Sales Quota & Capacity Planner

Because roughly 63% of reps hit full quota, per The Bridge Group. If you divide your target by quota and hire that many people, you have built a plan that only works if everyone is above average. Setting expected attainment to something like 70 or 80% is not pessimism, it is the observed distribution.

The Bridge Group puts average SDR ramp at 3.1 months and AEs at four to six, and sales leaders at six to nine. Whatever your figure is, measure it rather than assume it — most agencies discover their real ramp is longer than they believed, because they were counting from the first closed deal rather than from consistent quota performance.

Yes, and it is the input people most want to leave out. Average rep tenure is around 1.8 years, which means a team of six needs roughly one replacement hire a year just to stand still. Plan without it and you spend the year hiring reactively, which is slower and more expensive than hiring on a schedule.

Then one of the other inputs has to move, and the tool is showing you which. Raising attainment or shortening ramp are cheaper than headcount and are structure problems — onboarding, playbooks, tracking, coaching cadence. That is usually where we start, because adding people to a system that ramps slowly just adds more people ramping slowly.

No. Hiring in a cohort overwhelms whoever is doing the onboarding and lengthens everybody's ramp at exactly the moment you needed it short. Stagger them, and be honest that the last rep hired in a year contributes a fraction of a quota, not a whole one.

A common starting point is three to five times fully-loaded cost, then sense-check it against pipeline: the standard coverage rule is 3× quota in open pipeline, so a quota you cannot generate three times over in opportunities is a quota nobody can hit regardless of skill.