Goals: How To Set SMART Goals That Work

SMART is a goal-setting framework that turns a broad business ambition into a specific, measurable target with a deadline attached.

Setting a clear path to your objectives can help you work through them without getting overwhelmed. For example, Sara Sugarman, founder of home goods brand Lulu and Georgia, says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast that a disciplined, numbers-driven annual planning process helped the company grow 20% to 30% a year, while Stephen Grear, founder of show kit brand Reshoevn8r, says on the show that he has his team break big visions into smaller, attainable steps rather than chasing broad goals that “aren’t realistic.” 

In this article, you’ll learn what SMART goals are and how to write SMART goals, with examples and tips from Shopify business owners. You’ll also see where the SMART framework falls short, and how to track your progress directly in Shopify.

What are SMART goals?

The SMART acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The SMART goal framework outlines a process for effective goal-setting. It focuses on making a goal realistic and clear.

Individual team members, team leads, and business owners can all use SMART goal setting, whether that’s for a single campaign, a department, or the business as a whole. The technique can break overwhelming objectives into actionable steps, so that workers can stay focused on the single step ahead of them. 

You can also use a SMART action plan for personal growth, whether that’s setting career goals, developing new skills, or establishing healthier habits in your daily life.

How to set SMART goals

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

The process of setting SMART goals starts with knowing your business’s mission and long-term objectives. From there, break your broader priorities into smaller, measurable goals using the SMART criteria to specify the details. Here’s what each step of that goal-setting project looks like:

Specific

A specific goal is clear and actionable, not broad or vague. 

Buzz Wiggins, cofounder of the sparkling water device Aerflo, explains on Shopify Masters that his team prioritizes “setting goals that you can achieve by the end of the week.” These specific goals don’t just help the team stay on track; they also give them regular wins and something to feel positive about, even when there’s a lot to be done.

Measurable

Measurable goals include a specific metric to track, so there’s no ambiguity about whether you’ve hit them. 

Lulu and Georgia founder Sara Sugarman says her team creates their annual plans based on hard numbers, which helps them maintain focus as they track progress. This structured approach to project management has helped Lulu and Georgia achieve a repeat-purchase rate of 52%—more than double the industry average.

Attainable

An attainable goal is realistic, not aspirational for its own sake. 

Reshoevn8r’s Stephen Grear says on Shopify Masters that his team learned this the hard way. “There’s reality, and then there’s goals that just aren’t realistic at all,” he says. “It’s baby steps." 

Reshoevn8r now layers an OKR framework on top of its goals, pairing one ambitious long-term objective with smaller, manageable steps to measure progress toward its desired outcome. For example, that might mean checking recent repeat-purchase data before committing to a five-point increase rather than an unrealistic 20-point jump.

Relevant

Relevant goals support your company’s broader mission; the direction you need to move in evolves as you scale or as external conditions change.

As apparel brand Unbound Merino approached $100 million in cumulative lifetime revenue, Cofounder and CEO Dan Demsky realized that having achieved a big milestone, it was time to reprioritize. “We had to reassess, ‘Well, where do we go from here?’” he says.

Time-bound

Time-bound goals have a clear deadline, which creates urgency and a natural point to monitor progress. 

Sara’s team at Lulu and Georgia plans in yearly increments.

“This year we’re opening a showroom and launching a hospitality division,” Sara says on Shopify Masters. “Next year, a kids division.” Each goal has both a deadline and a successor already planned. The finish line for one goal gives way to the starting line for the next.

SMART vs. other goal-setting frameworks

1. HARD
2. BHAG
3. OKRs

SMART isn’t the only goal-setting framework, and it isn’t always the ideal choice to increase productivity and optimize team performance. Because SMART goals have to be attainable and measurable, they tend to favor modest, provable targets over bolder, harder-to-measure bets. Here are three alternatives:

1. HARD

HARD stands for “heartfelt, animated, required, and difficult.” The framework was developed by leadership researcher Mark Murphy, whose study of 4,182 workers across 397 organizations found that employees who said their goals pushed them out of their comfort zone reported 29% higher engagement. 

A HARD goal starts from a mission you’re genuinely invested in. HARD goals are intended for when you need a team to buy into a mission emotionally, not just hit a number. They can be harder to evaluate objectively than a SMART goal, since “heartfelt” and “difficult” aren’t metrics and aren’t tied to a specific time frame.

2. BHAG

Coined by Jim Collins in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, BHAG stands for “big hairy audacious goals.” According to Collins, a BHAG is meant to unify and energize an entire company for years, not one quarter.

Unbound Merino’s climb to $100 million in lifetime revenue functioned like a BHAG for the brand. Reaching nine figures was a big enough target to organize years of decisions around, rather than something to check off in a single time-bound sprint.

BHAGs are useful for setting a long-term direction, but they’re deliberately too big and too far out to double as a SMART goal’s specific, measurable, near-term target—you may need to break a BHAG down into smaller SMART goals to execute on it.

3. OKRs

Created by Andy Grove at Intel and later introduced to Google by former Intel employee John Doerr, objectives and key results (OKRs) pair one ambitious, qualitative objective with a handful of measurable key results that indicate whether you’ve hit it.

Reshoevn8r founder Stephen Grear says that his team adopted OKRs specifically to reconcile a big vision with concrete progress. “You set a really large goal, and then you set key results or key metrics that you can chip away at to get to that goal,” he says. “It keeps things in line. Keep your eye on the big prize but also focus on the small things."

OKRs work well as a bridge between an audacious goal like a BHAG and the day-to-day SMART goals a sales, marketing, or product team strives to achieve.

How to track SMART goals on Shopify

Once you’ve set a SMART goal, you need a way to see whether you’re actually on pace to hit it. Shopify’s Analytics dashboard has a built-in feature for this: Targets lets you set a numeric goal for a specific metric over a specific time period and watch your progress update automatically.

To create one, go to Analytics in your Shopify admin and select “Create target.” From there, you can:

• Choose from a list of metrics and key performance indicators to track, such as gross sales, orders, or conversion rate

• Narrow your tracking with an optional filter, like a specific sales channel

• Set a measurable target amount (e.g., 15% growth) and a time period (e.g., the next three months)

Once a target is live, a gauge shows your percentage complete, your current value versus your target, and how many days remain, so you don’t have to wait until the deadline to know whether you’re on track. 

For summable metrics like total sales, orders, or sessions, you can also view a cumulative chart that plots your actual progress against an expected pacing line. This gives you early notice if measurable outcomes are falling behind while there’s still time to course-correct and improve performance.