Here are 10 performance goal examples:
1. Revenue Goals
Revenue goals work well as the company’s primary goal. But they only make sense as an employee performance goal if that employee has enough power to make decisions that directly impact the company’s revenue.
Revenue Goal Example: “Increase Q4 revenue by 25% by closing 25 new accounts.”
2. Sales Goals
Sales goals work well as employee performance goals for salespeople. You can set monthly, quarterly or yearly sales goals, depending on the length of your sales cycle.
Sales Goal Example: “Close $900,000 worth of sales by the end of the current fiscal year.”
3. User Growth Goals
User growth goals are relevant to SaaS companies, marketplaces and social networks. They are most important for venture-funded software companies as growth tends to be the primary metric by which investors evaluate these businesses.
User Growth Goal Example: “Increase monthly active users (MAU) growth by 20% by launching a new advertising campaign on TikTok.”
4. Traffic Goals
While traffic goals are relevant to all businesses that have websites, they are the most important for online businesses such as e-commerce stores and SaaS companies. That being said, traffic in and of itself is a vanity metric, as you don’t want just any traffic. You want to attract people who belong to your target audience.
That’s why you should also set a conversion rate performance goal to balance the incentives. Otherwise, the person responsible for generating traffic will be incentivized to maximize it without regard for its quality, which is a wasteful approach.
Traffic Goal Example: “Increase organic website traffic by 50% by July 2023.”
5. Conversion Rate Goals
The conversion rate shows what percentage of people exposed to a call to action took that action. For example, if 100 people visited your sales page and 10 of them bought your product. The conversion rate of that page is 10%.
The formula is: (conversions / visits) x 100 = conversion rate percentage
You can increase your revenue by increasing your conversion rates across your sales funnel, e.g., ad clicks, email opt-ins, sales, etc.
Conversion Rate Goal Example: “Increase conversion rate from Facebook ad clicks by 11% by the end of the year.”
6. Email Marketing Goals
Email marketing goals are typically based on the target number of subscribers you want to reach. However, just like traffic, the number of email subscribers in and of itself is a vanity metric. Consider setting additional performance goals that include other relevant metrics, such as open and click-through rates, to balance the incentives.
Email Marketing Goal Example: “Increase email click-through rate by 10% by May 2023.”
7. Social Media Goals
Social media goals are typically based on the target number of followers you want to amass. Another important metric is engagement rate, the percentage of your followers interacting with a piece of content (e.g., liked, commented, shared, etc.).
Social Media Goal Example: “Increase Twitter engagement rate by 10% by the end of the year.”
8. Product Engagement Goals
Product engagement goals are relevant to SaaS companies, marketplaces and social media networks. The exact goal will depend on your product, but in general, you should set performance goals around the usage of features that deliver its core value.
Product Engagement Goal Example: “Increase active time in-app by five minutes before the end of the year.”
9. Product Development Goals
Whether you’re selling physical products, info products or software, you’re probably engaged in ongoing product development. You want to set performance goals based on relevant deliverables with clear deadlines while keeping in mind Hofstadter’s Law.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Product Development Goal Example: “Conduct 50 user interviews before the end of Q3.”
10. Customer Satisfaction Goals
Tracking customer satisfaction might require setting up an automated system for gathering feedback. The simpler the rating system, the more feedback you’ll collect. You should consider a survey with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons.
Only increase the complexity of the rating system if it’s necessary. Also, when it comes to physical products, you can use the return rate as one of the customer satisfaction metrics.
Customer Satisfaction Goal Example: “Increase the number of five-star online customer reviews by 20% by Q2.”
