Examples of SMART business goals: How to set and reach them

When you can describe a problem, most of the time, you’ve already solved it.

This is more or less the idea behind setting SMART goals for business: it’s a practical rule of how to set goals so that they’re clear to everyone and there’s no way of not understanding where you want to go.

For this, the word SMART was chosen. Because each of its letters corresponds to the initial 5 elements that a SMART goal for businesses should have:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Temporal

Let’s understand each of these elements and how they help you set growth goals for your company.

In order for you to understand this clearly, let’s start by defining, step by step good examples of SMART goals, so that they have all the elements of the acronym incorporated into your description.

But before, how about taking a look at this SlideShare that gives some more examples of SMART goals for a company and other cases that you can use in your day to day life:

Also see: Use the Ansoff Matrix and Determine Business Growth Strategies

Definition and examples of SMART business objectives

After defining each of the characteristics of SMART goals, we will present some examples to make the concept clearer.

1- Specific

Specific means referring to something unique, and is the opposite of general, broad or vague.

Therefore, a specific goal should detail where you want to arrive, unequivocally.

It goes without saying that your goal is to make a profit, or to sell more, these are general goals, not examples of SMART goals in companies.

Sell ​​what? Where? To whom?

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 1:

An example SMART goal, with respect to the specific feature, could be:

I want to sell more high quality sports products in my 4 stores located in malls to take advantage of the effect of a sports festival that will happen in my city.

Okay, now, yes, that’s specific!

2- Measurable

When we refer to measurable, it’s not only to define a measurement, a number to be achieved, but also that its objective can be ascertained objectively.

For example, if we were to establish the goal to make 75% of the city’s children happy, there would be no way to measure it, this criterion is subjective and impossible to measure.

The correct way would look something like this:

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 2:

Sell ​​35% more high quality sports products, compared to last year, in the 4 stores located in malls to take advantage of the effect of a sports festival that will happen in my city.

3- Attainable

Now we need our SMART company goal to be achievable.

If we were to talk about a 200% increase depending on the circumstances (but most likely) it would be unattainable, making the goal unbelievable, discouraging anyone who had to reach it and turning it into something useless and purposeless.

4- Relevant

There’s nothing more meaningless than setting a goal that won’t give you any practical meaning or that won’t help the company grow.

SMART goals have to be important to the business.

For example, setting a goal to renovate the flooring throughout your network of stores could be necessary, and an important goal for maintenance personnel.

But for your business, this is an operational detail, your goal should always be linked to something that will define the company’s destiny, how to conquer new markets, expand your network of stores, the number of customers, billing etc.

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 3:

Let’s take a new example, more comprehensive for a company and quite relevant:

Increase the market share of our company by 10% by opening 4 new stores in the 3 main malls of the city by the end of the year, taking advantage of the increase in consumption generated by the sports festival that will happen in the city.

5- Temporal

Now we’ve reached the last feature of our SMART goals: a date, a time to reach the goal.

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 4:

In our case, it could be to achieve the 35% increase in sales by the end of the year.

Source: Tools hero

Some examples of SMART goals for a business

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 5:

E-commerce: increase our base of leads that register on the site by downloading materials by 25% by the end of the year.

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 6:

Clothing store: sell 30% more evening dresses during the month of May, when marriages occur in our region, through allowing 10 installment payments by credit card.

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 7:

Fastfood Network: Open 25 new stores by the end of the year, 10 in our state and 5 in each of the 3 neighboring states.

Some of the most used goals in companies are sales goals, so we selected 3 good examples of SMART goals for companies related to sales:

3 examples of SMART goals to increase sales

Let’s go, 3 examples of measurable sales goals and objectives. For each element of the SMART acronym, let’s put its letter (in parentheses) next to this SMART goal feature:

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 8:

Increase by 20% (M, A, R) by the end of the year (T), the revenue from our e-commerce focused on generating content on special dates (Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.) in our blog to capture 40% more leads (M, A, S).

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 9:

Bill 10 million (M, A) in the first half (T), with the sale of our newly developed product (R, S), using all marketing materials and actions presented at the convention at the end of last year (S).

EXAMPLE of SMART goals 10:

Conquer 5% more market share (A, S, R) in our main market, the State of XY (S, R), through partnerships with distributors and sales promotions (S). This result must be achieved by the end of the year (T).

The importance of defining examples of SMART goals to increase sales that are specific is to give employees an indication of how they will achieve them, something that will be very important in the goal-setting methodology we are about to follow, OKR.

Determining goals with the use of OKR

OKR (Objectives & Key Results) is a well-known method of determining business goals used by large companies and became very popular when it was adopted by Google, which obtained excellent results.

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. The Objectives are where we want to go and the Key Results should indicate how we will know, during the process of the goal, if we are getting there.

OKRs usually refer to a period of 3 months in which Key Results are monitored to see if the company is on track.

In addition, OKRs comply with the following characteristics:

• Goals are ambitious (contrary to SMART objectives) and must be very difficult to achieve
• Key Results must be measurable
• If you reach 70% of OKRs, consider yourself doing OK
• Each OKR must have a maximum of 3 or 4 Key Results

But before we see real OKR cases and examples of SMART goals to increase sales, watch this SlideShare about OKR:

Success CASE: OKR and good examples of SMART objectives

Someone who can tell us about this methodology, is Pedro Renan, CMO from We Do Logos. This is how he uses OKR in his Creative Competition company:

“Here at We Do Logos we’re always objective and pursuing results through great planning and no resource waste. Therefore, the OKR methodology fits like a glove for us, allowing us to change course quickly, if necessary. “

Renan gave us an example of how OKR could work for a business similar to his. One where Digital Marketing is focused on Content, to attract customers, generate leads, opportunities, and convert sales.

“Let’s say that the CMO of this company defines one of its Objectives as to achieve a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) of $25. To know, during the quarter, if you’re getting there, you could stipulate 3 different Key Results: Number of Hits, Number of Leads Generated and Number of Generated Opportunities. That way, if the Hits objective is reached, but the Leads objective is not, it allows you to figure out, in the middle of the process, where the error is. And the same goes for Opportunities or any of the Key Results “

This is the logic behind OKR: identify through Key Results how things are going and redefine actions to achieve Objectives.
Did you like our list of good examples of SMART goals for a company?

But you might ask? How can I measure, track, and establish SMART goals for a company with my company processes? See a tool in the video below that allows you to create management panels from business process automation.

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