Business goals part 1
According to asana.com, business goals are a predetermined target that a business or individual plans to achieve in a set period of time.
Companies are required to establish goals. Setting clear business goals gives direction to a company and defines clearly what success is for the company. Success is relative to different companies, even industries. Goals sets the foundation for each activity in a business organisation.
Business goals include financial, marketing, operational and human resources goal
- Financial goal: These include:
Achievement of Profitability: profitability ensures you achieve long-term success, so the business can make progress towards achieving the overall company mission.
Achievement of revenue: This helps help you balance your income with your costs in order to stay in business. You might set business objectives to achieve a certain annual revenue goal, or to increase revenue by a certain percentage over a period of time.
Minimizing costs: Costs refer to how much money you’re spending on your business. Reducing costs can help you increase revenue and achieve profitability. Business objectives related to cost can help you control production or operations cost to improve your business’s financial performance.
Maintaining positive cash flow: Cash flow refers to the money moving into and out of your business. Cash flow can be positive—when you’re making more than you’re spending—or negative—when you’re spending more than you’re making. Similar to profitability, a cash flow-oriented business objective can help set you up for long term financial success.
2. Marketing goal:
Create a great competitive position: A big element of your business strategy is thinking about how your product or service compares to others in the same market. By setting a business objective focused on competitive positioning, you can ensure your product or service reaches parity with what’s expected in the market, or use competitive positioning to outdo your competitors in a key area.
Increase the market share: This business objective refers to how much market share your company’s product or service takes up. The larger the market share, the more reach your business has. Setting this type of business objective is helpful if you’re trying to grow your presence in the market. You can do this through social media initiatives, concerted advertising campaigns, or brand tracking and performance.
Customer satisfaction: In order to succeed as a business, you need happy customers. Focusing on a customer satisfaction-based business objective can help you better serve your customers. Depending on the business objective, this might focus on a customer advocacy program, a better help desk, or something similarly customer-facing.
Brand awareness: Your brand is what makes your organization stand out from the crowd. Brand awareness is an important way to understand how your customers think of your brand, and how aware they are of your distinct brand vs. your competitors. Understanding—and increasing—brand awareness is a key part of your long-term marketing strategy.
Sales: You’ll often find business objectives related to improving or refining the sales cycle. This could include anything from reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC), developing better lead tracking, increasing cross-selling, or something else.
The finance and marketing goals of businesses has been discussed above, we will discuss the human resource and operational goal in part 2.