Updated July 2026. Consolidated from two shorter posts into one.
Two questions came in together. At what level should I be having goal conversations, user or executive sponsor? And how am I supposed to make time for this with forty-plus accounts?
Both are worth answering. Neither can be answered before defining the word.
Define the Word First
A goal is an objective plus a time frame.
That sounds pedantic until you notice how often the two get used interchangeably. The objective is the thing to accomplish. The time frame is when it has to happen by. Strip the time frame out and what remains is a wish. There is no scarcity in it, no urgency, and nothing to be behind on.
An objective with no deadline is not a goal. It is a preference, and preferences do not get acted on.
Nobody Buys Your Product to Use Your Product
Take email marketing, which everyone understands whether they do it or not.
As the vendor it is easy to believe customers signed up to send emails. That is what the product does. It is plainly why they bought.
Except nobody wants to send emails. They want people at their event. They want purchases. They want signups. That is the objective. The event has a date, and there is the time frame. The goal is filling the room by the fourteenth, and email is the method they picked.
Now watch what happens if you never learn that. You optimize for sends. You help them send more, faster, to bigger lists. You report rising usage. And the room is empty, because the list was purchased, the subject line was weak, and none of that was ever your metric.
That is a Success Gap: the customer completes every task your product requires and still does not get what they came for. High usage with bad retention numbers is what it looks like on a dashboard.
The Goal Exists Whether You Participate or Not
This is the part that reframes the whole activity.
Your customer has a goal right now. They had one when they signed. They will have a new one next quarter. Your involvement in discovering it changes nothing about whether it exists. It only changes whether you are useful to it.
Which decides how you get treated. Participate in the goal and you are strategic. Skip it and optimize for product usage instead, and you are a tool with a person attached, priced accordingly at renewal.
At What Level
Both, and they will not match.
The executive sponsor bought an outcome. The user was handed a task. Ask only the sponsor and you get an objective with no idea whether the work is achievable. Ask only the user and you get a task list with no idea what it is in service of.
The gap between those two answers is frequently the whole problem, and it is why the person doing the work looks resistant when they are actually buried and unclear.
Forty Accounts and No Time
The honest answer: goal discovery is not a separate activity you need to find time for. That framing is why it never happens.
You are already talking to these customers. Kickoffs, check-ins, reviews, support escalations. The question is not whether you have a slot. It is what you spend the slot on. Most check-ins are status recitations that neither party would miss. Replace one of those with what are you trying to accomplish and by when, and you have not added a meeting.
You are not adding work. You are changing what the existing work is for.
And if you lead a team carrying forty accounts each, this one is yours. If your standing agenda is product status and open tickets, you built the calendar that has no room in it. Your team will not conduct different conversations than the ones you ask them to report on.
Goals Move
One caution. Whatever you learn is true today.
The objective shifts, the deadline moves, the sponsor leaves and the new one wants something else. A goal captured once at onboarding and filed is a document about a company that no longer exists. Which raises the obvious next question, how often to revisit, and that has its own answer.
