What are Goals?
Goals are
specific targets that a company expects or hopes to achieve over a specified time frame. Note that your goals must be in line with your vision, so it is important to have a vision first before you can begin thinking about goals. If you don't have a vision yet, you can read this blog
here to learn how to do that.
As we were saying, your goals should bring you closer to your vision.
Let's have a simple case study to demonstrate the relationship between your vision and your goal:
Introducing TJ Logistics...
TJ Logistics is a bike courier service company based in Lagos, Nigeria. They have a vision to be the most reliable, cost-effective, same-day delivery logistics company in Lagos and beyond.
As part of their vision, they plan to improve their operations in order to become more reliable to customers. More reliability means increased customer patronage, which in turn means an increase in revenue. Likewise, an increase in revenue means that they can continue to be more reliable, which begins the whole cycle all over again.
Their plan to improve their operations is what led to their decision to set a financial goal to achieve N7 million in revenue. They broke this down between their two customer types that they cater to - the key accounts and pay-per-delivery customers, with key accounts contributing 4.5 million, and pay per delivery contributing 2.5 million.
Thus, we can see that TJ Logistics has a clearly defined goal that speaks to their vision to be most reliable.
Now, if you break your goals down on a granular level, you get the strategies and the tactics that would help you achieve your goals. So you see, that strategy and tactics are simply core activities, and it is those activities that processes are developed on.
Strategies and Tactics
Strategies and tactics are
clear-cut pathways for you to reach your goals. They are the "what" you need to do to achieve your goal (
however, keep in mind that the "how" or the "step-by-step", are the processes that need to be developed). In other words, tactics are
the daily activities/tasks that deliver on your strategies, which in turn deliver on your goals. Strategies and tactics also cut across every possible avenue towards reaching your goals.
For example, if you have a goal to make 1 million in your business, then your strategies should cover every angle that would help you make that 1 million. Typically, you would be looking at how you can set strategies around your
business location, a
singular outlet,
a product(s) or service(s), or
customer types. We call these four areas,
Sales Segments.Back to our case study. Remember, TJ Logistics' financial goal was to achieve 4.5 million with key accounts, and achieve 2.5 million with pay per delivery in revenue per quarter.
Taking the pay-per-delivery alone, they deduced that their key strategy would be to determine how many deliveries will be required of them to attain their revenue goal quarterly. After calculations, they arrived at fulfilling 1,667 deliveries per quarter.
That's the strategy.Knowing this, it helped to break this further into tactical day-to-day activities (tactics). They came up with a few:
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Develop retention tactics - This is based on the premise that it's easier to get someone who has requested their services before to utilise their service again. And so, it is crucial for TJ Logistics to develop or strengthen a relationship to retain their existing customers for repeated business.
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Develop a referral program - A referral program is a good way to get more customers by getting existing customers who have enjoyed their delivery services to refer new customers to them and be rewarded.
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Roll out sponsored ads on a monthly basis - The use of sponsored ads to drive in potential leads that they can covert to new customers.
Now that you understand goals, strategies, and tactics, why don't you take a swing at setting your own goal?
