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4 Ways Capacity-Planning Principles Optimize Territory Planning

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FULLCAST

Fullcast was built for RevOps leaders by RevOps leaders with a goal of bringing together all of the moving pieces of our clients’ sales go-to-market strategies and automating their execution.

Most organizations acknowledge they don’t do capacity planning well. For example, more than 50% of businesses say they primarily rely on desktop tools or internally developed tools for planning, funding, and prioritization, according to industry research conducted by Lawless Research. 

In other words, these businesses are not using industry best practices, automation, and AI to optimize their planning processes.

Read: 4 Territory Planning Strategies To Avoid the Sales Ops Mindset

One of the critical places that businesses tend to underinvest in capacity planning is sales territory planning. Territory planning is enormously consequential for every organization: It directly shapes whether companies can achieve and exceed their revenue goals. Every business should strive to establish sales territories that are efficient, balanced, and fair. Companies need to optimize capacity planning to optimize the territory planning process. Capacity planning is how the talents and capabilities of individual sales reps get utilized to the maximum—but without overwhelming anyone or ignoring their needs.

Read: 4 Ways An Integrated GTM Strategy Drives Territory Planning

Let’s explore four key tips for engaging in effective capacity planning to support optimal territory planning decisions:

1. Break Down a Sales Rep’s Capacity to Sell Into Multiple Discrete, Measurable Components

A sales rep’s capacity to sell shouldn’t be based on a simple formula or a single number. Instead, an individual sales rep’s selling capacity will be shaped by a range of factors, from the team’s structure to current product lines to geographic boundaries and industry verticals. Thus, to accurately estimate a sales rep’s capacity to sell, multiple discrete components need to be measured. For example, how much time do sales reps spend traveling and preparing for customer engagements? How much time do they spend responding to customer problems and concerns? How much time do they spend on administrative tasks? What are the customer satisfaction scores of each sales rep’s customers? 

Read: 4 Ways To Infuse Automation and AI Into Territory Planning

2. Account for the Influence That Turnover Has on Capacity 

A veteran sales rep’s capacity to sell looks very different than a new hire’s selling capacity. That’s because hiring, onboarding, and fully ramping up a new sales rep takes time. As a result, turnover on the sales team can cause dramatic swings in both the sales team’s overall selling capacity, as well as the capacity of individual sales reps. Businesses need to account for the influence that turnover has on capacity and work it into their capacity planning processes. For example, even one key departure can leave the rest of the sales team scrambling as they redistribute workloads and try to create as much continuity for customers as possible. Until the departing sales rep’s replacement is hired and fully ramped – a process that can take months – the sales team will operate at lower capacity. These capacity downturns need to be taken into account when planning territory.

3. Deploy Training and Coaching to Expand Capacity 

Selling capacity is not a finite resource constrained by the sales team’s size. Even if a business is experiencing net losses among the ranks of its sales team, the company can still expand its selling capacity. That’s because every business has access to a secret weapon: Training and coaching. By supporting sales reps with targeted training and coaching opportunities, companies can enable their existing sales team to work more efficiently, engage customers more effectively, and better utilize technology to improve sales outcomes. Moreover, when businesses track the outcomes of training and coaching investments, they know when selling capacity is increased; these quantitative measurements, in turn, become additional data points informing territory planning decisions.

4. Don’t Make Capacity Planning a One-and-Done Activity 

Businesses traditionally only engage in territory planning once a year. But advancements in technology and changing customer expectations have raised the bar: If a business isn’t doing territory planning year-round, it’s already behind the curve. A fundamental way to make territory planning a continuous process is to ensure capacity planning is continuous. When businesses prioritize collecting data for capacity planning purposes, they generate so much valuable data that it invariably gets used to inform territory planning. 

Significantly, capacity planning data speaks to not just individual sales rep’s selling capacity but also the organization’s priorities and goals around revenue generation. The use of this data to inform revenue strategy is known as RevOps, and just like with capacity planning, RevOps needs to remain front-and-center year-round. 

Effective capacity planning is beneficial to more than just individual sales reps. It can also drive an organization’s entire RevOps strategy and help ensure customers consistently have high-quality experiences. To engage in effective capacity planning in support of optimized territory planning decisions, businesses should break down sales reps’ selling capacity into multiple discrete components, account for the influence that turnover has on capacity, deploy training and coaching to expand capacity, and make capacity planning a year-round activity.

Fullcast specializes in helping companies replace their ineffective, legacy capacity planning methods with data-driven approaches that take full advantage of modern technology. 

To learn more about how Fullcast helps organizations optimize territory planning through enhanced capacity planning processes, please visit https://www.fullcast.com/product/plan-collaborate/

 

Imagen del Autor

FULLCAST

Fullcast was built for RevOps leaders by RevOps leaders with a goal of bringing together all of the moving pieces of our clients’ sales go-to-market strategies and automating their execution.