# Pipedrive goals: set the target per month, not one number for the year

https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-goals-monthly-targets/
Published: 2026-10-03 · Updated: 2026-10-25

To set Pipedrive goals that follow your season, open Insights, create a deal goal on won deals by value, give it a start and an end date, and check “Specify individual period goals” so each month carries its own number instead of a flat twelfth of the year. Then add the goal to the dashboard the manager actually opens before the weekly meeting. That last step is what keeps the goal alive; a goal that lives on its own tab gets looked at in December.

This is about the setup inside Pipedrive. We assume the annual figure already exists; choosing it is a different question.

## A flat target in a seasonal year

The quickest way to put a goal into Pipedrive is to type one number and pick “yearly”. For most small B2B teams the progress it then shows is wrong for about nine months of the year.

Take a team whose buyers sign in March, June and especially November, while almost nothing closes in January or August. If the annual goal is divided evenly, the team is “behind” in February, badly “behind” in August, and then suddenly ahead in late November. None of that is information. The reps know the summer is slow. The manager knows it. The chart is the only one in the room that doesn’t. To see whether a slow month is the season or the team, compare it with [the same month last year](https://salesbond.app/blog/seasonal-pipeline-same-month-last-year-pipedrive/).

After six months of a red bar and a year that still lands, people stop looking at the goal widget, including in the one month where being behind actually matters. Give each period its own target, so that “behind” means behind this month’s realistic number.

## Which of the three goal types to start with

Pipedrive Insights offers three families of goals: deal goals, activity goals and forecast goals ( [Pipedrive: Insights goals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-goals)). Deal goals come in three flavors, added, progressed and won, and each can be tracked by count or by value. Activity goals count activities added or completed, and you choose which activity types count. Forecast goals track the weighted value of open and won deals, using deal probability and stage, and they are not available on every Pipedrive plan.

Start with one: deals won, by value. It is the number the owner asks about, and the one where seasonality bites hardest. If your deals use [recurring products or installments](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-recurring-products-vs-installments/), a goal by value counts the deal value, not the ACV and TCV those settings calculate. We would not start with an activity goal, even though it is the easier one to hit, because a team that hits 40 calls a week and misses revenue has learned to produce calls.

Add an activity goal second, and only for the activity you have evidence is scarce. If deals stall because first meetings aren’t being booked, a goal on completed meetings is fair. A goal that counts every activity type is not; reps fill it with emails.

Forecast goals we leave for later. They lean on stage probabilities, which in a team new to goals usually don’t mean much yet. A forecast goal built on optimistic close dates reports that you are on track right up to the week you aren’t.

Won-by-value goals also show up in the Revenue forecast report ( [Pipedrive: Insights goals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-goals)), and that report places won deals by their won time ( [Pipedrive: Revenue forecast](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-reports-revenue-forecast)). So a won time edited at month end moves the deal between months there; we covered that case in [when won time gets edited at month end](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-won-time-edit-month-end/).

## Setting up Pipedrive goals by month

The seasonality option is a checkbox called “Specify individual period goals”. It appears for goals that have an end date ( [Pipedrive: Insights goals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-goals)). A goal with no end date cannot have different numbers per period, so the first decision is to give it one. We set goals one quarter at a time, with a monthly frequency, and create the next one during the last week of the current quarter.

Here is the sequence we use.

1. Pull last year’s won deals for the same quarter, month by month. Say the team closed $62,000 in January, $88,000 in February and $130,000 in March: $280,000, with March carrying almost half.
2. Turn those into shares of the quarter: roughly 22%, 31% and 47%. Round them; nobody will manage to a decimal.
3. Apply the shares to this year’s quarterly target. With a $300,000 target the months come out at $66,000, $93,000 and $141,000. Check the sum: $66,000 + $93,000 + $141,000 = $300,000. If it doesn’t add up, fix the biggest month, not the smallest.
4. In Insights, create the goal: deal, won, value, assigned to the user or the team (team goals exist only on some plans), the pipeline or pipelines it should count, frequency monthly, start date the first of the quarter, end date the last day of the quarter.
5. Check “Specify individual period goals”. Enter one value, click “Apply to all”, then overwrite each month with your three numbers and save.

![Two bar charts for one quarter: a flat $100,000 monthly target vs. period targets of $66,000, $93,000 and $141,000 against the same results](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pipedrive-goals-monthly-targets-2.png)

If the business has grown a lot, the shares usually still hold even when last year’s totals don’t. Take out any one-off deal before computing them. With less than a year of history, set the shares by hand from what the reps say about their buyers; a rough seasonality the team believes beats a precise one nobody does. Whether the target needs another rep is a separate question with its own article: [capacity planning for a small sales team](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-capacity-planning-small-team/).

## Rep goals, team goals, who can edit what

A goal in Pipedrive is assigned to a user, to a team, or to the whole company ( [Pipedrive: Insights goals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-goals)).

- A company goal can be created by a user who has both deal admin and global admin permissions.
- Team goals exist only on some Pipedrive plans.
- A team manager can add, edit and delete goals of the users in their team, if both of those permissions are enabled.
- Regular users cannot add, edit or delete other users’ goals.

For a team of three to ten reps, our setup is one team goal for won value, with the monthly split from the section above, plus one individual goal per rep, also split by month. In Pipedrive these are separate goals, and nothing forces them to add up. How to size each of them is covered in [how to set sales quotas](https://salesbond.app/blog/how-to-set-sales-quotas/).

We set rep goals as the manager, and the reason isn’t control. A number a rep sets in a good week gets renegotiated in a bad one. Set at the start of the the quarter and left alone, it keeps the monthly conversation on deals, not on whether the target was fair.

## Putting the goal on the dashboard you actually open

Add the goal with “Add to dashboard”, or drag it onto a dashboard from the Goals list ( [Pipedrive: Insights goals](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-goals)). This is the step most teams skip, and it is why thier goals die.

Which Insights dashboard does the manager open before the weekly pipeline meeting? That one. Not a new “Goals” dashboard, which is what “+ New dashboard” gives you when you add the goal: a dashboard with the goal as its only item. It gets opened twice and forgotten. We wrote separately about [the six numbers on a sales manager’s dashboard](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-manager-dashboard-six-numbers/); put the goal widget next to open pipeline against target.

The goal widget shows a column per period with the result against the target, and clicking a column opens the deals behind it. “We are at $41,000 of $66,000 in January” is a status. Clicking through and seeing that two of the three deals that got us there came from one rep, and the third was a renewal, is a conversation. To [turn goals into a simple leaderboard](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-leaderboard-small-team-pipedrive/), rank each rep against their own goal rather than by raw totals.

## The monthly check

The first week of every month, before the team meeting, the manager opens the dashboard and looks at exactly two things on the goal widget: did last month land, and is this month’s target still the right one. Monthly, because a monthly target checked weekly produces four mini-panics for every real one. The weekly meeting has its own job, and the split between the two is the subject of [a meeting cadence for a small sales team](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-meeting-cadence-small-team/).

If last month missed, the question for the meeting is not “why”, at least not first. It is “which deals did we expect in that month that didn’t close, and where are they now”. The answer is in the pipeline and it usually turns out that the deals didn’t vanish; they moved to this month with the same close date pushed thirty days. That is fine once. By the third month it is the forecast lying, and the response is to stop counting those deals in next month’s expectation, not to raise next month’s goal.

If the month was hit but the quarter looks shaky, do not touch the monthly numbers mid-quarter. Write the adjustment down for the next quarter’s goal instead, that is what the end date is for.

The goal widget tells you that you are behind, and the deal list tells you which deals, but neither tells you why a specific deal is stuck or what to do about it this week. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses. Its Deal Health checks every deal in the connected CRM against more than 20 rules, gives a deal a health score once at least three rules apply to it, shows the specific violations and explains what to do, so the monthly talk starts from deals with reasons, not a red column. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

If you are reading this in early October, the fourth quarter has already started. Set the goal for November and December now, then do January properly in the last week of December, with last year’s won deals open in the other tab.