56 Strategic Objective Examples For Your Company To Copy

TED JACKSON  | 

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. Let’s dive in!

Nine out of 10 organizations fail to execute strategy. Avoid failure with this toolkit.

Note: Many of these objectives reflect different strategies, so there’s no way all of them will apply to
any one organization. We’ve provided a few ideas on how you can customize these strategic
objective examples to meet your strategy in each definition.

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 encouragingteams 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.