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Seller Capacity

Abstract

Assign new hires into groups to help you allocate resources to help them succeed.

Should you give your new star hire a difficult territory to see if they can handle it? Does a new hire need mentorship and extra training? The Seller Capacity Blueprint assigns your new hires into groups and helps you allocate resources to help them succeed.

How to use this blueprint

The following are the main use cases for Seller Capacity:

  • Calculate the average time it takes new employees to reach a specific sales target.

  • Identify if you are understaffed or overstaffed with capacity planning.

  • Find the performance levels that indicate if a seller is not meeting their goals and will not succeed.

For this Blueprint to work, the Sales Data must contain 2 years' worth of data: 1 year of data for calculating Yearly Sales Target.1 year after that, of first-year employees' information for calculating curves based on Target.

The following columns are required for the blueprint:

  • Sales Performance (monthly sales numbers for each employee)

  • Date to identify what month or week it is depending on the frequency

  • Hire date to identify first-year employees

Tip

We recommend using this blueprint once a year to see if sellers are still hitting capacity during the same periods.

Using this blueprint

  1. Import sales target data using your sales data.

    This gives the pipe a data set containing the first year of sales data for each employee at the company It ensures that the sales performance is broken up by some period, such a monthly.

  2. Calculate the time periods for sales targets and new hires.

    This branch of tools is colored purple. Using the most recent hire date, it finds the 1-year time frame to use for establishing sales targets, avoiding overlap with that date. The result is a table with one row, containing the latest hire date, and the sales target date ranges. (Calculate start date for sales target (Date Add)).

  3. Calculate the sales target.

    This branch of tools is colored blue . It is used to calculate the sales target, excluding employees with less than a full year of data. Get Previous year data to calculate Sales Target (Filter) Filters the data to only the time periods that encompass the target start and end dates calculated in the previous branch. Calculate Sales Target (Aggregate) Sets the sales target by averaging the yearly performance of employees within the target time period.

  4. Get new hire data.

    This branch of tools is colored orange . It gets the performance data for the most recent new hires and finds which numerical month they are in since starting. Get most recent Year of New Hires (Filter) Filters the data frame to get performance data for the most recent hires. Remove employees who did not sell during year (Filter) Finds the employees without sales during the year, as they may have left early or transferred to a non-sales role. The Join tool then joins this back to the most recent hires data, removing the employees without sales in the last year. Calculate month for each Employee (Rank) Calculates the month number for each record of a new employee by ranking the periods for each employee Name.

  5. Calculate cumulative performances.

    This branch of tools is colored red . It calculates the cumulative performance for an employee, and compares it to the median, 10th percentile, and 90th percentile as a fraction of each target. Join Joins the yearly Sales Target to the new employees data. Calculate percentiles for each month (Percentile) Aggregates the data to get the median (50th Percentile), 10th Percentile, and 90th Percentile sales for each month. Groups by the Time Period and Sales Target. Calculate percentage of target attained (Formula), Calculate percentage of target attained 10th percentile (Formula), and Calculate percentage of target attained 90th percentile (Formula) each tool divides the Xth percentile (50th,10th,or 90th) cumulative sales by the sales target to get the percentage of the sales target attained. Calculate percentage of target attained by individual (Formula) calculates the percentage of sales target each individual new employee has attained in each month since hiring.

How to interpret the results

This blueprint comes with visualizations to provide guidance on what to expect from new sellers, and requires minimal configuration.

  • Seller Capacity Curve: In this graph, you can see the percentage of target attained for the median (50th Percentile), 10th Percentile, and 90th Percentile. The 90th Percentile has hit around 90% of the target, while the median and the 10th Percentile lag behind. This is because it would not be reasonable for these individuals to hit 100% of their target, considering that they are new.

  • Distribution of Seller Capacity: In this graph, you can see the percentage of target attained by an individual over 12 months.