Strategic goals are a critical part of your strategic plan. In order to achieve your long-term goals, you need a clear sense of where you want to go—and an easy way to share those goals with your team. In this article, we take a look at the difference between strategic goals and other goal setting methodologies, then offer 65 example metrics and strategic goals you can use to get started.
Goal-setting is a critical part of your business strategy. You want to make sure your team is cohesively moving in the right direction—and goals are a great way to do that.
But in order for goals to be effective, they need to be measurable. The important thing isn’t just to create goals, but to create strategic goals that help you accomplish your overall company mission.
In this article, we’ll walk you through when to set strategic goals—vs. other types of goals—and how to do so.
A strategic goal is the objective you want to achieve at the end of your three to five year strategic plan. These goals are broader than your yearly objectives, but shorter than long-term goals like BHAGs and vision statements.
Because strategic goals are closely connected to strategic planning, they tend to be three to five year goals. But the most important part of setting a strategic goal is to identify where you want to go, and what goals you need to achieve to get there.
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There are a lot of different strategy and goal setting frameworks you can use. Here’s how strategic goals differ from other types of goals.
Strategic planning is the process of defining the direction your company wants to go in the next three to five years. A strategic plan includes longer term goals, strategic goals, and shorter-term goals that describe how you’ll achieve your strategic goals. The strategic planning process is typically run by decision-makers and stakeholders.
Part of defining your strategic plan is coming up with strategic goals. Your strategic plan should also include customer insights, a SWOT analysis, your company values, your organization’s competitive advantages, specific goals on a quarterly or yearly timeline, and a high-level project roadmap if you have one.
Read: New to strategic planning? Start here.Strategic management is the organization and execution of business resources in order to achieve your company goals. These usually help you implement your overall organizational strategy.
Strategic goals, on the other hand, are generally three to five year objectives that tie closely to your strategic plan.
Think of strategic goals as the specific things you want to achieve in three to five years. These strategic goals are part of your strategic plan, which provides more context and direction for why your company wants to move in that direction. Your strategic plan fuels your strategic management process, which is how you’ll actually achieve those goals.
Read: New to strategic management? Start here.The difference between strategic goals and strategic objectives is somewhat subjective. In general, objectives tend to be more specific than goals—some people argue that objectives are always quantitative, while goals can be either qualitative or quantitative.
Whether you use the terminology strategic goals vs. objectives, it’s critical to make sure your goals are specific, measurable, and actionable.
Read: Write better SMART goals with these tips and examplesBig Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) are long-term goals that typically take between 10 and 25 years to complete. These are industry-defining goals, like Microsoft’s famous goal to put "a computer on every desk and in every home."
Not every organization has—or needs—BHAGs. Depending on your business strategy, a vision statement might be enough. Whether or not you set BHAGs, strategic goals are shorter-term goals that help you accomplish these bigger, ambitious goals.
Read: How to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) to do the impossibleOKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results, is a goal setting methodology developed by Andy Grove that follows a simple but flexible framework:
I will [objective] as measured by [key result].
OKRs can span multiple years, but most commonly these are one to two year objectives that help your company accomplish your larger strategic plan. In a typical OKR structure, your OKRs feed into your broader strategic goals.
Read: How to set OKRsKPIs, or key performance indicators, are qualitative measures of how you’re progressing. Like OKRs, KPIs tend to be shorter in time frame than strategic goals. This is partially due to the fact that KPIs are nearly always quantitative. Achieving several long-term KPIs helps you achieve your broader three to five year strategic goals.
Read: What is a key performance indicator (KPI)?Business goals are predetermined targets that organizations plan to achieve in a specific amount of time. Technically, strategic goals—along with BHAGs, OKRs, and KPIs—are a type of business goal.
Read: OKR vs. KPI: Which goal-setting framework is better?If you’ve never written a strategic goal before, it’s helpful to check out common goals. Though your strategic goals are unique to your strategic plan, use these examples as templates to create measurable, actionable goals with clear success metrics.
Set strategic goals that are:
Simply phrased
Measurable
Easy to track
Specific
Time-bound
For more tips on what constitutes a good goal, read our article on how to write SMART goals.
Keep in mind that these goals should be achievable in three to five years. For shorter goals, consider setting OKRs or KPIs instead. For longer goals, check out vision statements and BHAGs.
Free company objectives templateFinancial strategic goals typically center around a few different important financial metrics, including:
1. Increasing revenue
2. Attaining or maintaining profitability
3. Growing shareholder value
4. Diversifying your revenue streams
5. Becoming a financially sustainable company
6. Reducing production costs
7. Increasing profit margin
8. Setting revenue targets for new products
9. Reducing department-specific budgets
10. Influencing the percentage of local vs. international sales
These examples do not represent Asana’s goals, and are merely included here for educational purposes.
11. Increase total revenue by $10M in the next three years.
12. Reduce cost by 12% to become a profitable company by 2024.
13. Grow a specific product’s revenue to 30% of overall business revenue within the next five years.
14. Reduce marketing budget by 10% in the next three years.
15. Update our sales profile so 50% of our sales are international by 2026.
Strategic goals that focus on your customers can help you break into a new market or further develop a trustworthy brand. These metrics can include:
16. Reducing customer churn
17. Measurably increasing customer satisfaction
18. Increasing the number of new customers
19. Increasing customer retention
20. Offering great customer value
21. Boosting customer outreach
22. Increasing customer conversion rates
23. Breaking into new customer segments
24. Increasing the number of returning customers
25. Decreasing the percentage of returned products
These examples do not represent Asana’s goals, and are merely included here for educational purposes.
26. Increase net promoter score (NPS) by three points in the next year, and 10 points in the next five years.
27. Capture 23% market share by 2025.
28. Provide the best customer experience in the market—measured based on reaction time, customer sentiment, and brand tracking.
29. Increase customer retention by 3% every year.
30. Reduce the percentage of returned products to 2% by 2023.
On an organizational level, growth refers to how your company expands and develops. Growth metrics include:
31. Increasing market share
32. Breaking into new markets
33. Developing new products, features, or services
34. Increasing operational reliability and/or compliance
35. Increasing company velocity
36. Opening new locations
37. Building your brand on social media
38. Increasing website traffic
39. Acquiring a new company
These examples do not represent Asana’s goals, and are merely included here for educational purposes.
40. Open 12 new locations within the next four years.
41. Increase market share to 8% by 2026.
42. Reach 5M followers on social media (including Instagram and Twitter).
43. Increase web traffic to 300K visitors per year by 2024.
44. Start three new product streams by 2027.
Read: 16 social media metrics you should be trackingYou can also set strategic goals focusing on your internal company goals. Example employee-centric metrics can include:
45. Increasing employee retention
46. Adding new team members
47. Building a healthy organizational culture
48. Implementing a performance review cycle
49. Standardizing titles and/or levels
50. Improving cross-functional productivity
51. Spinning up a project management office (PMO) to standardize processes
52. Attracting the best talent
53. Building high-performing teams
54. Investing in personal and professional development
55. Reducing burnout and impostor syndrome
56. Building employee-focused training programs
57. Reducing employee turnover
58. Improving workplace safety
59. Building better facilities management
These examples do not represent Asana’s goals, and are merely included here for educational purposes.
60. Add 20 new team members within the next four years.
61. Increase overall engagement scores by 7% based on yearly surveys.
62. Increase new hire referrals to 5,000 team members per year by 2026.
63. Develop and circulate new company values by 2023.
64. Implement a biannual performance review cycle within the next three years.
65. Attain maximum workplace safety score rating within the next three years.
Learn how Asana's Head of Organizational Strategy helps teams set, track, and achieve their goals.
Once you develop your goals, you need a clear way to track, measure, and communicate those goals. Too often, teams set great goals and then don’t know how to track those goals over time.
Instead of letting your goals collect dust in a slide deck or spreadsheet somewhere, use goal tracking technology to connect your strategic goals to your team’s daily work. With Asana, you can track long-term goals, as well as the shorter-term objectives that feed into those goals.
Free company objectives template