Anyone that knows me knows that I like goals. I believe in goals. I embrace goals.
It's been a constant theme in my career, as a consultant and as an employee. I like "ownership" and accountability in my work, and goals enable both.
Goals (in marketing) are good.
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In setting goals and getting buy-in for those goals, you get alignment with your managers, and support for your day to day activities. Maybe that means more budget (or less budget pressure). Maybe (hopefully) it means a more trusting boss.
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Goals awaken the competitive need to achieve that most people have in some way. When I set a goal, I can be extremely tenacious in achieving it, and am euphoric when I achieve a stretch goal. The excitement of achieving goals can energize a whole team.
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Goals, properly set, remind us why we all come to work every day. For instance, goals in marketing should tie to revenue in some measurable way. The goal should not be to "produce a whitepaper," but to "produce a whitepaper shortens the sales cycle." Stated that way, they help to remind me that my goal is to shorten the sales cycle, to increase sales, not to produce collateral.
But sometimes it's just not that simple.
Goals (in marketing) are bad.
Goals can be a curse. Especially if, in focusing on the goal, you lose sight of the purpose of the goal. A well crafted goal can help prevent this, but sometimes we forget to surface and reset our priorities based on a changing landscape around us.
Goals can provide an illusion that we are doing the right things, especially when the company is in trouble.
In one of my former marketing roles, for example, the management team (of which I was a member) became too focused on weekly, tactical goals. The worse our situation, the more to-dos we added to our lists, the more to-dos we exacted from the people we working in our teams.
Achieving these tactical goals week after week, and crossing items off my endless to-do list, may have helped me feel like my butt was not on the line (even though it was) but it meant I was not focused on solving the big issues. Instead of generating press coverage, retooling the company's website, or enhancing our visibility in our local community, I should have been focused on generating (or saving) cash in the short term.
Nothing else mattered.
Those other goals may have made sense if we had not faced a serious, unexpected cash shortage, one that we initially thought or hoped was temporary, but they should have faded to irrelevance given the new reality. And I should have refocused my own effort and those on my team away from any goals that did not directly contribute to that over-arching issue.
Lessons learned
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For leaner companies, marketing goals need to be tied explicitly and quantitatively to the immediate business objectives as much as possible (revenue, number of customers, repeat customers).
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Longer term goals (around visibility, mind-share, hiring) are important only in direct proportion to the amount of cash on hand.
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Companies and management teams need to build in a way to ensure departmental goals can be tuned when the business landscape suddenly shifts. Tactical goals should be focused on the immediate reality, and the strategic goals should be geared to medium-term survival. Being open and honest with departmental managers about the business realities, what is needed to survive and thrive, is one step.
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