The SMART goal acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It’s a framework that ensures every objective you set is beneficial for your business. The checklist goes like this:
- Specific: Your goal should be clear and easily understood.
- Measurable: Define metrics to track success.
- Achievable: Set realistic goals that can be met within the timeframe.
- Relevant: Ensure the goal aligns with your business objectives.
- Time-bound: Set a deadline for achieving the goal.
SMART goals help your business design clearer, more realistic objectives.
Every business sets goals — whether it’s building brand awareness, driving profit, or converting more customers. However, vague goals can confuse your team and reduce the chances of success. Irrelevant or unrealistic goals can also hinder growth.
To drive success, your goals need clarity, focus, and motivation. That’s where SMART goals come in.
Broad goals like “making more sales this year” are often too vague, leading to different interpretations of success. SMART objectives ensure everyone is aligned, goals are realistic and time-bound, and progress can be effectively tracked.
What are the benefits of SMART goals?
To reiterate why achievable SMART goals are important, let’s break down four key benefits.
- Increased motivation and focus: SMART goals are specific and measurable, meaning they give you clarity. They show you exactly what you need to do when it comes to achieving your goal within a given timeframe.
- Improved productivity and efficiency: As SMART goals provide clarity, they’re a great motivator. They will help you and your team work toward specific benchmarks more efficiently.
- Enhanced decision-making: SMART goals lay out a roadmap for achieving your objective. This makes it easier to prioritise tasks and make more informed decisions. They can also help with resource management.
- Greater accountability and responsibility: Rather than aimlessly wandering towards a broad goal, SMART goals set out metrics and a timeframe, creating a sense of urgency and accountability.
In short, SMART goals help you set better objectives that increase the likelihood of achieving success.
SMART goal examples
To help put the framework into perspective, let’s consider three examples of SMART goals in different contexts: professional, personal, and academic.
Professional SMART goal example
Let’s go back to ‘making more sales in the coming year.’ When we use the SMART criteria to refine this goal, we might end up with business goals like this:
“Our goal is to increase sales by 25% in the next 12 months. To do this, our sales and digital marketing team will create 5 personalised marketing campaigns, optimise our website’s product pages, host monthly webinars, and launch a social media strategy to engage customers and drive them down our sales funnel. This will ultimately help our business boost revenue.”
Personal SMART goal example
Next, let’s get personal. A common personal goal is to ‘lose weight’. This can be unhelpful and overwhelming for a lot of people. How much weight do you need to lose? How do you do it? How long for? Let’s put this goal into the SMART framework.
“I want to lose 2 lbs per week for the next 6 months by eating in a calorie deficit of 500 calories and jogging for 30 minutes three times a week. By the end of the 6 months, I’ll lose 50 lbs and be able to fit into those jeans from five years ago.”
Academic SMART goal example
SMART goals are also excellent for academia. Here’s what happens if we take a general goal like ‘improving grades’ and use the framework to refine it.
“I want to improve my overall GPA from 4.5 to 5.5 by the end of the next term. To achieve this, I’ll devote 1.5 hours a day to studying and attend a weekly tutoring session for challenging subjects.”
A step-by-step guide to writing SMART goals
You now know why SMART goals are beneficial and understand how they look in practice. Next, let’s break down how to create one.
Along the way, we’ll also take an example goal and SMART-ify it to guide you through the process.
1. Identify your broad goals
First, you need to identify your overarching goals. Perhaps you may want to build brand awareness or grow customer loyalty. Maybe you’d like to achieve a personal sales goal or spend more time working on your doctorate.
Whatever your broad goal, once you have an idea of what it is, move to the next step.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
Peter recently launched a new website for his popular dessert brand. He is starting to grow his online presence but isn’t happy with the results — progress is slow. He gathers his tech team together in a meeting and says:
“Listen up. I want to improve my new website’s traffic. Let’s get to it.”
Peter’s team quickly points out that this goal is vague and unclear, meaning it’ll be difficult to achieve. Peter acknowledges this and heads back to the drawing board. He decides to put the goal through the SMART framework.
2. Make your goals specific
To be successful, you need to ensure your goal is specific so it’s clear and actionable. We recommend going for a classic who, what, and why approach.
- What do you want to achieve?
- Who will be responsible for achieving this goal?
- How will you achieve this specific goal? What steps do you need to take?
These questions will make your objective more specific, providing clarity that will help you and your team work towards achieving it.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
Peter’s first problem is that his goal is too vague. He decides to make it more specific so it’s easier to understand what he wants to achieve. Here’s what he comes up with:
“I want to increase the number of local customers that visit my product pages through blogs, local SEO, and social media posts.”
We now have a who (local customers), a what (increasing visits), and a how (blogs, local SEO, and social media posts).
2. Make your goals measurable
Next, make your goals quantifiable so you can track progress over time.
For instance, reducing the customer churn rate is a great goal. But by how much do you want to increase it? 10%? 25%? 100%?
Without these key performance indicators (KPIs), your team will not know what they’re aiming for. Setting a quantifiable metric will ensure that everyone is on the same page with your goal.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
Peter’s new goal is more specific, but measuring success is still difficult. Next, he needs to make it measurable. He lands on:
“I want to increase the number of local customers that visit my product pages by 300% through blogs, local SEO, and social media posts.”
Now, Peter’s team has a benchmark to achieve, which will clarify what success looks like.
3. Make your goals achievable
At this stage, it’s time to take a long, hard look at your goal and decide if it’s realistic. Can you actually achieve it with your available resources, or are your ambitious goals setting you up for disappointment? Make sure your goal is something that you and your team believe you can reasonably achieve.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
After performing some domain research, Peter found that most of his direct competitors took years to increase their traffic by 300%. He decides that his goal is a bit far-fetched. He refines his objective again:
“I want to increase the number of local customers that visit my product pages by 50% through blogs, local SEO, and social media posts.”
4. Make your goals relevant
We’ve already considered the what, who and how. Now, think about the why. What are the benefits of this goal? How will it help you, your career, or your business? Expressing why your goal is so important will help with accountability and improve employee performance.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
To make his attainable goal relevant, Peter needs to hone in on the why of his goal. He understands that getting his team on board means clearly stating the purpose of achieving this objective and why it will benefit his business.
With that in mind, he refines his goal once again:
“I want to increase the number of local customers that visit my product pages by 50% through blogs, local SEO, and social media posts so that we can increase online cupcake orders by 30% and foster customer loyalty in the local area.”
5. Make your goals time-bound
Lastly, there’s the ‘when’. To track progress and understand whether you’re hitting your targets, you need to set a time limit for you and your team to reach the relevant goal. You can also create individual milestones and create an action plan for different parts of your project using a Gantt chart.
Example: Peter’s dessert store.
Peter’s goal is excellent, but he still needs to set a timeframe. After some more research, he lands on his final objective.
“I want to increase the number of local customers that visit my product pages by 50% within 12 months through blogs, local SEO, and social media posts so that we can increase online cupcake orders by 30% and foster customer loyalty in the local area.“
You can see how, by putting an objective through each of the stages individually, you can begin to refine an achievable, relevant, and time-bound goal to make an actionable objective for your team.
Are there any alternatives to the smart goals system?
While the SMART framework is a great choice for developing leadership skills for both personal and professional development, it isn’t the only way to set goals and objectives that drive success. The V2MOM framework, in particular, can be a highly effective alternative.
V2MOM is a strategic goal-setting framework. It stands for Vision, Value, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. Let’s break that down:
- Vision: What do you want to achieve with your goal?
- Values: Why is this goal important?
- Methods: How will you achieve this goal?
- Objectives: What is preventing you from success?
- Measures: How will you know when you’ve achieved success?
As with the SMART framework, V2MOM is an excellent way to align your team on a specific objective. We particularly like that this framework ties in with a business’s broader vision and values.
However, this also means the framework can be slightly more complex. Without a specific time-bound focus, simple one-time objectives can be less practical. Choose the one that appeals to you and adapt it to suit your own business needs.
Best practices for creating effective SMART goals
Here are some of the best practices you should keep in mind as you set SMART goals.
1. Involve others in the goal-setting process
When you set your goals, it’s worth getting input from others — especially when setting time frames and making the goal achievable. Your frontline sales and marketing teams will often have more insights into what’s a realistic goal.
In addition, involving others in your goals creates accountability, which can help to motivate your team to commit themselves to the objective.
2. Break down large goals into smaller, manageable goals
If you have a complex team goal, break it down into smaller tasks and tactics. For instance, if your goal specifies improving organic traffic with social media content, you’ll want to break that down further to avoid vagueness.
What types of social media content will you post? When and where will you upload it? Who needs to be involved? The more specific you can be with your tactics, the more your team will understand their roles and responsibilities. This will give them a strategic plan that they can follow to achieve the objective.
3. Celebrate your accomplishments
As you work towards your SMART goalsetting, celebrate the big and small wins. If you achieve a milestone in the timeframe, reward your team. If you’re ahead of schedule, let them know.
Reaching an achievable goal is all about motivation. The more you celebrate your success, the more energy you’ll have to keep pushing forward.
Summing up
When you set SMART goals, you can define a clear objective and take action steps to achieve it. If you’re running a business, they’re one of the most effective ways to align your team on a core objective. In your personal life, they can help you hold yourself accountable and stay motivated.
Need help with project planning? Salesforce Service Cloud, paired with powerful Gantt chart integrations, lets you manage tasks and timelines efficiently — keeping your team in sync and projects on track.
