Top 7 Critical Goal Categories To Ensure Ongoing Execution Of Your Strategic Plan
Posted by admin on April 17th, 2008 filed in Uncategorized
Strategic planning is putting together the necessary thoughts and actions to achieve business results through a systematic goal setting process. Critical goal categories are those big goal holding areas much like a grocery store’s numerous departments. For without all those departments including bakery, meat, product, dairy, frozen, seafood, bank, etc., the mission could not be achieved in today’s marketplace. The purpose of critical goals categories is to answer this simple question: Is this both necessary and sufficient to achieve the current mission statement?
Business coaches to business consultant recommend anywhere from 5 to 9 critical goal categories. After years of working with small business clients to multi-billion dollars organizations, I believe that the following are the top 7 critical goal categories:
Marketing
From the creation of a marketing plan to specific marketing goals, marketing is the primary critical goal category. Unless potential clients know about your business, how can you get sales?
Sales
Getting sales is almost the bottom line. Sales come from the marketing efforts. Sales goals must be aligned to marketing goals.
Profitability
If you company is not profitable, you won’t be in business very long. Making sure that the bottom line stays black and not read is absolutely essential.
People Development
Your people are your human capital. Without focused and committed employees, how can you effectively execute any actions with your business less alone your strategic plan?
Organizational Structure
Is your company easy to do business with? The answer to this question speaks more about how your business is structured. For example, poor policies lead to poor customers both internally and externally. Poor customers are bad for business. This critical goal category may also include management, customer service and expansion goals.
Communications
The inability to communicate the course of action as well as business results is one of the most common problems when organizations seek to reach that next level or even maintain the current one. If a business coach was to ask all of your employees or just a balanced sampling to answer the following question: What are the top 3 goals for this business?, would all responses be the same for each goal or a multitude of responses? HINT: Numerous responses indicate a communication problem.
Quality
How good are you at doing what you do? Quality is necessary and also sufficient to achieving the mission statement.
If your strategic plan includes these 7 critical goal categories, then executing your strategic plan should be much easier.
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Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S. is a speaker and Indianapolis business coach & Chicago business coach who has written hundreds of articles with a focus on improving individual and organizational performance through excellence in leadership to executable strategic plans.
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