Achieving your goals is an incredibly satisfying feeling.
However, this feeling can be difficult at times as achieving your goals takes time, effort, and a structured process. Because of this, it is important to create plans of action to achieve the goals that will help you stay motivated and ensure that you are on the right track.
In this post, we’ll go through a goal setting worksheet created by HubSpot to help you outline your goals with the SMART framework and create a plan for achieving them. The template is broken down into relevant sections to help you through the process and by downloading it you can keep track of the entire post.
Steps to Goal Setting
1. Identify your original goal.
The first step in the process is to simply identify what your goal is. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just the goal you want to achieve. For example, if you want to grow your website, your basic goal might be “I want to get more website traffic”.
2. Define your SMART goals.
The second step in the process is to use the SMART framework to work out your goals, to make sure they are clear and measurable, and that the process will help you get there. Here’s what each element in the acronym stands for:
- Specific: A specific goal clearly describes what you want to improve. When sharing your specific goals with your team, it should be clear what your intention is.
- Measurable: To make your goal measurable, you need to add numbers to your goal that will help you understand what you need to achieve, track your progress, and see how long it will take you to reach your end goal.
- Reachable: Making sure that your goals are achievable means that they are realistic and that you have a chance to achieve them. Your goal isn’t too far off or so unrelated to your current practices that you might not succeed.
- Relevant: To make sure that your goal is relevant, you need to answer the question “Why are you setting the goal you are setting?” Your goal should be directly related to the needs of your business and help your business grow.
- Time bound: The final aspect of your goal setting process is setting a schedule. It will help you understand your schedule and stay on track to achieve your ultimate goal.
Objective template
It is always helpful to have a worksheet to walk you through your process. The picture below is an example.
Now that you’ve defined your goals, the next step is to calculate your goals so that you know your final numbers and plan your process accordingly so that you can achieve those final numbers.
2. Calculate your target results.
The hardest part of your plan could be setting numerical goals that align with achieving your goals. You can simply say, “We want to increase blog leads by 25%,” but how about the 25% increase in numerical terms?
Once you have these numbers, you can set milestones for yourself and monitor your progress and make changes if necessary.
The image below is an example of a SMART goal calculation.
3. Assess your SMART goals.
The final step of the template is to assess your goals, which will help you anticipate potential obstacles and develop action plans to address them. If you have multiple goals, try asking these questions for each of your goals:
- What is your SMART Marketing Goal?
- Do you think this goal can be realistically achieved in the time frame you have set?
- How many hours per week can you devote to achieving your goal / goal process?
- What is the biggest challenge that is preventing you from achieving this goal? What are the potential challenges you may face in achieving this goal? What are the main obstacles to achieving this goal?
- What three steps can you take to reduce or eliminate this challenge and successfully achieve this goal?
All in all, following this framework makes your goals explicitly clear to yourself and helps you communicate their importance to all necessary stakeholders so that everyone is on the same page. First, download our template for free and achieve your goals.
