56 Strategic Objective Examples

For Your Company To Copy

Financial Objectives
Financial objectives are typically written as financial goals. When selecting
and creating your financial objectives, consider what you’re trying to
accomplish financially within the time span of your strategic plan.

1. Grow shareholder value: The top goal of your organization may be

to increase the value of your organization for your shareholders,
stakeholders, or owners. Value can be defined in many ways, so this
would need to be clearly defined.
2. Grow earnings per share: This objective implies your organization
is trying to increase its earnings or profits. For publicly traded
companies, a common way to look at this is through “earnings per
share.” This can be measured quarterly and/or annually.
3. Increase revenue: Revenue represents growth in your organization,
so increasing revenue is a sign of company health. You can make
this more specific by defining revenue from a key area in your
organization.
4. Manage cost: On the other side of revenue is the costs or expenses
in your business. As you grow (or shrink) you need to carefully
manage cost—so this may be an important objective for you.
5. Maintain appropriate financial leverage: Many organizations use
debt—another word for financial leverage—as a key financial tool.
There may be an optimal amount of debt you’d like to stay within.
6. Ensure favorable bond ratings: For some organizations, bond
ratings are a sign of healthy finances. This is a regularly occurring
objective for a public sector scorecard.
7. Balance the budget: A balanced budget reflects the discipline of
good planning, budgeting, and management. It is also one that is
 typically seen in the public sector—or within divisions or departments
of other organizations.
8. Ensure financial sustainability: If your organization is in growth
mode or has an uncertain economic environment, you need to be
sure you remain financially stable. Sometimes this means seeking
outside sources of revenue or managing costs that are appropriate to
your operations.
9. Maintain profitability: This is a solid top-level objective that shows
balance between revenue and expenses. If your organization is
investing in order to grow, you may look to an objective like this to
govern how much you are able to invest.
10. Diversify and grow revenue streams: Some organizations
receive revenue from multiple sources or products and services.
They set an objective to grow revenue in different areas to ensure
that the organization is stable and not subject to risk associated with
only one revenue stream.

Customer Objectives
Customer objectives are typically written like customer goals. Sometimes
they are written in the form of a phrase or a statement that a customer
would say when talking about your product or service.

11. Best value for the cost: This means that your customers
know they are not purchasing the most expensive product or service
—or even the highest quality—but that they are getting the best deal.
This may mean your customers are paying less than average and
getting an average or above-average product.
12. Broad product offering: This objective works if your strategy
is to be able to offer the customer the best product in its class,
regardless of price. In the hotel industry, for example, this could
reflect the strategy of the Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton.
13. Reliable products/services: If your organization takes pride in
the reliability of your product or service, this objective—which reflects
that you are targeting customers that also value this reliability—may
be right for you. This could indicate the on-time reliability of an airline
or the dependable reliability of a printer that generates high-quality
output.
14. Cross-sell more products: Some organizations—like banks
or office product companies—focus on selling more products to
 the same customers. This strategy acknowledges that you already
have the customer but can make money by selling them more.
15. Increase share of market: This customer strategy focuses on
selling to more customers, thus increasing the market share. For
example, if your organization is a landscape company, you are likely
trying to reach more households—or if your organization is a hospital,
you likely want more of the local population to use your services.
16. Increase share of wallet: This customer strategy focuses on
gaining more purchases from the same customers. If you sell
fertilizer, for example, you want each customer to purchase a larger
percentage of their fertilizer spend with your organization rather than
with your competitors.
17. Partner with customers to provide solutions: This strategy
reflects customer intimacy. As part of this strategy, you may deliver
service-oriented solutions or have customers participate in research
and development with your organization. Partnering comes at a cost
but tends to foster more customer loyalty across your organization.
18. Best service: This strategy indicates you want your customers
to consider your organization easy to deal with. Customers may
choose to work with you even if you have a product similar to your
competitors—simply because your service is better.
19. Understands my needs: This objective also reflects a
customer intimacy strategy. The customer feels like you understand
their needs, so they choose your organization’s products and
services because they are targeted for their specific problem or
situation.

Internal Objectives
The internal perspective is typically focused on processes that your
organization must excel at. According to Michael Treacy and Fred
Wiersema—who have written extensively on the topic—these processes
can be divided into three areas: innovation, customer intimacy, and
operational excellence.

Innovation

20. Most innovative products/services: This objective is for

organizations that pride themselves on constant and cutting-edge
innovation. You would first need to define what you mean by
“innovation” and how you’re innovating in each particular area.
 21. Differentiate the product: Your organization might use this
objective if you are in an environment where the customer cannot tell
the difference between your organization and another organization’s
product. You are asking your organization to either develop new
services around the product or new differentiating features of the
product or service.
22. Invest a certain amount in innovation: Sometimes
organizations use an objective like this to drive investment in
research and development or other innovative activities. This
objective may be used in a strategy when you are signaling a shift in
investments in the innovation category.
23. Grow percentage of sales from new products: Similar to
investing in innovation, this objective focuses on the outcome your
organization is hoping to achieve. It forces you to constantly
innovate, even on your most successful products.
24. Improve or focus research and development (R&D): This
objective focuses on specific innovation. If you are an organization
with multiple product lines, you might want to focus your innovation
on one product line over another; calling out the specific direction can
be quite helpful in your objective.
25. Acquire new customers from innovative offerings: This
objective focuses on the reasonyou put focus on innovation. For
example, you may be innovating in order to enter a new market or
attract customers you might not be able to reach with your current
offerings.

Customer Service

26. Great customer service: Defining what great customer

service means in your organization is a way to set the standard and
communicate internally. For example, hone in on whether you want
to provide one-touch resolution or proactive support, or whether
you’re focused on phone support or on-site support.
27. Improve customer service: When your organization has a
problem with good customer service, you may want an objective to
focus on improvement therein. The problem your company has is
likely in a specific area, so this objective should be focused on that
particular call center or the reactive support that you provide.
28. Invest in customer management: This objective is typically
used when your strategy is to focus more on your customer
management processes than you have in the past.
 29. Partner with customers to design solutions: Some
organizations focus on forming close partnerships with their clients. If
your business is an architectural firm or a custom software developer
company, this could be a good objective to ensure you are working
with your customers to design critical solutions.
30. Improve customer satisfaction: If customer satisfaction is
critical in your company, this may be a good objective to hone in on.
Because it’s generic, the definition for your organization needs to be
more focused around particular areas of satisfaction you place focus
on.
31. Improve customer retention: If your organization wants to
focus on retaining current customers, this objective may work for you.
You’d likely want to set measures and projects around certain
activities to help retain customers.
32. Develop and use a customer database: This is a specific
objective focused on implementing a large project like a customer
relationship management (CRM) system, that could take years to
implement.

Operational Excellence

33. Reduce cost by a certain amount annually: This objective

focuses on reducing costs—typically costs within a product or service
that is an offering (to make that particular product or service more
effective). It could also focus on reducing overhead costs across your
organization.
34. Reduce waste by a certain amount: If your organization uses
a lot of raw materials, a typical objective is to reduce waste from that
process. This usually results in significant cost savings.
35. Invest in Total Quality Management: Total Quality
Management (TQM) reflects a process around quality improvement,
which can mean doing things more efficiently or effectively. This
objective is used in organizations that have implemented (or are
implementing) TQM.
36. Reduce error rates: This objective applies for organizations
that have many repeatable processes. Sometimes this results in Six
Sigma projects, and other times the result is just a focus on defining
processes so that staff can adhere to these processes.
37. Improve and maintain workplace safety: If your organization
uses heavy equipment, chemicals, mechanical parts, or machinery,
 focusing on workplace safety is a good objective. Improving it can
reduce costs and improve job satisfaction.
38. Reduce energy usage per unit of production: If your
organization uses a significant amount of energy, making a goal to
reduce this can be an effective and important strategy.
39. Capitalize on physical facilities: In retail organizations, this
could mean focusing on an appropriate storefront location. Or it could
mean finding underutilized assets and either using them or
selling/leasing them to others for use.
40. Streamline core business processes: Many complex
organizations have very long, drawn-out processes that have
developed over many years. If your organization is looking at these
processes, this could be a key objective for you.
41. Increase reliability of operations: If your organization has
poor reliability, having an objective like this will encourage
management to look at investments and changes in processes that
could increase this reliability.

Regulatory (Optional)

42. Ensure compliance: In a regulated environment, there may be

a lot of rules that you need to follow, even if they don’t seem
strategic. They are often called “strategic objectives” to ensure no
one cuts corners.
43. Increase recycling: This is a self-explanatory objective, but
can sometimes apply to all aspects of waste. Depending on the
organization, there are compliance rules around making this happen.
44. Improve reporting and transparency: Organizations just
entering a regulatory environment or that are trying to change their
business model to meet contract needs may find that they need to
improve or change the way they report in order to do better cost
accounting or just be more clear about their actions.
45. Increase community outreach: For some organizations, it is
important to be seen as part of the community. This is especially true
for organizations that are either selling a necessity in the community
or are creating any kind of negative externality (like pollution).
46. Optimize control framework: If you’re a regulated
organization in an incentive environment, you may need to make
sure you have the proper controls in place to avoid one-off or
systematic cheating.
Learning & Growth (L&G) Objectives
Learning and growth objectives focus on skills, culture, and organizational
capacity.

47. Improve technical and analytical skills: With the increasing

advance of computers and technical innovations affecting all
industries, this is a common objective for some organizations.
Specific technical skills—or a more specific definition—may be
included in the objective name.
48. Improve a certain skill: This is seen in a goal if an
organization is either affected by a new competitive environment or is
trying to address a new market. The particular skill would be specific
to the organization. This is also seen in organizations with an aging
workforce without a clear means to replace highly technical skills.
49. Create a performance-focused culture: This objective can be
used if your organization is trying to change its culture to one that
focuses more on performance management or incentives. This
objective shows up a lot in government and nonprofit organizations.
50. Improve productivity with cross-functional teams: Large
companies see synergies from working together but want to
encourage staff to help with this. For example, a bank with multiple
products or a multinational company with multiple lines of business
may use this objective.
51. Invest in tools to make staff more productive: If your
organization has the right staff, but the staff does not have the right
tools for the job, this may be a critical objective.
52. Improve employee retention: This objective is common in
learning and growth and may focus on skills, culture, pay, and the
overall work environment.
53. Attract and retain the best people: This is a good “beginner
objective” if your organization is just starting to use the Balanced
Scorecard. Ultimately, you’ll need a good plan regarding who you
need to hire, how many hires you need, and what the biggest
challenges with regard to retention are. You can then become more
specific in this objective by addressing those challenges.
54. Build high-performing teams: If teamwork is critical in your
organization, consider this objective. It can be hard to measure, so
you should think about whether you are encouraging
teams or mandating teamwork.
55. Maintain alignment across the organization: Some
companies demand an extensive amount of alignment across the
organization, which can be seen through having common objectives
or common incentive programs where alignment is important.
56. Develop leadership abilities and potential of the team:
Many organizations realize that they are good at hiring people but not
developing them into good leaders. If this is something your company
wants to change, this objective is important.