Strategic objectives are statements that indicate what is critical or important in your organizational strategy. I also like to say they’re goals you’re trying to achieve in a certain time period—typically 3-5 years. Your objectives link out to your measures and initiatives. Objectives are a key part of your Balanced Scorecard, along with measures and initiatives.

I created this list of strategic objective examples to 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. Once you have your list of objectives, you may want to choose a software tool to help track your progress.

56 Strategic Objective Examples

While you can certainly use these for inspiration, I 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, I’ve provided a few ideas on how you can customize these examples in each definition.

Financial Objectives

When selecting and creating your financial objectives, start by thinking about how your organization operates. I often ask customers, what’s the basic financial model of your organization? Technology companies generate revenue from product sales, minus the cost of production. Local governments work within a tax rate and try to optimize for the number of services provided to meet the budget. Create your basic financial objectives from this standpoint.

Then, think about what you’re trying to accomplish financially within the time span of your strategic plan. And don’t forget to factor in how you want to differentiate from your competitors.

These should be the easiest objectives to develop because organizations have been setting financial goals for more than 150 years, so there are lots of industry and historical examples to pull from. Some of the financial objectives I think are most useful 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.

Claim your FREE eBook on 68 effective financial KPIs you should use for better strategic insights

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.

I want to note here that I don’t think your customers should be involved in setting objectives, but your organization needs to have an understanding about what your customers need versus what you provide. Do people value what you sell or provide? How do you differentiate yourselves? Your customer objectives should center on how you answer these questions. And I strongly advise that companies track what customers say and what they do separately—this will give you the best gauge on the true value of your products or services.

Over time, you will learn whether you really are reaching your target customers and providing them with something they need or want. If not, then you need to change what you offer.  These sample customer objectives will get you started:

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. Best in class 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.

Discover ClearPoint's Strategic Plan Dashboard templates here

Internal Process Objectives

The internal perspective is typically focused on processes that your organization must excel at. According to Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s Value Discipline Model, business strategy processes can be divided into three areas: product leadership (innovation), customer intimacy, and operational excellence.

One of these areas should be the primary driving element to your strategy. For example, McDonald’s leads with operational excellence and that’s how they’re able to deliver a meal to you in a few minutes. Amazon leads with customer intimacy—they don’t offer unique products, but they know their customers extremely well and make it easy to buy things customers need. The best business strategies incorporate all three areas to some degree, but one area should be dominant. Keep this in mind as you browse through these examples:

Product Leadership (Innovation)

The objectives I chose help measure innovation in a general sense. A good example is a company measuring the percentage of customers using new features or percentage of sales from new products. In a space like government, you can track interactions for a new process—such as the percentage of transactions online versus in person, or support provided by humans versus AI chat bots.

There are countless ways to innovate; your objectives should reflect your specific approach. Express your desired innovation goal in whatever way is best for you.

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 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 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.

See ClearPoint Strategy in action! Click here to watch a quick DEMO on the software

Customer Intimacy

Your goals here should be to really get to know your clients and serve them well. What share of wallet do you have from your existing clients, how quickly do they adopt your new products, and what is their churn rate? The smoother your internal processes, the happier your customers.

Again, think about which aspects of customer intimacy are most relevant to your organization and choose your objectives from there.

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, home 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 improving that. 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 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, I think this is a good objective. 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.

Claim your FREE 108 healthcare KPI library to improve your organizational performance

Operational Excellence

Objectives for operational excellence can be too vague, referring to “excellent” or “world-class” processes or “high-performing” teams. All the goals I listed above 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.

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.

Claim your FREE eBook on 8 effective strategic planning templates here

Regulatory (Optional)

If your organization is part of a regulated industry, such as utilities, creating regulatory-related objectives on your scorecard will be mandatory. I know they may not seem as strategic as your other objectives, but they must be part of your strategy because the law says so and you could face fines or penalties if you don’t.

Goals in this area could include tracking waste or pollution, increasing accountability, and implementing risk management plans. Finding a better way to stay informed about new regulations could be an objective itself! Ultimately, these objectives will help you stay compliant and grow.

42. Ensure compliance: In a regulated environment, you may get fined for pollution; the more you pollute, the more you get fined.  So, while the measure might be based on fines, your goal is to ensure compliance.
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 to do better cost accounting or be clearer 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.

Claim your FREE eBook on the Top 10 Business Strategy Best Practices for 2024

Learning & Growth (L&G) Objectives

Learning and growth objectives, commonly known as your People category, focus on skills, culture, and organizational capacity. Another way I explain these objectives is they’re about your employees, not your customers; and you want to make sure you have the right people, the right culture, and the right tools in your organization.

Especially when an organization makes a strategy shift, there must be a way to determine if you have the right people and resources for the new direction—if not, have a plan to retrain or hire. I’ve seen many companies over the past few years go through big culture shifts as remote work becomes the norm and artificial intelligence replaces many of the common activities within the organization.

To make the most of these objectives, 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 yourcompany’s growth—and improve employee satisfaction at the same time.

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 a goal if an organization is either affected by a new competitive environment or is trying to address a new market. The specific 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 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.

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

Turn Strategic Objectives into Success with ClearPoint

Looking for strategic objective examples to inspire your company’s success? ClearPoint Strategy provides the ultimate tools to define, track, and achieve your strategic objectives. Our comprehensive software simplifies the process of setting clear goals, monitoring progress, and ensuring alignment across your organization.  We have artificial intelligence built into ClearPoint to help you think through and create goals based upon your industry and strategy.

Transform your strategic planning and drive impactful results—book a personalized demo with ClearPoint Strategy todayand see how we can help you turn your objectives into achievements.