.webp)
Capacity planning is the foundation of a successful GTM strategy - as a revenue operations team, it’s what we build on to plan territories, quotas, books of business, and more.
It can also be incredibly difficult.
Capacity planning is what ensures we have the salespeople to hit our revenue targets, that we have enough professional services resources to deliver on implementations, and that we have the right ratio of customers to CSM.
To get all that right, we need to marry up promotion and attrition projections, organizational changes, and business growth targets, so that we can plan accordingly.
When you consider hiring takes about 3 months on average, and then the onboarding process for a new hire can be anywhere from 3-6 - it ends up really that we have to be 12 months ahead of what you expect to happen.
I’ve spent years working to perfect these models in Excel and Google Sheets, and spent countless hours on manually reconciling data from various sources to get this right. Fortunately, now I work at a company that builds pretty sophisticated sales performance management (SPM) software. In this article, I’ll outline how Pigment helps my team and I keep the entire GTM org running smoothly.
Avoiding ‘stare and compare’
One of the most difficult parts of sales capacity planning is that you always have two versions of the truth: the live version of the current headcount, which comes from the HRIS (HiBob for us) and is managed by HR, and then the ‘future’ version(s) in your plans.
For a lot of companies, that planning happens in Excel, Google Sheets, or some other planning tool. Because the two versions of truth are separated, you end up having a lot of difficulty reconciling between the two - you end up ‘staring and comparing’.
For us using Pigment, that’s not a problem. It integrates directly with HiBob (and other platforms), which means each position in our HRIS is given a unique ID that carries over into our planning Application. That means that when someone leaves and is backfilled, it’s not something that we need to change manually, for example.
It sounds simple but it makes a massive difference to us when things are changing all the time - it’s a lot of messy, time consuming work (and opportunities for mistakes to enter the process) that we avoid.
Everything at your fingertips
When we build our plan, like any other team, we make a bunch of assumptions and predictions - we’re going to close X number of deals, at an ACV of Y, etc.
But then as the plan is put into action, we also track our actuals in a reporting Application. At any other company, that’d be happening in some sort of business intelligence tool. The fact it’s in the same place is super, super valuable. It means we’re able to periodically review actuals and factor them into new assumptions as we tweak our plans moving forward.
Using Pigment opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities - in theory, we could dynamically change our assumptions based on actuals as they come in, for example. We take the approach of reviewing our actuals and updating our assumptions quarterly so that we can have more control, exclude outliers, account for nuances, etc. , but it’s a good example of how powerful it is to have everything in one place.
Scenarios - staying ready for anything
Any business leader knows that we live in very uncertain times, and that we’re constantly forced to explore new avenues for growth, new business strategies, and to be able to pivot on a dime.
That’s where Pigment’s native scenario planning capabilities are super, super helpful. We’re a company that’s on a really exciting trajectory, and we’ve seen a lot of growth. To achieve that we’re constantly having to evaluate different possibilities for the business, evaluate what the implications would be, and make fast, informed decisions. In Pigment, it’s incredibly intuitive to build, analyze, and compare different scenarios.
We’re also seeing a trend - internally and with our customers - where a lot of boards and investors are favouring a shift towards predicting a range of outcomes. If you say ‘we think we’re going to do $100M this year’, that can be somewhat helpful.
But if instead you say ‘we are highly confident that we’ll do between $95M and $105M’ - that can be dramatically more helpful.
Getting technical
It’s easy, using Pigment every day, to forget what life would be like without it. A lot of the more technical details just work in a way that it doesn’t in other tools that I’ve used in the past.
A good example particularly relevant to capacity planning is ragged hierarchies. This can happen when, for example, some sales reps report directly to a VP, while others go through multiple layers.
Pigment does a great job of allowing us to manage those hierarchies, managing the intersections, and handles sparsity extremely well - all of that means we don’t really have to revisit our primary lists. I don’t know how I’d calculate how much time it saves the team, but I expect it’s a lot.
Another really powerful feature is our custom aggregations, which let you view and group your data in really flexible ways (for example by team, region, or use case), without having to rebuild models. It’s particularly helpful for management reporting.
Parting thoughts
I hope you’ve found this overview helpful - check back in a few weeks for another detailed overview of how we approach territory and quota planning in Pigment.
In the meantime, the best way to see what Pigment could do for you is to book a personalized demo.
