OKRs for Business: How to Set Goals and Measure Results

Most businesses know what they want: more customers, more sales, a team pulling in the same direction. The trouble starts when that ambition has to become a plan. Goals stay vague, everyone on the team reads them differently, and by the end of the quarter nobody can say for sure whether you succeeded or not.

The OKR framework was created to solve exactly this problem. It helps you choose a small number of goals that really matter, decide up front how you will measure them and connect every person on the team to a shared target. Large technology companies have worked this way for decades, but the method fits just as well in a five-person business, or even for a freelancer.

In this guide we cover:

• what OKRs are and how the framework works;
• where the method came from and why it is so popular;
• how OKRs help rally a team around a goal;
• how OKRs differ from KPIs;
• how to write good OKRs, with marketing and website examples;
• how to roll the method out in your business and which tools to track it with.

What OKRs are and how the framework works

OKR is a goal-setting framework for companies and teams. The letters stand for Objectives and Key Results. Every OKR has two parts, and the real strength of the method lies in how they work together.

The Objective

The objective describes where you want to get to. It is written in plain language, it is meaningful and motivating, and it is usually set for a quarter or a year. For example: "Turn the website into the company's main sales channel."

It is important that the manager does not simply announce the objective but also explains why it matters and what will change once you get there. Imagine a startup founder telling the team: "By the end of the year we need to close a funding round." That is a clear objective. If the founder adds that the round will make it possible to raise salaries, hire more people and move to a better office, the team understands how the shared goal affects each of them personally.

Key Results

Key results are how you measure whether you are getting closer to the objective. Each objective usually has between two and five key results, and every one of them is a number you can check. For example:

• grow website enquiries from 40 to 80 a month;
• lift the landing page conversion rate from 2% to 4%;
• reach 30% of total sales through the website.

A key result is an outcome, not a task. "Launch a new website" is a task. "Double the number of enquiries from the website" is an outcome. The tasks, sometimes called initiatives, are what you do to move the numbers.

The 70% rule

OKRs are meant to be ambitious, set slightly beyond what looks comfortably achievable. That is why an objective is usually considered achieved when you reach roughly 70% of it. This does not mean you stop working at 70%. It means the bar was set high enough to push the team forward.

If you hit 100%, the objective probably was not ambitious enough. If you stalled at 40% or below, the objective may have been unrealistic, or it simply did not get enough attention during the quarter.

Cascading the objective across teams

The top-level objective is broken down into smaller ones. Each department writes its own objectives, teams break them down further, and every person decides what they will do to contribute. In a small business this can be very simple: the company objective is to double leads from the website, and the marketer, the designer and the developer each define their own part of it.

A key principle of the method is autonomy. Leadership does not dictate what every team and every employee must do. Teams write their own objectives in line with the shared goal.

Where OKRs came from and why they are so popular

The idea of setting measurable goals was developed in the 1970s by Andy Grove, one of Intel's early leaders and later its CEO. He built on Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives (MBO) and adapted it for a technology company that needed to move fast.

In 1999, John Doerr, who had worked at Intel before becoming a venture capitalist, introduced the framework to the founders of Google, then a young company. Google adopted OKRs and has used them ever since. In 2018 Doerr published the book Measure What Matters, which made the method known far beyond the tech world.

There are several reasons why OKRs are now common in small and mid-sized businesses too:

• Markets change fast. Planning five years ahead is hard, and not only for startups. A quarterly cycle gives you a regular moment to stop, check and change course.
• People want to know why they do their work. Good people are hard to hire and easy to lose. A method that shows everyone how their work affects the result helps you keep them.
• Cross-team work. Marketing, sales and development have to work together. When there is a shared, transparent goal, it is much easier to coordinate.
• Everything can be measured. Tools such as Google Analytics 4 and modern CRM systems provide data in near real time, so it is easy to set measurable key results and track them.

How OKRs help rally your team around a goal

In companies that run on OKRs, hitting an objective is not tied directly to salary or bonuses. Financial incentives still exist, but the emphasis is elsewhere: a sense of shared ownership of the result and a chance to prove yourself.

Shared ownership of the result

Every employee understands why they are doing what they do and how their work connects with everyone else's. They feel part of a bigger process rather than someone who just ticks off tasks.

For this to work, the values of the business need to match the values of the people in it. Say a company decides to reduce its environmental footprint and tracks that in a quarterly objective. Team members who care about the issue will feel they are working on something that matters to them as well.

A chance to prove yourself

Everyone on the team can choose their own tasks within the team's objectives. That gives people the opportunity to try new things instead of just running the routine.

This only works when processes are transparent. Imagine a marketer who suggests a way to boost sales of a product that underperformed last year. To act on the idea, they need to know how sales work and what share of revenue that product brings in. With OKRs, this information is open to everyone.

OKRs vs KPIs: what is the difference

KPIs are key performance indicators. With KPIs, leadership also sets targets to reach, and both methods agree that a goal should be measurable and time-bound. But the differences between them are bigger than the similarities:

• Scope. OKRs are ambitious and shared across the whole business. KPIs are simpler and tied to the work of one person or department.
• Source. OKRs come from the company's priorities for the coming quarter. KPIs come from a role and its areas of responsibility.
• Success threshold. An OKR counts as achieved at around 70%. A KPI is expected to hit 100%.
• Link to pay. With OKRs, hitting the target is not directly linked to a bonus. With KPIs, it usually is.
• Transparency. With OKRs, everyone can see where the business stands. KPIs are usually discussed only between an employee and their manager.
• Who sets them. With OKRs, teams and individuals write their own smaller objectives. With KPIs, leadership decides what each person has to achieve.

You can, and often should, use both. KPIs track the ongoing health of the business: cost per lead, conversion rate, response time to an enquiry. OKRs focus on the change you want to make in the coming quarter. A metric such as cost per lead can be a permanent KPI, while a significant improvement in it can become a key result for a particular quarter. We explain these metrics in detail in our guide to CPC, CPM, CPA and CPL.

How to write good OKRs: examples for business

The hardest part of the method is not the rollout but the wording. Here are a few rules that help.

Rules for objectives

• Keep them few. Three objectives per quarter is already a lot. For a small business, one or two are enough.
• Use plain language. If an objective needs explaining, it will not work. Everyone on the team should be able to recall it from memory.
• No numbers in the objective. Numbers belong in the key results. The objective sets the direction.

Rules for key results

• A number with a starting point. "Increase enquiries" is not enough. "Increase enquiries from 40 to 80 a month" can be measured.
• An outcome, not an activity. "Publish 12 blog posts" is an activity. "Reach 3,000 organic visits a month" is an outcome.
• Data you actually have. Before you set a key result, make sure you can measure it. If the website has no conversion tracking, you cannot know how many enquiries came from Google.

Example: a service business that wants more leads from its website

Objective: make the website the company's main source of leads.

• Key result 1: grow website enquiries from 40 to 80 a month;
• Key result 2: lift the conversion rate on service pages from 1.5% to 3%;
• Key result 3: cut the average response time to an enquiry from 6 hours to under an hour.

The initiatives that move these numbers might include redesigning the landing page, shortening the form, connecting forms to the CRM and sending an instant alert to a sales rep on WhatsApp or Slack.

Example: an online store that wants to grow organic traffic

Objective: stop depending on paid advertising alone.

• Key result 1: reach 25% of revenue from organic traffic;
• Key result 2: get 20 category pages onto the first page of Google for the most important search terms;
• Key result 3: speed up the site so that every product page passes the Core Web Vitals assessment.

Committed and aspirational objectives

Some businesses split their objectives into two types. Committed objectives must be delivered in full, for example launching a new website before the holiday season. Aspirational objectives are the ones where 70% counts as success. Mark up front which objective belongs to which type, so there are no misunderstandings at the end of the quarter.

How to roll out OKRs in your business, step by step

The method works best in businesses with an open culture, where people collaborate and there is room for initiative. If every decision in your company has to go through the manager, start by changing the culture, not by building a spreadsheet.

The push has to come from whoever runs the business. They need to believe in the method and lead it, otherwise it turns into yet another form people fill in once a quarter.

Step 1: explain OKRs to the team

Before anyone writes a first objective, explain to everyone how the method works, why you chose it and what it gives the business and the people in it. In a larger company, start with team leads so they can pass the idea on correctly.

Step 2: set the top-level objective

The top-level objective is set by the owner or the leadership team. Write it in plain language and choose the key results that will measure it. If you are not sure where the business stands today, a SWOT analysis is a good starting point.

Step 3: teams write their own OKRs

Each team, or each person in a small business, writes their own objectives and key results so that they contribute to the top-level objective. Then you review them all together and check that nothing is duplicated and no objectives contradict each other.

Step 4: make sure everything is measurable

Every key result needs a data source. Check that conversion tracking on the website works, that the CRM records the source of each lead and that every number you picked can be pulled without hours of manual work.

Step 5: a short weekly check-in

Once a week, review progress. This is a 15 to 30 minute meeting: where each key result stands, what is stuck and what needs to change. Without this check-in, the method is forgotten within two weeks.

Step 6: the quarterly review

At the end of the quarter, score every key result, for example on a scale from 0 to 1, and look at what worked and what did not. Use those conclusions to write the OKRs for the next quarter. If you work in sprints, this review fits naturally with the approaches we describe in our guide to Agile and Waterfall.

Tools for tracking OKRs

You do not need an expensive system to get started. What matters is that the objectives are visible to everyone and the numbers stay up to date.

A shared spreadsheet or document

For a small business, Google Sheets is perfectly enough: one column for the objective, one for each key result, plus the starting point, the target and the current value. The sheet is open to the whole team and gets updated at the weekly check-in.

Work management platforms

If you already use monday.com, Asana, ClickUp or Notion, most of them offer templates or features for goals and OKRs. The advantage is that objectives live in the same place as the tasks, so it is easy to see which tasks move which key result.

An automated dashboard

The next step is a dashboard that updates itself. Website data comes from Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, lead data from the CRM, and advertising data from Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads. You can bring all of it together in Looker Studio or another BI tool. We go deeper into this in our guides to business intelligence (BI) and end-to-end marketing analytics.

Automating the updates

So that nobody has to copy numbers by hand, you can connect your data sources to the sheet or dashboard with n8n, Make or Zapier. For example, a workflow that pulls the number of leads from the CRM every Monday, updates the OKR table and sends the team a short summary in Slack or WhatsApp.

Common mistakes when rolling out OKRs

Too many objectives

Ten objectives per quarter is really a to-do list. When everything is important, nothing is. Pick a few objectives and focus on them.

Key results that are really tasks

"Launch a new website" or "start a campaign" are things you do, not outcomes. You can tick off the task and still make no progress towards the objective. Ask yourself: which number will change if this task succeeds?

Tying OKRs directly to bonuses

When hitting a target decides the bonus, people set comfortable targets. The objectives stop being ambitious, and the method loses its point.

Set and forget

Objectives written at the start of the quarter and opened again only at the end change nothing. The weekly check-in is what turns OKRs from a form into a working tool.

Measuring what is easy instead of what matters

Likes and visits are easy to measure, but they are not always linked to revenue. It is better to invest in connecting the website to your CRM and in conversion tracking, and to measure leads and sales.

Dictating from the top

If leadership writes the OKRs for every employee, they are no longer OKRs but KPIs under another name. Teams need to write their own objectives.

How RJL Studio helps turn goals into measurable results

At RJL Studio we do not write your strategy for you, but we make sure you have something to measure and the means to move the numbers. We set up conversion tracking on your website, connect your forms to WhatsApp and to CRMs such as monday CRM and HubSpot, build dashboards and run automations in n8n, Make and Zapier that keep the data up to date without manual work. When the goal is more leads from your website, we also build and improve the site itself and its SEO.

Want your business goals to be measured automatically? Read about our automation and integration services and our SEO services, or get in touch and we will get back to you.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between OKRs and KPIs in one sentence?

KPIs measure the ongoing performance of the business and of each employee, while OKRs define a significant change the business wants to achieve over a set period, usually a quarter. You can, and often should, use both together.

Do OKRs work for a small business?

Yes. In a small business the method is even simpler: one or two objectives per quarter, three key results for each and a shared spreadsheet. What matters is the weekly check-in, not the size of the team.

How many key results should each objective have?

Usually between two and five. Fewer than two is not enough to describe the objective, and more than five spreads your attention too thin. For a small business, three key results per objective is a good place to start.

What should we do if we miss an objective?

If you reached around 70% on an ambitious objective, that is a success. If you landed well below that, use the quarterly review to find out why: the objective was unrealistic, the data was missing or priorities changed along the way. Those conclusions feed into how you write next quarter's OKRs.

Which tool should we use to manage OKRs?

To start with, Google Sheets or a shared document is enough. If your team already works in monday.com, Asana, ClickUp or Notion, it is convenient to manage objectives there. Once you have many data sources, it is worth building a dashboard that updates automatically.