Hey everyone — I could use a bit of guidance here 👋 We’ve been working on fixing our sales pipeline and finally have some consistent numbers over the last two months:
1 salesperson books ~15 demos/month
~10 demos actually happen
~6 go into trial
~2 convert to paying clients
Given these metrics, is it fair to say we’re ready to scale by hiring more sales reps? Or should I be optimizing something else before I do that? Would love to hear how others approached this stage — especially those who scaled a SaaS sales motion from early traction. 🙏
These sound like good numbers. You can always optimize more. How busy is your salesperson? I would guess they can take on more before you scale.
I guess looking at his months work I think he can take more. This month he was on leave for a week but still he reached the target
Make sense. We are continuously creating strategies. Applying lot of new stuff and keep on noting down the progress.
That's the best way to be!
Do you think horizontal scaling and predicting number would be a right thing? Like 2 sales then 30 demos? or 3 sales then 45 demos?
You need to make sure to give the new hire time to ramp up.
It also wont be horizontal unless you have marketing helping build up demand gen and brand awarenes.s
oh got it giving time for the new person to ramp up and expecting him to be at full speed by 3rd or 4th month.
Yes!
More context on the scope of a sales person's role at your company would be helpful given that depending on the responsibilities, it can impact the amount of time they have/don't have in their calendar to take on more. I'd assess time spent on key revenue generating activities on average per week (e.g., discovery calls, demos, follow up meetings, etc.). If you identify time being spent on activities that could/should be automated (email communications, data entry, etc.), spend time finding and implementing solutions to help your existing team save time/operate more efficiently. Aim to optimize what you have before determining you've exhausted optimization and it's necessary to add more head count. I'd also take a look at what's causing the drop in demos booked to held. Thoughts coming to my mind are quality of leads and readiness of those leads. Is your current process allowing some lower qualified leads to engage with and use sales personnel time? If so, tighten up your lead qualification criteria/process to more effectively utilize sales time. On a personal note, I was once the only full cycle sales person covering software sales for North America and was conducting two, 1-hour software demos per day, along with all the other duties as the lone sales person. So, while it's great that you're starting to get some benchmarks to track at your company and use for decisions making, I can't help but compare it to my experience and assume with the general details provided that you are too early to be thinking about adding head count.
