How do you set achievable targets for Capacity Planning?

To set achievable targets for capacity planning, start by analyzing historical data and current demand trends to establish a realistic baseline. Consider factors such as resource availability, operational constraints, and market conditions. Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) targets, and incorporate flexibility to adapt to unexpected changes. Regularly review and adjust targets based on performance metrics and feedback to ensure they remain aligned with organizational goals.

When it comes to capacity planning in the context of sales, the starting point for capacity planning should always be to understand what resource you have, and how it currently performs. This means understanding what different sales roles you have in your organisation, and how they contribute to the revenue funnel. It can be tempting to believe that company targets are the starting point, however the reality is that revenue is an outcome of the plan, not the starting point from which it's derived. Targets are simply there to understand the gap between what the plan is capable of delivering and where you want to be, helping to inform what additional resource or investment is needed to close it.

Setting achievable targets starts with a thorough analysis of historical data and trends. Understand the demand patterns, client expectations, and seasonality to forecast accurately. Collaborate closely with operations and sales teams to align capacity with projected workloads. Use workforce management tools to model various scenarios and identify potential bottlenecks. Set targets that are challenging yet realistic, ensuring they account for factors like attrition, training, and ramp-up time. Regularly review and adjust targets based on real-time data, keeping flexibility to adapt to changing demands while maintaining service levels.

Setting achievable targets starts with a thorough analysis of historical data and trends. Understand the demand patterns, client expectations, and seasonality to forecast accurately. Collaborate closely with operations and sales teams to align capacity with projected workloads. Use workforce management tools to model various scenarios and identify potential bottlenecks. Set targets that are challenging yet realistic, ensuring they account for factors like attrition, training, and ramp-up time. Regularly review and adjust targets based on real-time data, keeping flexibility to adapt to changing demands while maintaining service levels.

Sales capacity planning can become complex when assessing scope, and can have an impact on who should be involved. If working to achieve overall revenue targets, it needs to encompass more than just net new sales, wrapping in planning covering the teams & headcount required to retain and grow existing accounts, as well as net new customer acquisition to drive growth. Even if focussing on net new, there needs to be heavy collaboration with marketing/growth to understand the demand generation activities that are going to help power sales, as effective sales capacity planning is far more complex than just stacking headcount.

Your baseline is the most important part of the process, and in the context of sales planning there's a real need for it to be kept honest. As it's the starting point for all the change, team additions and strategy that you pile on top of existing efforts, it's critical to understand what the existing efforts are capable of producing. Plan should be established through a comprehensive bottom up model, looking at the volume of opportunity and pipeline that is generated across your outbound sales and marketing efforts, and your capability to capture that generated demand. Planning should primarily focus around this aspect, before looking to add or expand "closing" roles like Account Executives.

Planning shouldn't be an annual activity, as the business that surrounds the plan is constantly in flux. In sales capacity planning, it should be reviewed and updated continuously, scenario testing the impact of improving or worsening trends that can be found in the data. This can be tricky, especially when the modelling is carried out in a spreadsheet, where each single scenario or deviation from the plan can require it's own dedicated spreadsheet with calculations across multiple plans. The rest of your business planning relies on your ability to generate revenue, so it's really not the place to be taking shortcuts - The most successful businesses lean into using dedicated sales capacity planning software that helps them remain agile.

Planning collaboration can be incredibly difficult - Each department will have their own perspective of data going in, and discussions can very quickly devolve into picking apart the models, instead of working to build strategies that help plan in the direction towards targets. In sales capacity planning, this can be made especially difficult when run in spreadsheets, as the need for more detailed and nuanced understanding can be lost or misunderstood by some of the involved departments. By getting out of spreadsheets and into dedicated software, businesses can move the conversations away from models, with a quicker and easier understanding of both outcomes and the cost of getting to them.