Efficiency and Productivity: Sales Capacity Planning with Lative

Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to sales capacity planning. Join Lative’s Werner Schmidt, CEO and Co-founder, and Ollie Sharpe, Chief Commercial Officer, as they explain how sales capacity, productivity, and ramp times are analyzed, planned for, and tracked in Lative, the revenue orchestration platform.

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Productivity and efficiency are central to sales success

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“Lative was founded out of our frustration of not being able to measure the impact of the sales team's true contribution.” - Werner Schmidt

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The world of sales and RevOps has changed. Today, revenue organizations are focused on driving efficiency, rather than fast growth.  This shift brings with it new questions that are difficult to answer. How do you measure when productivity changes? What’s your sales team's capacity? How do you ensure you have capacity in the future?

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Lative was founded because existing tools in the market aren’t robust enough to help companies with productivity and sales capacity planning. Using Lative, organizations can meet company objectives in the most profitable and efficient way.

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RevOps teams can start tackling three critical questions:

1. Will we hit our number? 

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RevOps teams need visibility into how many sales reps they have and whether their current productivity will allow them to reach their sales target by the end of the year. 

2. How will we hit our number? 

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If you add more people in the right regions, you should be able to scale your revenue. You can measure this as revenue per rep over a period of time. 

3. Will we hit our number in the most profitable way? 

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Efficiency should be your goal. You can measure this as productivity divided by cost. 

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Jump to the clip for a deeper dive into the 3 questions RevOps should be able to answer.

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Analyze, plan, and track

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“We live in a world of efficiency now. You're going to grow fast and add a lot of sales heads, that's true, but you've got to look at efficiency. What's the return that you're getting back?” - Werner Schmidt

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Lative is designed to support three stages of sales capacity planning: analyzing, planning, and tracking.

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Analyze

This tool helps you understand your sales performance, productivity, and efficiency. Using granular analysis, you can: 

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• Analyze trends across unlimited business dimensions
• Understand ramp times across business dimensions
• Drive the optimum return on investment by focusing your sales representative’s time

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Plan

Lative helps with both short and long-range capacity planning models. Bottom-up capacity planning includes what-if scenarios that help your revenue team: 

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• Plan and optimize your strategy based on market potential and performance 
• Model productive capacity based on historical data to stop over or under-hiring 
• Incorporate future strategic initiatives to see their impact on the plan 

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Track 

Tracking the execution of your initiatives to see if they’ll help you meet your annual plan is central to the Lative platform. You can connect top-down plans with bottom-up operational data to identify risks and opportunities, plus: 

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• Track actual ramp times, tenure productivity, cost efficiency, and the impact of strategic initiatives
• Track actual performance metrics vs. target and future capacity 
• Course correct headcount and quotas to hit plans 

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Jump to the clip for a demo of the Plan component of Lative which helps with short and long-term modeling.

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Is Lative right for your business?

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“You can capitalize on market opportunities where your productivity is the highest and pull back where it's not.” - Ollie Sharpe

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Lative is a great fit for companies that have outgrown spreadsheets. When your team has grown to 15 or 20 salespeople, managing capacity planning without the right RevOps tools, like Lative, becomes problematic and time-consuming. 

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Integrations

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Lative is a strategic partner of Salesforce, HubSpot, and Snowflake. They also have over 150 data connectors and can even work with homegrown data systems that require manual uploads. If you have a consumption-based subscription model, Lative has the right integrations in place. 

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Implementation 

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If you’re a Salesforce user, you can easily download Lative on the Salesforce AppExchange in 10-15 minutes. The Lative team will configure your dimensions to match how you run your business. Configurations take anywhere from one day to two weeks on average, then you’re up and running. 

Jump to the clip for Werner and Ollie’s answers to the question: what differentiates Lative?

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