Strategic objectives are statements that indicate what is critical

or important in your organizational strategy. In other words,

they’re goals you’re trying to achieve in a certain period of time—
typically 3-5 years. Your objectives link out to your measures and
initiatives.

This list of strategic objective examples should help you think through the various types of
objectives that may work best in your organization. You’ll find all 56 of them categorized below by
perspective and/or theme. Before we dive into the examples, let’s talk about how to choose the
right ones for your organization. Once you have your list of objectives, you may want to consider
choosing a software tool to help you track your progress.

IN THIS ARTICLE

 Choosing The Strategic Objectives That Work Best For You

 Strategic Goals Based On Your Industry
 Strategic Goals Based On Your Strategy
 Strategic Objectives For Municipalities
 Strategic Objectives For Healthcare
 56 Strategic Objective Examples

 Financial Objectives
 Customer Objectives
 Internal Objectives

 Innovation
 Customer Service
 Operational Excellence
 Regulatory (Optional)

 Learning & Growth (L&G) Objectives

Your objectives are only part of your strategy. Use this

step-by-step guide to define your entire strategic plan.

Choosing The Strategic Objectives That Work

Best For You
Here’s some practical advice based on years of experience: Don’t put 56 objectives in your
scorecard—that’s too many. You need to pick and choose. We recommend no more than 15
objectives maximum—you can read more about creating them here. But how do you know which
objectives are right for your organization? It depends on your industry and your strategy.
Use this list of objectives to brainstorm what’s most important for your industry and your specific
strategy, then build a set of objectives that best represent your organization.

Strategic Goals Based On Your Industry

What business are you in? If you’re operating in a fast-growing industry like IT, technical services,
or construction, you should choose objectives that match your growth goals and include
movement in a positive direction. For example, those might include launching a new product or
increasing gross revenue within the next year. If you’re in a slow-growing industry, like sugar
manufacturing or coal-power production, choose company objectives that focus on protecting
your assets and managing expenses, such as reducing administrative costs by a certain percentage.

Strategic Goals Based On Your Strategy

What’s your strategy within your industry? Two similar businesses in the same industry can have
two very different strategies. Your strategy will determine the objectives you set as much as your
industry. (Here are 6 expert tips on strategic planning to consider as you're going through the
process.)

To further explain, here’s a business objectives example based on strategy. Think of two financial
services companies: Goldman Sachs and E*TRADE. Both handle customer finances and investments,
but (generally speaking) Goldman Sachs prioritizes high-touch, personal relationships, while
E*TRADE values high-tech, self-service relationships. As a result, the two organizations
undoubtedly have distinct objectives. From a marketing perspective, Goldman Sachs might focus
on referrals and connections, and E*TRADE on social media and customer service automation. Or
from an HR perspective, Goldman Sachs could set objectives based on retention and client
relationships, and E*TRADE on technical skills and product development.

Your business could have the same mission and purpose as another, but if it takes a different
approach to achieve that purpose, you should have a unique set of strategic objectives.

Strategic Objectives For Municipalities

It’s not uncommon to hear that municipalities or agencies don’t really have a strategy, but that’s a
myth. If you look more closely at individual cities, you’ll see that some are growing quickly...and
some are not. Cities with strong growth have chosen strategic objectives based on their specific
socioeconomic situation. Yes—virtually all municipalities have goals based on balancing the
budget and improving safety. But the most successful cities refine those high-level objectives. Does
the city-planning portion of the budget need more focus than public utilities? Is street crime or
retail crime more of a safety issue? Choosing objectives that function as answers to questions like
these is the most strategic (and successful) approach for cities.

It’s also important to note that a municipality’s strategy must be specific to its economy and
population, and it must be diverse. Goals cannot all be focused on a single source of revenue, such
as tourism or manufacturing. For example, cities along the Gulf Coast have realized that when an
oil spill occurs, a reliance on tourism is detrimental. They need a more resilient economy to build a
healthy community. In short, municipal objectives should be diverse enough to withstand
economic and environmental shifts.

Strategic Objectives For Healthcare

The healthcare industry is constantly changing. However, it’s crucial for healthcare organizations to
continue to deliver effective, reliable care even as certain outside factors—medical practices,
technology, and government regulations—evolve. So, although healthcare organizations can’t
always predict (or control) the future, strategic planning is the best way for them to set a course
for excellence while taking into account possible changes that may occur in the years ahead.

Economic trends, government policies, and technological advancements can help provide context
for healthcare objectives, but each organization needs to consider what it would like to accomplish
strategically. You obviously want great health outcomes, but where do finances fit in? And what
about your staff, skills, and technology? For example, you may have an objective to optimize the
use of real-time data to improve patient care but also have additional goals to develop a
comprehensive employee wellness program or build trust in the community by improving your
communications. Safety, quality, patient satisfaction, people, and finance are all areas of
significance to consider.

56 Strategic Objective Examples

Below is a handy list of the 56 strategic objective examples; there are detailed definitions in each
section.
 While you can certainly use these for inspiration, we don’t recommend simply duplicating them for
your strategy without putting in some thought. Use this list of objectives to brainstorm what’s most
important for your industry and your specific strategy. Then, build a set of objectives that best
represents your organization.

Note: Because the below objectives reflect different strategies, we’ve provided a few ideas on how you
can customize these examples in each definition.

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. Examples of strategic goals for this perspective include:

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.
While all of the above objectives are valuable for maintaining a stable financial base for your
organization, the most obvious strategic levers are:

 Increase revenue
 Manage costs
 Maintain profitability
However, other objectives may be more applicable, particularly if your organization is not driven by
the need to be profitable but simply looking to improve its financial position. Consider your needs
carefully; do you want to become more financially self-sufficient or maybe maximize your
resources? These motivations should drive the financial objectives you choose.

Using a Strategic Plan Dashboard gives organizations

the ability to visualize their progress towards
important goals.

Customer Objectives
When looking at examples of a business’s customer objectives, you’ll see they 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
These three objectives indicate the most basic needs customers want an organization to fulfill:
 Reliable products/services
 Partner with customers to provide solutions
 Best value for cost
However, you have to understand your own customers in order to make them happy. So, to choose
your customer objectives, think about what your customers are looking for specifically and set your
objectives accordingly.

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 examples of business strategy processes can be divided into three areas: innovation,
customer intimacy, and operational excellence.

INNOVATION

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Acquire new customers from innovative offerings: This objective focuses on
the reason you 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.
All of the objectives from the above list help measure innovation in a general sense. However,
there are countless ways to innovate; your objectives should reflect your specific approach. Maybe
you’re trying to hit a performance target with your product or improve the quality of a particular
product or service, for example. Express your desired innovation goal in whatever way is best for
you.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
Creating customer service objectives is a way to ensure your organization continuously maintains
focus on this crucial area. In addition to the objectives listed above, consider which aspects of
customer service are most relevant to your organization. You may want to improve your customer
chat functionality, or, if you sell a software product, improve your customer onboarding process.
The smoother your internal processes, the happier your customers.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
 9. 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.
Sometimes, objectives for operational excellence can be too vague, referring to “excellent” or
“world-class” processes or “high-performing” teams. All of the above goals are specific and tied to
various aspects of performance. And while you might be tempted to skip over operational
excellence goals altogether, it’s important to invest time and resources in this area! Efficiency and
cost-effectiveness are key to staying competitive, and achieving these objectives can have a
positive impact on your company’s growth.

REGULATORY (OPTIONAL)

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.
If your organization is part of an industry where regulations apply, creating regulatory-related
objectives not only helps you stay in compliance but can also help you grow. (Finding a better way
to stay informed about new regulations could be an objective itself!) Goals in this area could apply
to anything from increasing accountability to implementing risk management plans to streamlining
compliance processes.

Learning & Growth (L&G) Objectives

Learning and growth objectives focus on skills, culture, and organizational capacity.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Improve employee retention: This objective is common in learning and growth and may
focus on skills, culture, pay, and the overall work environment.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
Learning and growth objectives support the employees responsible for carrying out your strategy,
which makes this category of objectives extremely valuable. Classic objectives in this area are:

 Improve skills
 Improve productivity with cross-functional teams
 Attract and retain the best people
However, to make the most of these goals, first, take time to evaluate the specific capabilities
required to deliver exceptional performance in your organization. Doing so will help you formulate
more specific goals that will give your team the capabilities it needs to support your  company’s
growth—and improve employee satisfaction at the same time.

If you have questions about which of these strategic objective examples may work for you,  drop us a
line.  We’re happy to help.