Lesson 3
Goal Setting for Success
Featuring Insights From
Lauren Erera
Principal, Weber Associates
Anya Macleod
Principal Consultant at Loopio
Learning Goals
Understand effective goal setting
Capture baseline metrics before enacting change
Clearly define your goals using a concrete success statement
Table of Contents
- How to Make Your Goals Feel Real to Your Team
- How Will You Measure Success?
- Key Metrics to Track
- Assignment 3: Success Statement
Now that you’ve gotten clear on your problem or opportunity, it’s time to set some goals. This is one of the most critical parts of the change process. We’ve already discussed why it’s so difficult for teams to change and some of the reasons why most changes fail—namely because companies suffer under the weight of their own inertia. Suddenly shifting years of ingrained habits is really freaking hard.
“Most change strategies are very conceptual…People need to know, ‘what are the tangible details I need to bring this thing to life?”
And it doesn’t help if your team isn’t clear on exactly what the change is or why it matters, which happens more than you might think. “Most change strategies are very conceptual,” says Lauren Erera, Principal at Weber Associates. “They feel very visionary, and they’re not super tactical or practical about what you’re doing differently. People need to know, ‘what are the tangible details I need to bring this thing to life?’”
Today, we’re going to take your ideas from lofty to practical by setting goals and defining your success criteria. We’ll also take a baseline measurement of your metrics now, so you can track your progress in real time once you start to implement your improvements.
Note: There are some reflection questions to consider throughout this exercise that will help you complete your assignment. You might want to open up a blank document or grab a pen and paper so you can brainstorm as you read.
How to Make Your Goals Feel Real to Your Team
In the last lesson, we looked at your RFP process like a factory assembly line to identify where things were getting jammed or where there were opportunities to implement more modern processes or equipment. Now, it’s time to interrogate that problem or opportunity a little bit more to get clear on exactly what you want to achieve—in other words, set an effective goal.
What does an effective goal look like? Academic research shows that goals are most effective when they are:
- Specific: The goal needs to be clearly defined.
- Difficult but attainable: There’s a sweet spot where a goal is challenging, but not so tough as to be unachievable.
- Accepted by those involved: If team members disagree with a goal in principle, they are unlikely to be motivated to complete it.
- Accompanied by feedback: Performance feedback helps teams understand how well their efforts are working.
- Used to evaluate performance: When team members know their work performance is going to be evaluated based on goal attainment, they are more motivated to work towards those goals.
- Tied to a deadline: A timeline gives a sense of urgency to goal completion. The timeline should be realistic, however—if it’s too long or too short, the quality of work may suffer because it might get deprioritized or rushed.
- Connected with a learning goal: Team members may be more motivated to complete a goal if they can tie it to their own growth and learning.
- Tackled as a group: Teams feel more effective and motivated when working towards a collective goal, rather than just individual ones.
To take a goal from “visionary” to “tactical,” you need to get clear on what precisely the goal is, who is going to be involved, how they’re going to implement it, what the timeline is, and how you’ll know when you’ve achieved success. (In today’s assignment, we’ve created a template that will help you do just that.)
But setting a goal is only the first part of the equation. Having a way to measure it—and understand when you’ve achieved it—is equally important.
How Will You Measure Success?
“One of the biggest mistakes people make is not setting up clear metrics and tracking for success,” says Lauren. “And if people don’t see why the juice is worth the squeeze, then why do it? When things get hard or we’re done launching it, what’s going to stop me from defaulting to my old ways when I don’t even know when it’s working or not?”
If team members are able to see their progress (and know they’re going to be evaluated on it), they’ll be all the more inspired to pursue the change goals you’ve set out. Being able to see their progress will help your team understand the impact of their work, which is in itself a huge motivator. Everyone likes to look back and see how far they’ve come.
Thinking about how you’re going to measure these criteria now, before you kick off your change, allows you to 1) establish your baseline and 2) set a realistic target. For instance, if only about 20% of salespeople are currently using your content hub to fill in answers on a regular basis, you might not be able to shoot for 100% right away. But it’s still a huge improvement if you can get to 70%. And if your team sees that the change is possible, they’ll be all the more likely to stick with it and continue improving.
If that weren’t enough to convince you, we’ve found a strong correlation between tracking metrics and overall team performance in our research. Our 2025 RFP Response Trends and Benchmarks Report shows that top performers (those who win more than 50% of the RFPs they respond to) are more likely to be tracking granular process metrics like advancement rate, speed of completion, cost per bid, team member performance, and capture rate.
Check out the example below for a full list of metrics you should consider tracking.
Key Metrics to Track
- Total annual number of RFP responses
- Advancement rate
- Automation rate
- Win rate
- Cost per bid
- Revenue associated with RFPs
- Time spent on each RFP
- Or if that’s too difficult to track, you could also look at how much time before the deadline you’re submitting (is it typically the day of the deadline, the day before, several days before?)
- Qualitative check-in
- How do key stakeholders (Sales, SMEs, etc.) feel about their role in the process before the change, after the change, six months after the change, etc.?
Now that we’ve covered the keys of goal setting and tracking, let’s get into your assignment.
Assignment 3: Success Statement
Estimated completion time: ~30 min
Set a timer for ten minutes and work through the following reflection questions, using the problems and opportunities you’ve identified in the last lesson:
- On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being highest), how much of a priority is this problem or opportunity?
- Where does this problem or opportunity sit in relation to your overall team goals and growth plans?
- If left unaddressed, is this problem or opportunity likely to fade away, stay as-is, or get more critical in the next year? Why?
- Have you tried addressing this problem or opportunity before? If so, what happened?
- What are some things that are getting in the way of addressing this problem/opportunity?
- Fast forward one year. What are the consequences of not taking action? (i.e. “so what?”)
- Who does this problem or opportunity impact the most?
- What’s a realistic timeline for tackling this problem/opportunity?
- What other thoughts or ideas came to mind as you worked through these questions?
Using your answers to these reflection questions, fill out the following success statement to clearly define your goal.
Success Statement Template
Feel free to modify based on what makes sense for your change initiative—this is just a framework to get you started.
In the next _____ (weeks/months) we will implement ________ (specific change) in order to achieve __________ (team objective). This is tied to the business goal of_______. We will track ______(metrics) to measure our success. _______(specific team/role)’s performance in relation to this goal will be measured on ____(metric).
Example:
In the next three months we will implement generative AI drafting powered by our response management platform in order to accelerate time-to-submission and increase Proposal Managers bandwidth to personalize responses. This is tied to the business goal of improving our shortlist rate by 5% through improved proposal quality. We will track our automation rate for the first pass and the average time reduction in the drafting phase to measure our success. RFP Project Managers’ performance in relation to this goal will be measured by meeting a 10% automation rate for first drafts.