How to set and achieve business goals in 2025

Business goals frameworks

Whether you’re running a startup or an established company, setting business goals helps your teams prioritize and work toward shared success. The challenge lies in turning your vision into clear targets.

In this article, you’ll learn what business goals are, what types of business goals are, why they matter and the essential steps to setting goals that drive growth.


What are business goals?

Business goals are outcomes that a company wants to achieve within a given period. They can be high-level, like Amazon’s goal to “become Earth’s most customer-centric company” or measurable and specific goals like “reduce customer complaints by 25% this quarter”.

Business goals fall into two categories:

  • Long-term goals, which span several years and represent the company’s broader vision and strategic direction

  • Short-term goals, which focus on a time frame of anywhere from a couple of months up to a year and cover specific areas like financial goals, strategic initiatives and operational improvements

Companies typically maintain multiple short-term goals that support the long-term goal.

Take Amazon’s early goal to “become Earth’s most customer-centric company”. To achieve this long-term vision, they set progressive short-term goals: they developed Prime delivery, created a generous return policy and invested heavily in customer service.

These decisions helped transform Amazon from an online bookstore into one of the world’s largest companies.

Why are business goals important?

Well-defined goals help drive your business plan forward. Here’s how they impact different aspects of your company.

They guide decision-making

Teams constantly face choices about where to spend their time and resources. Business goals make these decisions easier by providing criteria for evaluating your options. You can assess every opportunity by asking, “Does this help us reach our target?”

For example, suppose your goal is to “grow enterprise clients by 30%”. In that case, your sales team may prioritize large accounts over small businesses or focus on hiring new team members with enterprise experience.

They give a clear benchmark for success

Without measurable goals, tracking your progress can be challenging. Goals give you specific numbers and clear targets to hit. You’ll know what success looks like and can quickly spot when your strategy needs adjusting.

For example, if your goal is to reduce customer wait times to under two minutes before the end of Q4, you can easily measure current wait times and see how changes affect this number.

They align departments around one vision

Different teams often have competing priorities that can pull your company in multiple directions. Business goals give everyone a shared destination to work toward so each department can align its work to achieve it together.

For example, suppose your goal is to become the easiest product to use in the market. In that case, your design team might simplify features, support might create better help documents and marketing might focus messages on simplicity and ease of use.

They encourage accountability

Without goals, it’s easy for tasks to fall between the cracks. Goals help you assign specific responsibilities and deadlines to teams or individuals. Everyone knows what they’re responsible for delivering and by when.

For example, if each sales team member aims to schedule 20 qualified demos per month, they can track their progress daily, and managers can identify who needs support early on.


Frameworks for setting business goals

Several frameworks exist to help you set business goals, each with a different structure for creating and tracking objectives.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to setting business goals. Different frameworks suit different business needs, company sizes and situations.

Here are the most widely used frameworks and how they work. We’ll also explain what each framework is best for and when to avoid using it.

SMART

SMART goals transform vague intentions into actionable targets by making them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Business goals Pipedrive SMART framework


Instead of “grow the business,” you might set sales goals like “acquire 50 new enterprise customers in Q3”.

Each element serves a purpose:

  • Specific clarifies what you’ll achieve

  • Measurable indicates how you’ll track progress

  • Achievable ensures it’s realistic

  • Relevant confirms it matters to your business

  • Time-bound creates urgency with a deadline

SMART business goals help clarify your focus and ensure you can track your progress, regardless of your business model. However, they’re not the best for all cases.

Here’s when to use SMART goals and when to use a different model instead.

Best for

Avoid when

  • Sales targets, where you need clear numbers to motivate teams and track progress (like “acquire 100 new customers”)

  • Launches for new products, where missing deadlines impact multiple teams

  • Performance improvements where specific metrics show what success means (like “increasing conversion rates”)

  • Solving complex problems that need creative thinking rather than fixed targets

  • Operating in emerging markets where goals need frequent revision

  • Prioritizing innovation and detailed metrics might limit new ideas


Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs pair an objective that sets direction with key results that measure progress.

For example, your objective might be to become the most trusted provider in your market, with key results such as 95% customer satisfaction, 98% uptime and response times under one hour.

Most companies set OKRs quarterly and aim to achieve about 70% of each key result. Targeting 70% encourages teams to set ambitious goals without feeling discouraged if they don’t fully achieve them.

Best for

Avoid when

  • Large organizations where many stakeholders need to align around common goals

  • Growing companies that need to balance rapid business growth with quality

  • Major change initiatives (like entering new markets) where you need both vision and concrete progress

  • Small teams need straightforward, simple targets

  • Teams are new to goal-setting and might struggle with the framework’s complexity

  • Organizations lack resources to track multiple metrics regularly


OKRs could be the right choice for your business if you like to aim high and feel comfortable knowing you’re unlikely to achieve a perfect score.

Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

BSC ensures companies don’t focus only on one business area by aligning strategic management across four critical perspectives:

  1. Financial performance

  2. Customer satisfaction

  3. Internal processes

  4. Learning/growth

Each area has its own goals and metrics. For example, you might track profit margins (financial), customer service metrics (customer), delivery times (process) and employee training completion rates (learning).

Best for

Avoid when

  • Established companies where success depends on multiple factors working together

  • Organizations with diverse business units that need coordinated growth

  • Companies seeking sustainable growth rather than quick wins

  • Situations require intense focus on a single critical area

  • Small teams track multiple perspectives, as this creates unnecessary complexity

  • In fast-moving environments like tech startups where comprehensive metrics slow decision-making


Tracking several areas with BSC can ensure everyone works in the same direction.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG)

BHAGs are ambitious, long-term business goals that define your company’s ultimate direction.

While your other goals should be attainable in the near term, BHAGs push beyond standard targets to achieve something that might seem impossible, like Microsoft’s goal to put a computer “on every desk and in every home”.

These goals typically span 10+ years and inspire teams to think beyond small improvements while still being specific enough to guide business strategy.

Best for

Avoid when

  • Companies ready to make a fundamental impact on their industry

  • Companies that need to unite diverse teams behind a single vision

  • Stable companies that can invest in long-term transformation

  • Teams need to show regular, incremental progress

  • Quick wins are crucial for survival

  • Markets are unstable, so long-term planning is risky


If you have an established business and want to achieve greater success, a BHAG could be the right choice.

Management by Objectives (MBO)

MBO emphasizes collaborative goal-setting. Rather than having targets handed down from management, managers and employees work together to define performance objectives.

For example, if the company aims to improve efficiency, a team leader might commit to “implement new project management software by Q3 and reduce meeting time by 30%”.

Best for

Avoid when

  • Organizations wanting to increase employee buy-in through shared goal-setting

  • Companies where success depends on strong department-specific targets (like marketing qualified leads)

  • Teams that benefit from customized objectives aligned with company goals

  • In fast-paced environments where collaborative planning takes too long

  • In organizations where teams need to work independently

  • In rapidly changing markets where goals need constant adjustment


Allowing employees to contribute to goals could improve employee satisfaction by giving them more buy-in and control over their work.


How to set business goals step-by-step

Setting effective business goals requires a systematic approach. Here are six key steps for creating and implementing goals that drive progress.

1. Define your long-term vision

Without a clear vision, strategic planning often gets stuck reacting to immediate challenges rather than building for the future.

Your vision works alongside your mission statement, company values and goals.

Mission

  • What you do now

  • Who’s it for

  • How you’ll do it

  • What this achieves

Vision

  • Where you’re going

  • What do you want your mission to achieve – for you, your customers and/or society in general


Goals

  • Tangible ways you’ll carry out your mission and move towards your vision

Values

  • What you stand for

  • Set of beliefs that you create and help you carry out your goals


Your mission defines why you exist, your values guide your operations, and your vision is your company’s destination five to 10 years from now. Together, these elements ensure that every level of your business moves in the same direction.

To define your long-term vision, start by answering these questions:

  • What market position do you want to achieve?

  • What value will you deliver to customers?

  • How large do you want your business to grow?

  • What will make your company distinctive?

Your vision should be ambitious enough to inspire action but also focus on outcomes (what you want to achieve) rather than processes (how you’ll get there).

For example, a virtual meeting software might set this vision: “to become the leading remote collaboration tool for tech teams across North America”. The goal focuses on the result rather than listing improvements like “better video quality” or “more features”.

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2. Determine areas for improvement

Once your destination is clear, you need to identify what’s standing in your way. Key performance indicators are a great place to start. Track the numbers that matter most to your business:

  • Revenue metrics. These include growth rates, customer acquisition costs (CAC) and customer lifetime value.

  • Customer metrics. These include churn/retention rates, satisfaction scores and repeat purchase rates.

  • Operational metrics. These include productivity levels, error rates and delivery times.

  • Financial metrics. These include margins, cash flow and profitability by product.

Pair this quantitative data with qualitative feedback to get the complete picture. Study customer surveys and social media mentions and analyze lost deal reports in your CRM.

Business goals Pipedrive lost deal reason


If the same topic arises repeatedly, you’ve found a weakness you need to address.

Your teams can fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. Create safe channels for honest feedback and encourage everyone to share their insights. Often, they’ll reveal the “why” behind the numbers you’re seeing.

The most valuable opportunities often lie where multiple data points intersect (like when customer complaints align with weak metrics and team feedback). Choose two or three key areas where improvement will have the biggest impact.

For example, the virtual meeting software company might discover that they have a 22% customer churn rate, high customer acquisition costs and recurring customer support tickets about software integration challenges.

From these insights, they prioritize improving product integrations and reducing customer acquisition costs when setting goals.

3. Turn your vision into actionable goals

After identifying areas for improvement, you can transform those insights into specific goals using your chosen goal-setting framework.

Imagine the virtual meeting software chooses the SMART framework because it provides a structured approach to addressing their specific performance challenges, particularly when they need clear, measurable targets for improving customer acquisition and product integrations.

They develop two specific, short-term business goals:

  • Reduce CAC from $250 to $150 per customer by Q4

  • Develop and launch three new third-party software integrations by Q3

Remember that frameworks are tools, not rules. Adapt them to serve your business needs rather than letting them restrict your thinking. The best framework helps your team understand its goals and how to achieve them.

4. Break down goals into short-term objectives

Big goals often feel overwhelming, making it hard to know where to start and maintain momentum. Breaking them into shorter objectives creates a clear starting point and makes progress visible, helping teams stay motivated.

Start by setting your first milestone, which should be ambitious but achievable within three months. Then, break it into two or three time-based objectives to drive progress toward that milestone.

Each objective needs a clear owner responsible for driving progress, specific success criteria and a deadline.

In our virtual meeting software example, they might decide to have a first milestone of reaching a CAC of $225 rather than jumping straight to $150. They break this down into three business objectives:

  1. Identify and cut the lowest performing 20% of marketing channels by ROI, reallocating budget to top performers by February 15th

  2. Launch an automated lead scoring system that flags leads with >40% conversion probability for priority follow-up by March 1st

  3. Create a real-time dashboard tracking conversion rates at each funnel stage, with alerts for any stage dropping below target rates by February 28th

Set up weekly progress reviews for each objective. Success requires clear ownership and accountability. Assign a specific person to drive each objective rather than leaving it to a team or department.

Meet with each owner at the start to clarify expectations and ensure they have everything they need to succeed.

Note: while “business goals” and “business objectives” are often used interchangeably, they differ. Business goals are the specific targets you want to achieve, whereas business objectives are the specific strategies and actions you’ll take to reach those goals.


5. Align your team around shared goals

When you share your business goals with your teams, share the “why” behind each one. Show how achieving these goals benefits everyone, not just the company.

In our virtual meeting software example, reducing the CAC from $250 to $150 could save them $100,000 monthly.

The savings could allow engineering to hire two more developers to build requested features faster, customer support to expand its team to reduce response times and sales to invest in better tools and training. Sharing these benefits with the teams helps get them onboard and keeps them motivated to achieve your business goal.

To build and maintain alignment across your organization, focus on four key elements:

  1. Clear communication. Document goals in simple language that connects to each team’s work. Turn a revenue target into customer satisfaction goals for support teams or product milestones for developers.

  2. Ongoing visibility. Make goals part of daily work through visual dashboards in common areas, dedicated sections in team meetings and progress tracking in project tools everyone uses.

  3. Open dialogue. Schedule regular one-on-ones and team discussions focused on goals. Create anonymous feedback channels to surface concerns and ideas that might not emerge in group settings.

  4. Active ownership. Let teams help set their own targets, give them a budget and encourage them to experiment with different approaches to reaching goals.

Alignment is ongoing, not a one-time announcement. Regular communication and visible progress tracking maintain momentum and keep everyone moving in the same direction.

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6. Implement a system for tracking progress

Regular tracking helps you validate what’s working and catch problems early.

Start by identifying the metrics that matter for each type of goal:

  • Short-term targets need granular metrics like sign-up rates, campaign performance and lead quality scores

  • Monthly objectives track broader trends like CAC, channel ROI and conversion rates

  • Strategic goals focus on growth indicators like market share, customer lifetime value and profitability

Connect these metrics to your existing tools. Most customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, project management software and analytics tools offer API connections or built-in integrations.

Link them to dashboard tools like Mixpanel or Scoop Analytics or use built-in reporting features to surface key metrics. Set thresholds for each metric and alerts when numbers fall outside expected ranges.

In our example, the virtual meeting software company may automate its CAC tracking through connected dashboards.

Marketing reviews campaign performance weekly to catch significant shifts in channel effectiveness, sales analyze lead quality trends every two weeks to refine their scoring system and finance calculates CAC by channel monthly to guide budget decisions.

When metrics show you’re off track, resist the urge to push harder with the same approach. Review your initial assumptions by talking to customers and frontline teams and run small experiments to validate new approaches before making major changes.

The path to your goal often looks different than you expected. The key is staying flexible in your methods while remaining committed to your destination.

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Track your sales goals with Pipedrive

Pipedrive streamlines sales goal tracking through its comprehensive dashboard system.

Customize your dashboard to monitor real-time metrics that matter most to your team, from conversion rates to revenue targets.

Business goals Pipedrive insights dashboard


Activity tracking shows your team’s daily sales efforts like completed calls, meetings and follow-ups.

Granular insights like these help identify where adjustments could boost performance.

Business goals Pipedrive activities dashboard


The goal-setting functionality takes this further. You can set custom targets for individuals or entire teams and track progress through daily, weekly or monthly views.

Real-time dashboard updates keep everyone aligned and motivated.

Business goals Pipedrive dashboard


Deal status reports reveal pipeline health, while performance metrics spotlight win rates and revenue tracking measures financial success.

All these insights make it simple to spot trends early and adjust strategies to meet your targets.

Business goals Pipedrive reports dashboard


Challenges of setting business goals

Business goals must satisfy multiple stakeholders, from investors seeking growth to teams needing sustainable workloads and a customer base expecting consistent quality. Balancing these competing needs surfaces several common challenges.

Setting unrealistic targets

Investors and business owners often push for ambitious growth targets, like wanting to increase revenue by 300%. However, if your hiring and training can’t keep pace, you’ll burn out teams chasing impossible numbers.

Base your targets on current performance and available resources.

Misalignment with vision

Short-term goals often undermine long-term strategy.

Before setting any target, ask how achieving it affects your strategic priorities.

Will hitting an aggressive quarterly sales goal require compromising product quality? Could rapid expansion dilute your customer experience?

Revise the target if reaching a goal requires sacrificing what matters most to your strategy.

Lack of clarity and ownership

Vague goals like “improve customer experience” confuse teams about success and who’s responsible for getting there.

Define the specific target and who’s accountable for reaching it. Break broad aims into measurable objectives with clear owners.

Poor communication

Business leaders can’t make a single announcement and expect results. Instead, they should make goals part of daily conversations. They should use visual dashboards, regular updates and team meetings to keep everyone focused on critical priorities.

Review your goals regularly and listen to team feedback. Small adjustments early prevent bigger problems later.


Final thoughts

The best goal-setting process balances ambition with achievability, uniting teams around targets that drive sustainable growth. These six steps – from defining your vision to implementing tracking systems – create a roadmap for success.

Goal setting works best as an ongoing process, not a yearly planning exercise. Set direction, measure progress and adapt based on what you learn. Your CRM can help automate much of this work through custom dashboards and alerts.

Start your 14-day free trial today and see how Pipedrive’s powerful CRM features can elevate your email marketing strategy.

Driving business growth

Driving business growth