KPIs Vs Goals Vs Milestone

There is usually a confusion between KPIs, Milestones and Goals and are sometimes even used interchangeably but they are very different from each other. KPIs are NOT goals or milestones.

The goal is the final outcome you hope to achieve and it's usually defined as what success will look like.

A KPI or Key Performance Indicator is a metric that gives you concrete data on how good/bad you are doing towards your goal.

Milestones are the point in your project lifecycle when something substantial has been achieved. For example in the image, milestones can be reaching steps...

Let’s look at an example of a company that need more sales from email marketing, in order to increase sales the team decides to increase the size of their marketing email list. The marketing team starts running a series of campaigns to increase email opt-ins. The campaigns are successful and the email list grows, so the team believes they’ve met their goal. But the emails they collected weren’t well-targeted, and sales stay flat.

Now, in this case, the metric or KPI was to increase E-mail signups but it was not the Goal, the goal was to increase sales, so teams should not confuse KPIs with Goals.

How do you find the right KPI?

Today, we are collecting a lot of data almost about anything and everything, but not every data you collect tells you about how your business is doing or what should you do to increase your business. The key is to find the right Performance Indicator that will actually measure the performance of your business.

For Instance, If my goal is to improve my health, one of my KPI could be my body weight. If I want to win a Marathon, my KPI should be “number of miles I run in a day” NOT “number of steps I take in a day”, Although, If I just want to maintain my ideal body weight my KPI could be “number of steps I take in a day”.

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