How To Set Achievable Business Goals In 2023
Publié le 9 March 2023
Make your professional dreams a reality by knowing how to set achievable business goals in 2023.
You should have big goals for your business. Setting your sights high will keep you motivated and inspire everyone on your team to do their best to make it happen. Making your goals a reality requires a clear plan that lays out multiple steps that will lead to the success of your business. By understanding how to set achievable business goals, your organization will be able to chart a clear path forward.
How To Set Achievable Business Goals In 2023
- Review Your Current Position
- Talk To Employees
- Have Clear Objectives
- Break Down Into Small Steps
- Set Your KPIs
- Review Progress Regularly
- Be Prepared To Changed Course
- Celebrate All Successes
Review Your Current Position
In order to set achievable business goals, you must take full stock of your business’ current position. Reviewing key metrics such as sales, revenue, expenditures, audience reach, client growth and related statistics can provide a good look at your organization’s current place in your sector. It is also important to review internal metrics, such as employee turnover and retention rates, ease of hiring, internal growth and employee feedback.
If your business is not currently in as strong a position as you would like, it is still important to perform an honest appraisal of these metrics. The only way to really know how far your business can go is to understand exactly from where you are starting.
Talk To Employees
No matter what goals and objectives you have for your company, the truth is that you will not be able to accomplish any of them with the hard work of your employees. When working to set achievable business goals, it is important to meet with employees at all levels of the organization and solicit their thoughts and opinions. They have the most in-depth knowledge of the day-to-day operation of the company and will be able to make an honest appraisal of potential business goals, as long as management is willing to listen.
Employees want to have a voice in the company and will be more engaged in the workplace if they have a clear understanding of objectives and plans. By involving employees at every stage of the goal setting process, you will have a better understanding of the company and they will be even more committed to putting their best effort into achieving your business goals.
Have Clear Objectives
When setting your business goals, it always pays to be specific. It is not good enough to say that your goal for the year is to increase sales, expand your client base, or better connect with your customers. While well-intentioned, these types of goals are ultimately hard to work towards as a result of their vagueness. Due to the fact that you have already performed an honest appraisal of current standings, you know how far you have to go to achieve your objectives.
Better goals and clear objectives would be:
- Increase monthly sales figures by 30%
- Maintain a minimum of 50,000 monthly sessions to webstore
- Increase client base by 25%
- Reduce employee turnover rate to under 5%
With clear objectives such as these, it is much easier to set benchmarks, review your progress and know exactly how you are progressing towards your business goals for 2023.
Break Down Into Small Steps
Having the ambition to set big goals is a good thing, but no big goal can be achieved all at once. Achieving large objectives takes time, patience and work, which can be easy to forget. This is why it’s important to break down large goals into smaller steps. Failure to do so is like planning to drive across the country without a map. Sure, you know the right direction but there’s a good possibility of getting lost along the way.
Once you’ve set your large business goals for the year, work with your team to break these goals down into small steps. Having a 10-step plan is much more actionable, as it is easier to envision the individual tasks and projects required to move each step forward. It also helps to set deadlines for these smaller steps, which can be quarterly, monthly or even weekly. The right way to do so is with whichever method keeps your team on track to completing the small steps that lead to large goals.
Set Your KPIs
Key Performance Indicators – also known as KPIs – are the specific metrics you will use to track your progress toward your achievable business goals. These indicators can be sales figures, client growth, revenue, overhead budget, number of projects completed or any other similar metric. Since you have reviewed your organization’s current position, you know your starting points are now able to set achievable KPIs.
If you work in sales-based call center, for example, and you have a call-to-sale conversion rate of 45%, this figure can become a KPI. You can set your goal as increasing the conversation rate by 10% over the next year, breaking it down into smaller achievable increases over the coming months. While KPIs are useful to track quantifiable performance metrics, it’s important to remember the human element that is less easy to quantify. The success and happiness of your workplace team should also be a KPI, even if it is slightly more difficult to measure.
Review Progress Regularly
Working towards achievable business goals is not a process that is completed overnight. Organizational success requires sustained effort over a period of weeks, months and even years. Over such a long period, it is possible to lose sight of both your overall goals and the process you have made towards reaching them. This is why it’s important to take the time to review your progress on a regular basis.
Having regular review sessions that track progress, highlight difficulties and acknowledge the hard work of the workplace team will be hugely beneficial. Company leaders can conduct short reviews on a weekly basis to track daily progress, with large review sessions on a monthly or quarterly basis to chart the progress towards large annual business goals.
Be Prepared To Changed Course
Having a detailed plan is the best way to reach your goals, but almost equally as important is the ability to admit that your plan is no longer working. The truth is that you can create as detailed as plan as possible, but there will always be things that are completely unpredictable. No business plan in existence could have been prepared to handle the events of the past 3 years.
By having KPIs that are analyzed and reviewed on a regular basis, after a few weeks and months you will be able to tell if you are on track to reach your business goals. If you are not seeing the results you expected, it’s time to explore why. You can adapt and modify your plan to fit the reality of the market, but if it is clearly not working you must be prepared to admit this. If a year-long plan is not working at the 6 months point, sticking to it and ignoring all the warning signs will not make success any more likely.
Celebrate All Successes
The most important step when it comes to setting achievable business goals is making the commitment to celebrate all success along the way. Big objectives take a great deal of time to complete, and employees will be working hard every day to make it a reality. Employees who feel acknowledged, supported and recognized will feel better and be more committed to the organization. When a goal is reached, a project is completed or a problem is solved, take the time to recognize this achievement and celebrate all the hard work that made it a reality.
Growth and success are the goals of all businesses. These big goals require clear plans and steps in order to become a reality. Knowing how to set achievable business goals in 2023 will put your business on a path to success this year and beyond.
