Do you know what SMART goals are?

One of the fundamental pillars of effective teamwork is goal orientation. When people, teams, and companies work with well-defined objectives, productivity improves exponentially. What is the problem, then? For many companies, defining objectives and monitoring them is not easy and, for this reason, many end up forgetting them. For objectives to be effective, they must be well formulated and meet certain characteristics. In this article, we are going to tell you what SMART objectives are (take into account the commercial plan) and how important they are for your team or project. To define objectives, the SMART methodology is one of the most effective and simple to apply.

Tip: Implement a marketing plan.

When you finish reading this article, you will have all the tools that will allow you to improve the productivity of your company and achieve all your business goals much faster. The most innovative and effective companies in the world work with clear goal orientation. Why couldn't you do it yourself?

What are SMART goals?

SMART objectives are those that meet the following requirements: they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and have a certain time to complete them. This way of defining objectives has proven to be the most effective in the work environment since it avoids uncertainties and offers all the necessary information so that they can be met quickly.

The SMART methodology for defining objectives was devised by George T. Doran, using the word SMART (intelligent) as a mnemonic of the following words:

• S: Specific
• M: Measurable
• A: Attainable
• R: Relevant
• T: Time-related

Next, we are going to look in more depth at each of these characteristics and why they are important to define business objectives.

S: Specific goals.

When we define a SMART objective, it must be specific, that is, that it clearly express what exactly is to be achieved. The more specific a goal is, the easier it will be for your team to understand and the easier it will be to find strategies to achieve it.

A generic objective such as “that our company succeeds” is not the same as a specific one such as “that our company invoices USD350,000 in the last quarter of the year with the launch of a new product”.

To correctly define specific objectives it is necessary to ask yourself some questions. What do we want to achieve? How do we want to achieve it? Or what do we need to achieve it? among others.

M: Measurable goals.

The objectives are measurable when you can establish variables that determine their success, failure, or even their evolution over time. A very common problem in companies is precisely establishing non-measurable objectives such as "improving motivation in the company" or "launching a product that people like"; How are you going to determine if you have met these objectives if you have not established measurable variables?

The objectives given as an example would be complete if we reformulated them as follows: "Improve the company's motivation by 25% according to the data obtained in the weekly survey" and "Launch a product that improves the perception of our users by 15% according to the satisfaction survey."

Formulating measurable goals is vitally important; but for them to be useful, we will have to establish a monitoring system that allows us to check their status. In the last point of this article, we will deal with this topic.

A: Attainable goals.

SMART goals must be achievable. This means that when establishing them we must take into account the effort, time, and other derived costs to determine if they are viable, that is if we are going to be able to achieve them. If we create extremely difficult objectives with the sole objective of putting pressure on our team, we will only achieve the opposite effect: nobody will take them seriously and whoever does will lose motivation by not reaching them.

This does not mean that goals have to be easy to achieve. The ideal is to find the balance in the difficulty so that they pose a challenge, but a viable challenge.

R: Relevant goals

Are the stated objectives relevant to your company? It is important that the objectives are measurable, achievable and that they are limited in time, but above all, they must be relevant. If you set irrelevant goals you may be leading your company in the wrong direction. To set SMART goals it is necessary to spend enough time to discover what our needs are.

Let's give an example: An online fashion store with a blog to attract traffic decides to set the following goal "to get 10,000 visitors to the blog per month in less than 3 months". The objective is well stated, but if your real objective is to sell products in your online store, it may not be relevant at all. This store could devote all its marketing efforts to getting thousands of visitors only to find that none of them buy its products. We could restate this objective to make it relevant or add another one that would give it that relevance, for example: “Achieve a sales volume of 10,000 euros per month from visitors who come from the blog in less than 3 months”.

T: Time-related goals.

Finally, although we have already been commenting on it throughout the article, SMART goals should have a limited date. If we mark an objective but do not give it a temporal context, that objective will no longer make sense. It is not the same to get USD100,000 in sales in 1 month than in 1 year. For our team to be able to contextualize the objectives, we will always have to accompany them with the desired deadline for their fulfillment.

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