Sample Business Objectives

As a small business leader, you establish goals and business objectives to ensure your company accomplishes what it needs to accomplish to remain a going concern. For example, a goal may be to triple the sales of your e-learning courses. A supporting objective might be to attract 1,000 new customers in two months time by offering a package deal consisting of the course and a certification exam at a discounted price. Possible business objectives are as numerous as the companies that adopt them. However, many objectives pertain to sales volume, customer satisfaction, profits, product quality and productivity.

Sales objectives provide your sales force an incentive to achieve an increased sales volume, which can mean increased profits. Examples of sales-volume growth objectives include increasing sales to existing accounts by 10 percent by the end of the quarter and acquiring five new accounts each month. Other examples include devoting 80 percent of a salesperson's time to his twenty most profitable accounts and the development of five new markets by year-end.

Steadily increasing profits are dependent on the consistent generation of revenue and the careful management of expenses incurred to manufacture a product or provide a service. Profit maximization objectives might include replacing legacy computer systems with a new company-wide system by year-end or contracting with a new service provider to decrease production line maintenance costs by a specified percent by the end of the quarter. You might also increase profits by changing your company's product or service mix, increasing sales revenues goals or contracting with new vendors to decrease the variable costs of manufacturing a product component.

Customers' needs and expectations require that you provide them products of high quality. To do otherwise leads to high maintenance and replacement costs, vanishing repeat sales to existing customers and the loss of any competitive advantage based on product performance. Examples of improved product quality objectives include training five service personnel a quarter in new quality control procedure and installing quality measurement mechanisms in your production line by year end. Other objectives might include a 15 percent decrease in defect rates, a 20 percent decrease in total quality costs or a 25 percent decrease in the number of defective units for a product line.

Your ability to utilize your available resources to produce goods and services and earn a profit determines the financial performance of your company. Increased productivity decreases your cost per unit, which allows you to decrease prices and be more competitive in your market. You might implement increased productivity objectives such as implementing new equipment to decrease process time and production costs. Other objectives include reviewing and revising production line processes to decrease processing time, wait time, inspection time and move time to decrease your total manufacturing cycle time. You might also identify new quality measures that will minimize defects and improve productivity by a certain percent for the year or improve your capacity by adding a production line that will enable you to respond more quickly to customer demand.

You enhance profits by reselling to current customers and getting new sales through customer referrals. Therefore, improving customer satisfaction is an important goal. Objectives in this regard might include the on-time delivery of products 99 percent of the time and adjusting production and sales processes and policies to reduce the customer’s total cost of ownership by 10 percent. Additional objectives include correctly fulfilling customer orders 95 percent of the time and solving customer issues within 48 hours of the customer's initial contact. You might also commit to improving product functionality, decreasing prices and improving service quality and convenience.