Most revenue leaders calculate how productive their sales reps are using complicated spreadsheets that take a look at headcount, quota, and return on investment. That’s how Werner Schmidt, CEO and Co-Founder of Lative, started out managing sales capacity planning in the early 2000s.
Until recently, headcount planning followed the growth at all costs mindset. This lack of focus on headcount ROI resulted in over-hiring during the pandemic, soon followed by mass layoffs. Today's revenue leaders must have a new focus on revenue efficiency.
“We need to shift our focus from growth at all costs to measuring sales contribution in real time and building revenue efficient sales capacity plans to avoid expensive mistakes.” - Werner Schmidt
Most revenue functions focus on the end goal, revenue, leaving revenue efficiency on the sidelines. RevOps folks often don’t have the right software for determining ROI and must rely on manual spreadsheet calculations to tie together answers to questions like:
It only gets harder as your sales team grows from 10 reps to 20 reps and new hires onboard while tenured reps leave the company. RevOps folks can find themselves in spreadsheet hell, always reactive and never proactive.
“The days of annual planning are gone, we move too fast now.” - Werner Schmidt
Lative allows seamless transparency between sales, finance, and HR so they can focus on strategic elements. The software does this by helping leaders focus on sales productivity, defined as yield per rep per unit of time. In other words, how much revenue does someone generate over a period of time?
Lative can help you make decisions about when to hire more headcount, when the productivity of your existing headcount is declining, and give you guidance about your revenue productivity and efficiency.
“It’s time to go back to the basics. If I'm going to spend money on a sales organization, what is the return I'm going to get?” - Werner Schmidt
Lative can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange where it pulls in sales data and transforms it into insights about the ROI of your sales team. Lative is designed to support customers of all sizes and use cases. One customer, EnterpriseDB, uses Lative to communicate their sales ROI with their board members.
Onboarding is fast, simply sign up through the Salesforce AppExchange. The installation only takes 15 minutes and is followed by a 30 minute meeting to determine your business dimensions. In less than 24 hours, you're ready to go live. You can access a free trial when you download Lative on the AppExchange or you can reach out through their website.
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