It’s the New Year, and while many of us would like to start anew, the reality is that we’re still dealing with some 2022 baggage.

Talks of a recession have not quieted down, so how you start this year off can have a lasting impact on your business’s sustainability. In order to drive top performance and keep your business looking to the long term, it’s important for you and your team to be goal driven. This is why, as a business owner or manager, you should define goals to help your team understand what you want to accomplish this year.

Team goals require the collective participation of every team member. Setting them can be challenging, but it is necessary for you and your team to do your best work and to ensure that you thrive this year, despite all the economic ups and downs being thrown your way. By planning and executing measurable goals, you can better assess your team’s progress, accountability, and performance. This will benefit you, the team, and the business at large.

In this article, we’ll go over some tips for setting measurable goals, simplifying goal setting, and giving your team a head start on increasing marketing and sales in 2023.

1. Specify What You Want to Achieve

As the owner of your small business, you need to identify the purpose of setting a goal and what you hope to achieve by doing so. You can begin by identifying areas where the business is falling behind and setting goals to help close those gaps. Your goals will be more likely to be met if they are broken down into daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly targets. Ensure that all team members understand the goals and their roles in achieving them.

2. Set Smart Goals

Get together with your team to establish the goals you’ll want to work toward. Also, document the key results you expect to obtain as a way to assess success and determine whether or not the goal was met.

When setting these goals, make sure they’re SMART. A smart goal is an acronym written within the framework below:

Specific: It should be clear and easy to understand what you and your team want to accomplish.

Measurable: A way to determine whether or not the goal was met should exist.

Attainable: It should be possible to accomplish it.

Relevant: It should be a goal that is essential to the entire team and the business at large.

Time-bound: There should be a time frame for successful delivery.

Assume you and your team currently have a weekly customer service and support satisfaction rate of 75%, and you want to increase that to 80% or higher within two months. You can cross-check this goal with the smart framework to ensure you’re on track:

S: The goal has a clear and specific percentage increase outlined.

M: The goal includes a weekly measurement.

A: The goal is to go from a 75% to an 80% satisfaction rate in two months, which is attainable.

R: If customers are satisfied, they will be loyal to the brand, making the goal relevant to the business.

T: The timeframe for achieving this goal is two months.

3. Establish Deadlines and Commit

This step aligns with your “SMART” goals, but make sure you assign deadlines to these initiatives. Deadlines assist in holding the team accountable, and a team that does not have a deadline to meet might be slow in completing tasks. What’s worse, they could become discouraged, disengaged, and neglect the goal altogether.

Deadlines help you succeed; however, when it comes to deadlines, don’t be afraid to fail. Your team may fall short of the metrics by the project’s end date, but this only serves to highlight where they need to improve or if the goal necessitates more time. Failing to meet deadlines provides a clear indication of where and how to improve the goal itself in order to achieve greater success.

5. Set Individual Goals

As well as setting team goals, individual goals can be helpful too. Setting individual goals helps each team member understand their role in achieving the team goal. It keeps each individual engaged and gives them room to grow.

Suppose the team’s goal is to reduce customer attrition by 15% in the first quarter of the year. To ensure that each team member is actively participating in the achievement of this goal, assign specific tasks to each of them. You can also ask each team member to come up with a task idea that is in line with the team’s goals.

Setting measurable goals allows your team to assess whether their efforts were successful and what impact they had on sales, performance, or engagement.

Examples of SMART Team Goals

Now that we understand how to set team goals and how essential they are to your business let’s look at some specific examples to give you inspiration.

Rebrand Your Business by X Date

This is a process that involves changing the business’s corporate image in order to establish a new identity in the minds of customers. To accomplish this, you will set goals for creating a new brand identity.

You could consider giving different team members different tasks. For example, one person is in charge of updating email templates, and another ensures that the website homepage displays the new branding. Make sure that you all agree on a date for all marketing materials to be fully updated with the updated brand design.

Boost Website Traffic by X%

As a business seeking to grow, it is critical to set goals for increasing website interaction, and you will need to come up with some specific strategies that can assist you in accomplishing this feat. Here are some ideas:

• Start a blog in order to deliver more valued content to prospective clients.
• Ensure that all marketing channels, such as email and social, link back to your website.
• Improve your search engine ranking by increasing your SEO efforts.
• Expand your paid advertising campaigns.

Improve Email Marketing Success

For this goal, it will be important to measure success using various metrics:

• CTAs conversion rate. Make sure your CTA copy is compelling and that the offer is tailored toward the needs of the people it’s being offered to.
• Open rate. Make sure your email subject line grabs the attention of your subscribers and hints at what’s inside the email.
• Click-through rate. Make your emails personalized and offer content that is educational and informative so that people will want to click on it and engage.
• Subscriber rate. Make sure you include email sign-up forms on your website in high-traffic places, like your homepage, your blog, or on landing pages.
• Unsubscribe rate. When your subscribers are receiving emails they find helpful, informative, and educational, they’ll be less inclined to unsubscribe or mark you as spam.

Kick-off 2023 right by outlining specific goals you want your business to achieve this year. Make sure they’re attainable and that they push you and your team forward so you can make this year especially productive and positive for your brand.