HubSpot Goals: What They Are, What They Can Do, and Where They Fall Short
You've probably seen the goals tool in HubSpot and thought "I'll set that up when I have time." Which means it's been sitting there for months.
Fair. But goals are one of those features that quietly makes everything else in your portal more useful — your dashboards, your pipeline reviews, your conversations with leadership about whether things are working. So let's walk through what they actually are, what they're good at, and where you'll hit a wall.
What are HubSpot goals?
At their simplest, goals are a way to track a specific target for a specific person over a specific time period. That's it.
Every goal has three building blocks: a metric (what you're measuring), a time period (when you're measuring it), and attribution (who's accountable for the number). They're always quantifiable — based on CRM data, objects, and properties. Think of them like a report with a target attached.
Goals live in the Reporting section of HubSpot. They're designed for tracking things like quota attainment, deal counts, activities completed, and revenue targets. They are not the same as marketing goals or ad campaign goals — those are separate features with different mechanics.
Why bother?
Because a number without a target is just a number.
Your reps closed $400K last quarter. Is that good? Depends on what you were aiming for. Goals give you the benchmark. They turn raw data into context, and context is what drives better conversations in pipeline reviews, forecasting meetings, and performance check-ins.
They also make your dashboards more useful. A revenue chart is fine. A revenue chart with a goal line showing whether you're on pace? That's something people actually look at.
When should you use them?
Goals work best when you need to track individual or team performance against a defined target on a repeating basis. Monthly quotas. Quarterly revenue targets. Weekly activity benchmarks for prospecting.
They're a good fit when:
You have a clear metric tied to CRM data (revenue, deal count, activities, tickets resolved)
You need accountability at the individual or team level
You want that data showing up on dashboards alongside everything else
You're running pipeline reviews or forecast meetings and need a benchmark
They're not the right tool when your target is vague ("improve customer satisfaction"), when there's no CRM data backing it, or when you need complex hierarchical rollups across regions or business units.
What can they measure?
This depends on your HubSpot tier.
Starter gets you basic revenue goals. Professional opens up all the goal templates — revenue, deals closed, calls made, meetings booked, and more. The templates are pre-built metrics based on HubSpot's default data model, so the math is already done for you.
Enterprise is where it gets interesting. Custom goals let you define your own metric using any standard or custom property, on any supported object. You can also save those as templates for reuse.
HubSpot recently expanded what's available too. You can now create goals around leads created, activities completed, and tasks. The leads object is available for custom goals on Enterprise. So if your team is doing outbound prospecting and you want to track lead generation by rep, that's now an option.
For revenue goals specifically, you can filter by pipeline. So if you've got a new business pipeline and a renewals pipeline, you can track those separately instead of lumping everything together. Clean swim lanes.
And if your team uses deal splits — where credit for a deal is shared between multiple reps — those now automatically factor into goal tracking. No extra setup needed. If deal splits are turned on in your portal, HubSpot incorporates them into progress calculations. This was a long-standing gap that got fixed recently.
What about reporting?
Goals are only useful if people actually see the data. And most reps are not going to voluntarily open the goals app.
HubSpot added a few report types you can create directly from a goal and drop onto a dashboard: a progress gauge that shows a visual progress bar with a percentage, a line chart for attainment over time, and a leaderboard that ranks people by goal progress. All three support dynamic filters, so reps see their own numbers and managers see the full picture.
You can also build goal reports in the single object report builder, which gives you a bit more flexibility.
One thing to know: goal reports aren't available in the custom report builder yet. That's in development. When it lands, you'll have much more control over how goal data looks and what you can combine it with. But for now, the options above cover most use cases.
Where goals fall short
No tool does everything. Here's where you'll run into limits.
Goals don't roll over year to year. When 2025 ended, your goals didn't automatically extend into 2026. You had to create new ones. There's no auto-clone or repeat feature.
There's no carryover logic either. If a rep misses January's target by $20K, that $20K doesn't get redistributed to February through December. You'd need to manually adjust targets using the CSV upload.
Line items and products aren't supported as goal objects. If you sell physical products and want quantity-based goals per SKU or product line, you'll need a workaround — custom properties or separate reporting.
Hierarchical rollups don't exist. You can't set up a structure like "company goal breaks into regional goals breaks into team goals breaks into individual goals" inside a single goal. You'd need separate goals for each level and manage them independently.
Geographic or regional grouping isn't available. HubSpot doesn't currently have the underlying territory or division structure that would make region-based goals possible. Same limitation applies to forecasting. The hierarchy needs to exist in the platform before goals can use it.
Goals can't track the AI customer agent. If you're using HubSpot's AI agent and wanted to set SLA-style goals for it like you would for a human rep, that's not supported today.
Forecastable revenue goals can't use the new goal reports yet. That's a known issue the team is working on, but there's no timeline.
And period-over-period comparisons are clunky. Because goals don't carry continuity from year to year, looking at a rep's attainment trend across multiple years takes extra work.
What's on the horizon
HubSpot shared a few things they're actively working on or discussing. Nothing here is guaranteed, but it gives you a sense of direction.
Goals as a data source in the custom report builder is in development. This will be a big one — it'll let you build exactly the reports you want with goal data mixed into custom reports alongside other CRM data.
The goals team and forecasting team are working more closely together to improve how goals, forecasts, pipeline stages, and snapshots interact. Right now these tools don't really talk to each other. That's a known gap and they're in active conversation about fixing it.
Multiple main teams is in beta. This would help when reps contribute to more than one team and you need goals to reflect that without duplication issues.
Line item goals, auto-cloning goals year over year, weighted or auto-redistributing targets, native integration with the sales workspace homepage, and regional/geographic goal grouping have all been raised and are on HubSpot's radar — but none are in active development as far as we know. If any of these matter to you, posting on the HubSpot Ideas Forum is the best way to get them prioritized.
So what now?
HubSpot goals aren't flashy. They're a straightforward tool for answering a straightforward question: are we on track?
They work best when you keep them simple — clear metric, defined time period, specific owner. Where they get frustrating is when you try to force them into something they're not built for yet, like complex hierarchies or product-level tracking.
Use them for what they're good at. Work around the gaps where you can. And keep an eye on the custom report builder integration — that's going to open up a lot.
Want help figuring out which goals make sense for your team and how to set them up without the headaches? Start here.