The Best Way to Set Goals and Objectives

Companies that measure everything should also be measuring their corporate goals, as well as the goals of their associates. This is how you can tell whether your company and your staff are meeting projections, improving productivity, and improving their skills and abilities.

To properly measure your goals, they have to be specific, quantifiable, and even have a deadline.

For example, if the sales department’s goal is to “improve sales,” that doesn’t mean anything. It can’t be measured. Does it mean the number of orders or the amount of revenue? How much is considered an improvement? How is it going to get accomplished? And when is the deadline for improving those sales?

A better goal is “Improve current sales revenue by 10 percent in 12 months.”

This goal is quantifiable — 10% more than what we make now — and it has a deadline date — 12 months from the date the goal was set.

Of course, this also means you have to wait for 12 months to see if you achieved your goal. Plus, you have no way of knowing how you’re going to achieve that goal. Make more phone calls? Increase your prices? Add new products? Say ‘pretty please’ with every sales call?

Don’t Forget Your Objectives!

Your goals are just the finish line to shoot for, they don’t actually mean anything if you don’t have a plan of action in place. These are your objectives. They’re the steps you’ll take to reach those goals.

Sticking with previous example, what are some of the objectives we can list in order to meet that goal? What will help us grow our revenue by 10 percent?

• Produce one special white paper per month, which we email to our customer and prospect mailing list. This will help us gauge our prospects’ interest, and guide them down our sales funnel.
• Increase the number of outgoing sales calls by 10% each day. This will increase the size of our prospect pool.
• Increase prices of our top 20% selling items by 10%. Even if we maintain the same number of customers, we’ll see an increase in revenue.
• Each salesperson will schedule one more sales meeting or pitch per week. This increases our odds of closing sales.
• Measure progress at the beginning of each month to see if we are meeting our objectives. This helps us make adjustments and corrections as needed.
• Grow sales through these objectives by approximately 1% (specifically .833%)each month.

Any or all of these methods can be used to help a sales department meet their goal of increased sales revenue. But note that the final two objectives are geared specifically to the milestones the sales department needs to meet in order to achieve their final goal.

Ultimately, everyone in your organization should have their own goals and objectives, and they should be quantifiably measured whenever possible. Because if everything is outcome driven, there is a clear line of sight by the individual or group of what the end game should be, and you’ll know whether your company is on the right track and making forward progress.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business and help them set and meet their goals and objectives. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Geralt (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)