Regardless of where your pipeline is coming from -- and with the exception of a fully self-service PLG motion -- a person must shepherd that pipeline through the middle of the funnel up to a qualified sales opportunity. This requires that you create and measure a people capacity plan for working pipeline in the same manner as you would for sales quota capacity.

First you start with targets for the pipeline you aim to generate each month. For the purposes of this article, we'll view this in 6-month periods:

Once you have determined the pipeline generation requirements, you will need to determine how much each team of people will contribute to those requirements prior to creating a pipeline people capacity plan. Below, we see both percentage and real-dollar targets by month for what Sales Reps (AEs) will contribute vs. outbound (SDRs), inbound (marketing), and channels (partnerships).

You will now create the pipeline generation people capacity plan in the same manner as you would with sales rep quota capacity, by using the assigned quota for each role and an attainment factor. Here's an example focused on SDRs:

You can extend this model for your channel/partner team if each member of that team carries an individual pipeline generation quota. 

In addition, when creating the sales rep capacity model, you should determine how much pipeline generation each one of them can deliver based on a pipeline generation quota. Since you want to optimize sales rep capacity to revenue quota, the pipeline generation capacity should be an input into the contribution table above. For each of the planning assumptions above, you will need to measure their performance. This includes hiring, attainment to quota, productivity and contribution.

SDR headcount is at or near plan for most of the month along with SDR productivity.  As long hiring levels are maintained relative to plan, SDRs should be delivering against their pipeline targets.

It is important to look at both attainment to plan and contribution for each team that is responsible for pipeline generation to get a full view of performance and where issues may exist. These basic scorecard approaches also allow you to highlight in green, yellow, and red how each is measuring vs. plan:

From the above table, if you compare the inbound SDR attainment and Inbound SDR contribution lines you will notice that attainment is mostly yellow while contribution is mostly green. This confirms that other teams are not delivering enough against the pipeline generation plan and the performance of those teams needs to be investigated and improved. When the other teams improve performance and therefore their contribution, the Inbound SDRs teams contribution will decline, maybe even turning yellow, but this may be acceptable given overall performance.

We recommend you incorporate the above into your weekly cadences (and Revcast makes it easy to do that with all the data, reports, and insights in one place). Some prefer to include it in their weekly forecast calls, others have separate weekly pipeline performance calls to drive focus.  

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