Separate people, capacity, and available work
Estimate how much revenue the roster could produce, then check how many qualified opportunities it can work. A team can have enough sellers for its target but too little pipeline, or enough pipeline but too much evaluation work for the available sellers.
- Fix the reporting date, segment, role, motion, currency, outcome metric, and planning period.
- Record each seller's allocation, start and exit dates, availability, and ramp. Report people on the roster, contracted full-time equivalents, and ramp-adjusted productive equivalents separately.
- Calibrate output on comparable roles and periods; show rep and rep-month counts. Separate leader-attributed production and historical ramp months from a repeatable fully productive AE baseline.
Compare revenue capacity and workload
Productive equivalents equal each seller's available allocation multiplied by the applicable ramp factor, summed across sellers. Modeled dollar capacity applies a comparable period output rate. If quota already includes ramp or time away, do not reduce it again.
- Compare eligible incoming work, active book, deal complexity, and buyer commitments with observed throughput.
- Count all resolved opportunities when estimating processing throughput, and count wins when estimating revenue output. A batch of administrative closures can inflate throughput without freeing a comparable amount of selling time.
- Incoming opportunities / processing capacity shows whether new work is arriving faster than the team usually resolves it. It does not measure hours occupied.
- Open opportunities / processing capacity estimates how many periods of work sit in the active book. It does not predict individual close dates.
Model timing, then choose one action
Put recruiting time, start dates, ramp, departures, and sales-cycle length on the calendar. Estimate a new hire's contribution only after they can work qualified demand with enough time left to close.
- Test hiring, rebalancing eligible work, improving demand, removing friction, or revising an assumption as separate scenarios.
- Save the current roster and demand, the change tested, its expected start date, the limiting assumption, and the person responsible for the decision.
- Add compensation, employer costs, commissions, and cash timing separately before a spending decision; productive equivalents do not calculate payroll.
- Preserve valid account ownership when rebalancing, using explicit release and reassignment rules.
Worked calculation: account for ramp before adding headcount
Assume six fully ramped AEs, two AEs at 50% productivity, and $20,000 in monthly new ARR bookings per fully productive AE. Hold those assumptions constant for a three-month quarter.
- Productive equivalents: 6 + (2 × 50%) = 7.
- Quarterly capacity: 7 × $20,000 × 3 = $420,000. Against a $450,000 target, the modeled gap is $30,000.
- In a separate scenario where all eight AEs are fully productive for the entire quarter, capacity is 8 × $20,000 × 3 = $480,000.
- Before adding a seller, check when the two ramping AEs will reach full productivity and whether enough qualified opportunities are available. If ramp changes during the quarter, calculate capacity month by month.
Check which assumption caused the gap
If modeled output falls short, check whether the cause is too few qualified opportunities, lower win rates, smaller deals, excessive workload, or late starts. Use recent comparable months for the baseline and mark months with missing data.
- Compare saved capacity estimates with actual output in the same scope, explaining demand and timing separately.
- Track time from eligible coverage need to a useful action, including cases still waiting.
- Retain planned dates when measuring start and ramp milestone error.
- If the same forecast misses repeatedly, inspect the ramp, demand, or throughput assumption responsible before adding more decimal places.