Haaaaappy Tuesday, folks! In last week’s edition of Weekly Roundtable, we discussed the 5 dos for setting goals with your team. As promised, this week, we will be sharing the 5 things you don’t want to do.
In other super exciting news, we gained 3 new followers last week! A very special “hello” to the three of you 👋, we’re literally so giddy that you’re here!
Let’s hop to it!
🙅🏻♀️ 5 don’ts for goal setting in 2026
#1: DON’T distract from the team’s main purpose
The fundamental purpose of setting a goal is to provide your team with focus, aka one direction they are driving toward. If you can recall, focus was the number one do in last week’s edition. On the other side of that coin, the last thing you want to do is to pull away from your team’s focus.
No distracted driving here! 🤳
Let’s use the Business Development Representatives (BDRs) as an example. At SupplyPike, a BDR’s primary activity was reaching out to prospects to convert them into demos. Once a demo was scheduled, they would hand that opportunity off to an Account Executive (AE) to close the deal.
In this case, the metric that a BDR has direct control over and, therefore, should be focusing on is the number of demos scheduled with prospects.
🙈 Unforeseen Consequences
You might be tempted to incentivize them based on the number of demos that Closed Won to ensure that they are bringing in good-quality leads. However, they don’t actually have any control over whether a deal closes or not. That’s the AE’s responsibility. If you were to goal them that way, the following scenarios could happen:
The BDR doubles down on getting the deal closed by bugging the heck out of your AEs during the sales cycle, resulting in lower time spent on their actual focus - calling/emailing prospects.
The BDR figures out (whether true or not) which AE has the highest closing rate, and fights to assign all their deals to that AE instead of the perceived underperformers, causing friction amongst the teams, uneven deal allocation, and unnecessary drama for you.
The BDR simply becomes apathetic and unmotivated by the metric because they recognize the lack of direct control and influence they have in actually hitting that goal.
How do we know all this? Unfortunately…we tried it. These examples were real-life consequences that caused huge distractions to the team and, more importantly, adversely affected the pipeline.
We quickly learned that this type of goal wasn’t going to work. However, we still wanted to make sure our BDRs were bringing in high-quality leads. So instead, we added specificity to the BDR’s goal → The number of demos scheduled with qualified prospects. Prospects had to meet certain criteria determined by the leadership team and, again, were within the BDR’s control, to be considered “qualified” and count toward their goal.
Each company’s org chart is different. No matter how you structure your team, keep the fundamentals in mind - tie goals directly to the activities you want teams to be focusing on to avoid distractions.
#2: DON’T keep the goal if the math ain’t mathing
Stacy and I both touched on this in our posts last week: you want to make sure that your goals actually make sense and are ambitious but attainable. If you don’t get this right, your team will either not believe in the goal or not believe in you. In most cases, probably both.
Show 👏 Your 👏 Work 👏
As a leader, you owe it to your team to have the numbers to back up your goals. If you can’t even explain the numbers to yourself, why should your team take them (or you) seriously? Best-case scenario: You work with your team’s leadership to determine the goals.
If this is your first year setting goals, use industry benchmarks as your guide and cite your sources. If that’s not available, goal in smaller increments of time (ex: quarterly instead of annually) and track everything so you can be more flexible and adapt to how the numbers perform. I don’t recommend increments shorter than three months to account for seasonality and outlier months. Also, some campaigns just truly require time and patience to perform.
Stacy is basically writing the textbook on how to do this on the GTM side. Part 1 was published last week, and Part 2 will be coming out on Thursday!
A Note on Experimenting
When experimenting, think back to your days in Science class where you learned about the Scientific Method. The same rules apply here. You want to change as little as possible, while keeping the majority of conditions the same. If you try to change too many factors at once, whether you succeed or fail, you’ll never be able to confidently say why. If you are early in your journey and don’t have as many resources, you can’t afford the wasted time and effort. Focus on incremental changes that give you the biggest impact.
#3: DON’T fracture from the top line goal
One year at SupplyPike, we were…a little lost. One side of the business set up goals with an OGSM framework, the other side set up other goals with an OKR framework. While using different frameworks at the same time can work, the biggest issue was that there were literally different goals for the same teams at the same time. Woof.
No one had their story straight. No one really knew what they were working towards. Everyone was scared of disappointing the leader on the “other side.”
❌ It was awful. Do not recommend. ❌
To ensure consistency and one voice, make sure there is only one set of top-level goals for the entire company. As you add more dedicated teams to the company (ex: Marketing, Ops, Tech, etc.), each team will want to divvy up the goals based on what they contribute. Teams should be allowed to use whatever framework works best for them.
Here’s what we did. In December of the current year, we would finalize and communicate the OGSM for the following year. After that, each leader would determine goals for their teams based on the OGSM. Every quarter, we would enter all our metrics into a doc with the original OGSM language and send it back out to all the employees for consistency and accountability. We would tag each goal with the owner and status - “On Track,” “Off Track,” or “Done.”
For example, one of our OGSM goals was for everyone to be trained on SupplyPike products. Our Talent Development Team took this goal and broke it down into OKRs.
Objective: All employees understand SupplyPike’s products’ value and high-level functionality.
Key Results: % of employees certified in SupplyPike’s products.
TD activities that tied directly to this goal:
Coordinate quarterly product overviews hosted by Product Managers.
Build certification courses for employees to assess understanding.
Promote, encourage, and follow up with employees to complete the certification courses.
At the end of the quarter, TD would report the % of employees who completed certification in the OGSM report to share with all the employees.
#4: DON’T set and forget
After goals are set, it’s important to keep them top of mind year-round to make sure you’re achieving them. A really fun way to do this is with incentives and gamification. Here are a few ways we did this:
At the end of 2022, we started noticing a dip in participation and engagement at the office. So, we launched an Engagement Reward every quarter where employees who participated in events, surveys, and professional development could earn points to receive exclusive company-branded swag.
➡️ Outcome: Employees went crazy for this. They brought it up at every all-hands, they would plan vacations around our event dates, and a few devs even built a Slackbot to help everyone check on points. Folks were committed.In 2023, we started doing annual week-long hackathons that were open to the entire company. The theme each year was SupplyPike’s motto: Get Paid. Get Better. Typically geared towards our customers, we challenged the team to think about it internally. How can SupplyPike increase getting paid and optimize getting better?
➡️ Outcome: Some ideas were just for fun. Other ideas were actually implemented and became a core part of the business (like the Slackbot mentioned above)!In 2024, we introduced a company-wide incentive based on the OGSM goals. It was a sliding scale where if we hit numbers, the entire company would get a bonus. The higher the achievement, the higher the bonus.
➡️ Outcome: We suddenly had non-customer-facing employees show up, be more present, and ask better questions about how we can deliver more value to customers. 🚨 Spoiler alert: we crushed our number.
#5: DON’T be vague about ownership
Some goals are pretty obvious: the Sales Team owns the revenue number, the Customer Success Team owns the retention number, etc. Unfortunately, other goals can be a little harder to set up. Referencing back to item #1 in this post, ideally, you want to tie a team’s goal directly to what that team can do and what they have control over. Sometimes, that can be hard to figure out in the early days of a startup when everyone is doing everything (sound familiar?).
These are some of our own examples from early SupplyPike days:
Who should own product release announcements to customers - product or CS?
Who should own building community - people operations or marketing?
Where should UX fall - product or tech?
There are no hard and fast rules for how your team gets built and structured. I’ve seen many different combinations from many different companies. The best advice that I can give is to:
Make sure you have those discussions early and with the right people. Pick the best option based on the people and resources you have.
Be decisive and timely with your decisions. Take the time to really consider your options, but not too long that the team stays in limbo.
Don’t let the team live in ambiguity. “Clarity is kindness” is very real. Reminder: Nice is not the same as kind.
Following these guidelines will help to reduce duplication of efforts, confusion/friction between teams, and keep your movements fast and precise.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Please leave a comment with one of your hottest takes on goal setting! Let us know a time when goal setting went wrong 🥵!
Have a wonderful week!
Christine
Christine’s Corner
📖 Read of the Week: Guess what. It’s still Iron Flame. I’m like 75% of the way through, and it’s so good!
🍿 Watch of the Week: Stacy and I watched The Housemaid together with another girlfriend! We had all read the book prior to the movie coming out. I loved that it was a little campy and so fun!
🎧 Song of the Week: Is there any other right answer than I Just Might by Bruno Mars? We are so back, baby!