A solid plan is crucial for your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Proper capacity planning and efficient coverage assignments are key to minimizing disruptions, ensuring project timelines are met, and keeping your team productive.
It’s always best to have a plan. Assessing your team’s capacity, planning assignments and due dates accordingly, and having procedures in place for managing assignment coverages, are critical for minimizing disruptions and keeping projects on track.
In this article, we will discuss what capacity planning and assignment coverage are, why you need to stay on top of changes, tips for coverage assignments, and why you should be keeping these topics top of mind when it comes to your GTM plan.
What is Capacity Planning?
At its core, capacity planning is a supply and demand issue: you balance the available hours your teams have (both total and each day) against each project’s needs, as well as other factors such as the project’s labor budget and the demands of stakeholders such as the client.
Using this information, you determine how quickly the project can be done without compromising other projects or incurring too much overtime and allocate your team member’s hours accordingly to ensure the project is completed on time.
Capacity Planning in the GTM Cycle
Capacity planning is integral to every GTM cycle. Streamlining your end-to-end GTM process is essential, yet many companies still spend significant time manually planning and executing this cycle. This often diverts valuable resources from growth-driving initiatives and creates bottlenecks.
To solve this, you need to operationalize your GTM plan. Implementing infrastructure that quickly deploys your plan into operational systems (such as your CRM or HR system) allows teams to focus on their core functions, not time-consuming administrative tasks.
By investing the time and energy it takes to operationalize your plan (including clearing any backlogged tasks) upfront, you can save time later on. Look for ways to simplify your process and, ideally, implement push-of-button delivery.
The days of deploying your GTM plan only once per year are over. You need to build a solid foundation that will support your business and your team as the plan changes.
Why Staying on Top of Changes Is Critical
No matter how well you plan, change is inevitable. You may face market shifts, employee turnover, or organizational restructuring (e.g., mergers or acquisitions). These factors can require rapid modifications to your GTM plan.
Even if you weren’t planning on making any dramatic changes, sometimes circumstances change, and you have to adapt: maybe you need to pivot to remain competitive, or manage employee turnover. You may need to change tactics when selling in a new territory, or navigate a merger or acquisition.
A two- or three-week deployment cycle that requires complete revamping for every adjustment is inefficient and resource-draining. By investing in operationalization, you enable quicker responses to these changes, keeping your business agile and competitive.
The ultimate goal is self-service. Sales managers should be empowered to make changes themselves without relying on the sales ops team, as long as those changes align with the GTM strategy. Self-sufficiency reduces delays, improves efficiency, and eliminates help desk backlogs.
The self-service model is also great because it empowers your reps and sales managers to handle tasks according to what is most critical or urgent for them, not what management considers the most important or urgent. This ensures that tasks and issues are triaged correctly, reducing downtime and preventing backlogs while your reps wait for issues to be addressed.
However, for this self-service model to be successful, you also need to invest in education: Your sales managers need to understand the impact any changes will have on the whole system, including coverage assignments.
What Are Coverage Assignments?
Effective coverage assignments ensure that you have the right people, with the right skill sets, handling the right accounts. This includes determining which sales roles—such as salesperson, sales engineer, or product specialist—are needed for specific accounts, depending on the nature of each deal.
Assigning Resources by Market Segment
In addition to skill-based assignments, coverage assignments can also involve organizing your sales team into specialized groups based on market focus. For instance, you might have a team dedicated to enterprise clients and another to SMBs. The goal is to ensure that each customer or prospect receives appropriate attention from the right experts, improving the likelihood of successful conversions.
For example, an account heavily involved with the healthcare industry may require a sales team member with specialized knowledge of healthcare-specific challenges and solutions. Aligning skills with market segments helps ensure the best possible customer experience.
Dividing Your Sales Team by Market
Assignment coverage can also involve creating multiple sales teams focusing on different markets or business types (such as having an enterprise-focused team and an SMB focused team). Ideally, your goal should be to ensure that all of your customers or prospects in your different accounts or segments have the appropriate sales resources assigned to cover any deals or other interactions you may have with that customer.
For example, if you have a customer who deals with a high volume of healthcare providers, you will want to make sure their team includes someone who has experience working with healthcare providers and can offer appropriate insights.
Maximizing Customer Experience and Minimizing Costs
Effective coverage planning balances two key goals: delivering an excellent customer experience while controlling costs. This balance is critical to avoiding unnecessary resource allocation and ensuring that your sales efforts are as efficient as possible.
Minimizing Sales Team Overlap
Assignment coverage is also critical for minimizing overlap (and potential conflict) on your sales team: you want to make sure you don’t inadvertently assign two sales reps overlapping territories, verticals, or other categories or give your highest performing sales rep a batch of low potential leads while leaving your newest member to handle your most profitable accounts.
Moreover, an equitable assignment strategy ensures that all sales reps have access to a balanced set of opportunities, preventing the loudest voices from monopolizing resources.
Good assignment coverage can also help address one of the most common complaints in the sales industry: the loudest team member gets the best leads and most support, while quieter team members are left with less-profitable potential leads and less support simply because they aren’t as vocal.
Specialization and Verticalization as Your Organization Grows
As your company scales, your sales team roles may need to become more specialized. This approach, called verticalization, involves grouping your sales teams based on specific industries or markets (e.g., government, healthcare, financial services).
With specialized teams, each group can hone its sales strategies to better cater to the unique needs of the vertical. You may also need to hire product specialists who provide technical insights to support sales teams targeting complex or highly technical products.
For example, if you have a multimillion-dollar deal come in, then it makes sense to bring in your product specialist and assign it to your top-performing salesperson. However, without clear guidelines in place, who gets to call on that additional support might be whichever sales rep is the loudest, not whichever rep has been assigned an account that would benefit most from the additional support.
Efficient Resource Sharing and Guidelines
In organizations with multiple specialized teams, there should be clear resource-sharing guidelines to ensure that the right experts are brought in to support the right opportunities. For instance, if a multimillion-dollar deal arises, your product specialists and your top-performing sales reps should be assigned to the deal, following predefined deal parameters. Without such clear guidelines, resource allocation may end up being driven by subjective factors, such as the most vocal rep, rather than the most logical fit.
As organizations get larger, it is more likely that your sales ops team won’t know everything that is going on from a staffing standpoint on the sales manager and sales rep side, so they might not even realize an account is inactive right away and your organization has already missed out on a lot of new opportunities.
To avoid this type of scenario, you should develop a set of defined policies on how things are done. This is also critical for handling scenarios such as re-assigning accounts when a sales rep leaves.
By developing and enforcing policies, you can create a consistent, repeatable process designed to handle disruptions like staff turnover quickly and efficiently, minimizing or even eliminating downtime and helping ensure you aren’t missing key opportunities or neglecting customers.
How Fullcast Can Help Optimize Capacity Planning and Coverage Assignments
Even the best planning and policies can fall short without the right tools to support them. This is where Fullcast comes in.
Fullcast is an end-to-end platform that streamlines your revenue operations, empowering your teams to execute their GTM strategies more effectively. Here’s how Fullcast can help:
Sales Strategy:
- Build segmentation and territory models using AI-powered insights.
- Design coverage models and roles, and easily push them to Salesforce.
- Set and collaborate on quota planning across your organization.
Sales Management:
- Enable self-service for sales managers to manage changes in accounts, territories, and quotas.
- Get real-time insights on the impact of role, quota, and territory changes on key KPIs.
- Track productivity and performance across your teams and territories.
By leveraging Fullcast, you can ensure your capacity planning and coverage assignments are optimized, helping you scale effectively while maintaining a competitive edge.
Are you ready to take your capacity planning and assignment coverage strategies to the next level?
Book a free Fullcast demo today!
