Setting Better Quarterly Business Goals
If you're looking for a quick way to boost your business, setting really good quarterly goals is an easy place to start. Use these steps to set the right goals and get results!
Know your 'why'.
A 'why' is a motivator, a reason for doing something. It’s important to know this before setting goals because it can help you focus on what matters most and keep you motivated when things get tough.
If your only reason is “because I have to,” then the first time things get hard — like when an obstacle comes up — it will be easy to give up.
There are a few steps you can take to make sure you're creating the right goals for your business.
Setting goals is important because they're one of the best ways to keep your business moving forward. They can help you focus on what's important and make sure you're spending time on the right things. But if you don't do it right, setting goals can be a waste of time. Follow these steps to make sure that doesn't happen:
Be ambitious, but not unrealistic. You want to set goals that are big enough to challenge yourself—but not so far out there that they're impossible for your team to achieve in the time frame you've given them (so no "finish writing my book in two weeks").
Be specific about what exactly is being accomplished by each goal (this will come in handy later).
Be measurable so everyone knows when something has been completed or how well it was done. Use quantifiable criteria like revenue generated or number of customers served as benchmarks against which teams measure their performance over time—giving everyone an idea of where they stand with respect to the rest of their industry peers at any point during their tenure at your company.
Use "OKRs" to write better goals.
OKRs (which stands for Objectives and Key Results) are a popular method for setting business goals developed from the agile goal-setting system used by Google and many other large companies. OKRs have five main characteristics to help you define better goals (Objectives):
Is it aligned with the company vision? If you accomplish the goal (or Objective), will the company benefit? What happens to the company if it isn't accomplished?
Is it clear? Can everyone on your team understand the purpose of the stated goal or objective?
Can it create positive change? OKR's don't consider routine work as a real objective unless it help create a new, better version of your company.
Is it challenging? If your objective is easy to achieve, then chances are likely that your team isn't reaching its fullest potential.
Is it inspiring? Are you proud of yourself and your team if you accomplish the objective? Does the outcome justify all of the hard work?
Build quarterly goals from your SMART Goals.
If you have annual SMART Goals, you should be converted them into smaller quarterly goals. This allows you to keep an eye on your progress and gives you a more precise measure of achievement. It also allows you to re-evaluate your work and adjust where necessary, but not get bogged down in the details too much.
If this sounds like something that would benefit your business, here are some things to remember when building SMART quarterly business goals:
Specific: The goal must be clear and detailed enough that you can't just say, "I want to make more money." Instead, it should be something like "$12k in revenue from new clients by the end of Q3."
Measurable: How will you know if your goal was achieved? A good measurement might include an increase in visitors or number of sales leads generated. If there's no way to measure progress on your goal, then it's not going to happen!
Attainable: Your quarterly goal shouldn't be so ambitious that it's unrealistic—you want something that challenges you but is still within reach. Think about the resources available to your company right now, and how much growth those resources can support over the next quarter. Then set aside some time every day or week to focus on getting closer to achieving these goals (more on this later).
Relevant: What impact will achieving this quarter's objectives have on the overall success of our company? This question helps keep us focused on big-picture priorities rather than short-term wins at any cost—which isn't always helpful if we're looking for long-term sustainability!
Time-bound: Your quarterly goals need to have clear start and stop dates and your team must know when the goal has been accomplished. Try to set more detailed timelines instead of just saying "finish by the end of the quarter."
Conclusion
If you’ve ever been frustrated with your business goals, take heart in knowing that it can be done right! The first step is knowing what makes a good goal. You should have an overarching purpose that informs the rest of your strategy. Once you have that, the rest will fall into place easily (and quickly).
