How to Make a Good Process Goal

Process goal to be consistent

Outcome goals are goals which contain a target number of outcomes. For example, acquiring 10 new customers in a month is an outcome goal. Compared to the outcome goal, the process goal is a goal which is focused on what a person does. Making 50 follow up calls in a week is an example of a process goal. Making follow up calls is a process of acquiring new customers. The main difference between outcome goal and process goal is that outcome goal contains external factors so that achieving goal by doing some certain actions are not promised. To become a customer, the customer needs to make a decision to purchase. The salesperson may be able to influence the decision but the salesperson can not make the purchase decision. However, making follow ups calls can be done without any external conditions. Self-discipline affects more to achieve the process goal.

In many cases, as long as the process goal is relevant to the outcome goal, Although the outcome goal might not be achieved as planned, the number of outcome goals should be achieved eventually. Therefore, achieving progress goals consistently will become important to achieve the outcome goal.

Be SMART on goal

No matter whether it is for outcome goals or process goals, in order to make a good goal, it is important to be SMART. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This means a goal needs to contain a specific number which is measurable and achievable. Plus, the goal needs to be relevant to the purpose of the person’s work and need to have some due date to do so. If a marketing team would like to put more effort on content marketing, posting 1 article per week is a good example of a goal. There is a specific number 1 article as a goal and the post number is measurable. How achievable depends on the person but rather than saying writing 10 articles in a day, I would say writing 1 article per week is quite an achievable goal. Writing a blog article is quite relevant to putting effort on content marketing. And there is a time bound of a week.

On the other hand, a bad example is setting a goal “to make customers happy”. There is no specific number and happiness is difficult to measure. Since it is difficult to measure, it is difficult to evaluate whether it is achievable or not. And, there is no specific time-bound. This goal can be relevant to the purpose if the purpose is to increase happy customers.

The reason the goal needs to be SMART is that not only it becomes objective so that there is less gap of understanding between members but also it is easier to evaluate. If the goal is not clear to evaluate, it is difficult to recognize whether things are going well or not.

Tips of setting a good process goal

It is important to make a process goal which is achievable without any external factors. However, since we are too used to making an outcome goal, we often have difficulty making process goals. For example, if a person is in sales, having more than 5 meetings with customers in a week is good as a goal. However, as the process goal, there are uncertainties that customers may not accept meeting. Therefore the person will not have full control over the result. In order to make 5 meetings, I believe there are some actions needed to make appointments. The action can be to send email or to call. And, there should be some statistics to achieve 5 meeting appointments. Maybe to send out 50 emails to potential customers in a week or maybe to call 15 customers in a week. In any case, if there are statistics which are relevant to the result, those actions can be a process goal. In this case, sending 50 emails to potential customers in a week to acquire 5 meetings can become a goal. Of course, even achieving the process goal does not promise to have 5 meetings. But, we can be confident that achieving the process goal will provide 5 meetings in a week on average.

The tips of setting a good process goal are:

1. Focus on action which the one can take without any external factor.
2. Make sure the achievement of the process goal is relevant to the outcome goal.
3. Be aware that the outcome goal might not be achieved even if the process goal is achieved.

If we only focus on the outcome goal, we might lose our confidence depending on the external factors. Having a good process goal will make us be confident about our action and make us be confident on the eventual outcome.

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