If You Can't Say It in KPIs, You Haven't Earned the Ask

Somewhere in your presentation, there's a slide that says "improved efficiency" or "stronger engagement" or "more aligned teams."

That slide is doing nothing.

Not because those outcomes aren't real. They might be exactly what happens as a result of your work. The problem is that "improved" and "stronger" and "more aligned" are not numbers. They are not benchmarks. They are not things a CFO can put in a model or a board can reference in a decision memo. They are adjectives in the place where evidence should be.

This is the soft-outcome trap. And it is where otherwise strong presentations lose credibility in the room.

Why vague outcomes kill credibility

When you make a claim about impact without attaching a specific, verifiable measure to it, you're asking the audience to trust you. In some rooms, with some relationships, that trust is pre-existing and you can get away with it. In most rooms — especially the high-stakes ones, especially with decision-makers you haven't worked with before — you can't.

This isn't cynicism. It's a basic feature of how senior decision-makers evaluate claims. They've been in enough rooms and approved enough projects to know that "improved efficiency" is what every vendor promises and that most of them couldn't tell you six months later what exactly improved or by how much.

When you express impact in specific KPIs — the actual numbers, the specific metric, the measurable change — you demonstrate something different from a claim. You demonstrate that you've already thought clearly about how this would be measured, which implies you understand the business well enough to be accountable to a result.

The discipline of expressing impact in KPIs is not primarily about making your slide look more credible. It's about proving you've thought seriously about what matters to the audience.

The OPMG case: translating signal architecture into executive math

Nothing crystallized this lesson for me more clearly than the work I did on the OPMG Connected Data project.

The technical capabilities OPMG had built were genuinely impressive. A multi-layer signal taxonomy that captured and modeled customer behavior across first-party, second-party, and third-party data. Machine learning models that could predict customer lifetime value. A decisioning engine that could personalize at scale.

The internal teams understood this. They could speak to it in detail. The problem was that the stakeholders who controlled the budgets — the CMO, the CRO, the CFO — were not data engineers. They were people responsible for revenue, margin, and return on investment.

The existing section of the deck described the architecture. It named the layers and explained the flow. What it didn't say was: here's what this is worth.

We translated the architecture into the language of outcomes. Not "enriched signals improve targeting" but "+30% lift in conversion when campaigns are built on modeled behavioral signals versus raw behavioral data." Not "the decision engine personalizes customer journeys" but "clients using full personalization across the journey see 2.3x improvement in lifetime value versus segment-level targeting."

These weren't invented numbers. They were real performance metrics from client engagements, expressed in the language that the executives in the room were already using to evaluate their own departments.

The change in the room was palpable. The same capability, described in KPI terms, landed completely differently than when it was described in architectural terms. Because the CMO didn't need to understand how the enrichment layer worked. She needed to understand what it was worth to her.

That's the discipline: translate capability into consequence, and express consequence in numbers the audience already cares about.

Finding the right KPIs

This requires you to do work that most presenters skip: understand how your audience measures success.

This sounds obvious, but it's almost never done systematically. Most presenters describe their impact in the language of their own work — their process metrics, their delivery metrics, the things they track internally. These are rarely the things the audience tracks.

A creative agency might measure success by award wins and client satisfaction scores. But a brand manager measures success by sales lift and unaided awareness. A technology partner might measure success by uptime and feature delivery velocity. But the CTO measures success by system reliability and cost per transaction.

The discipline is to find the translation layer — the bridge between how you think about your impact and how the audience measures theirs. Then express your impact at the audience's level, not yours.

For the Chevron New Energies project, we faced this translation challenge at scale. The internal team thought about impact in terms of sustainability KPIs: carbon intensity reduction, renewable energy investment volume, clean hydrogen capacity development. Important metrics. But the external stakeholders were investors and partners who thought about impact in terms of portfolio risk, energy security, and return on capital.

We built a section that explicitly made the translation. "For every 10% increase in low-carbon revenue share, we reduce portfolio exposure to carbon pricing by X." Not greenwashing. Not abstract commitment. A specific number that showed an investor how the sustainability strategy affected the risk profile of their holding.

That slide required understanding what a financial stakeholder cares about and working backwards from there. The underlying data was already in the organization. The work was translation.

The three questions that generate better KPIs

When I'm working with a client on a section of a deck that's expressing outcomes, I ask three questions.

First: what does the person in the room get measured on? Not what they care about in the abstract — what is literally in their performance review? Revenue, retention, cost reduction, growth, market share? This is the language your KPI needs to use.

Second: what's the baseline? An impact claim only means something if there's a comparison. "+30% conversion" compared to what? A KPI without a baseline is just a number floating in space. The baseline is what makes the improvement legible.

Third: what's the timeframe? "Improved efficiency" over three years means something different from "improved efficiency" over three months. Timeframe makes the claim specific and makes the cost of inaction real.

Most presentations fail on all three. They describe outcomes in their own language (not the audience's), without a baseline (so there's nothing to compare), over no specific timeframe (so the urgency is absent).

The Lupus case: turning clinical data into a case for funding

The Lupus Association × JPMorgan project is one of the most delicate examples of this discipline I've worked on.

The challenge with a disease awareness presentation in a financial context is specific: clinical data is already available, often in abundance. What isn't always available is the translation of that data into the terms that move a room of decision-makers to allocate resources.

"Lupus affects approximately 1.5 million Americans" is a statistic. It may be accurate and important. It doesn't create a sense of urgency in a room unless the audience already has a reason to care about it.

The discipline was to translate epidemiological data into the language of the stakeholders in the room. For a JPMorgan wellness initiative, that language included employee impact on productivity and healthcare costs. The question wasn't "how many people have this disease?" It was "what does this disease cost organizations that aren't thinking about it, in measurable terms?"

That reframe — from clinical statistic to organizational impact — transformed clinical data into decision-making material. Not by manipulating the data. By expressing it at the right level for the specific audience.

Soft outcomes are a form of hiding

There's something worth naming directly. When presenters use vague outcomes, it's often because they don't yet know the specific numbers — or they do know them but are nervous about committing to a claim they might be held to.

Both of these are understandable. Both of them are worth working through, because the alternative — vague claims that nobody believes — is worse than either uncertainty or accountability.

If you don't know the specific numbers yet, say so, and describe how you would measure them. "We'd measure success against three metrics over a twelve-month engagement: X, Y, and Z. Here's what the baseline looks like today and where we believe we can get to." This is more credible than a vague claim, because it shows you've thought about measurement.

If you're nervous about the commitment, ask yourself whether you actually believe in your own impact. If you do, the number should be possible to defend. If you don't, that's a different problem — and the vague outcome isn't solving it. It's papering over it.

Impact expressed in specific, relevant, audience-appropriate KPIs is the clearest signal that a presenter understands both their own work and the business they're presenting to. It's also the fastest way to build the kind of trust that makes the room say yes.

Make the number real. Make it theirs.