operating history in agriculture, agribusiness, animal protein, food and industrial equipment: dealer and distributor channels, OEM accounts, feedlots, grain handling and feed processing equipment, sold across Brazil and then the United States and Canada inside the same company. Vice Chair of the Marketing and Communications Committee at the American Feed Industry Association.
These pages are written from having carried the number in that kind of business, not from having read about it. Where a metric belongs to a world outside that experience, the text says so.
Start with the constraint
If a number in your business is not doing what the definition promised, that is usually a symptom of a measurement designed for a different physics. Tell me which number, and I will tell you whether the metric is wrong, the instrumentation is wrong, or the business is telling you something you do not want to hear.
Related: what a fractional CRO does · fixing a forecast the board stopped believing · agtech and agribusiness
Last updated: August 25, 2026.