When your business is helping customers accelerate and maximize their lead-to-money process—the business alchemy that turns leads into paying customers—it’s safe to assume you often have sales on the brain.
That’s certainly true at CallidusCloud, a recognized leader in sales performance management solutions that’s helped more than 5,400 organizations equip their sales and marketing functions so they can drive bigger deals, faster.
So it’s unsurprising that sales capacity planning—with the goal of hiring the right people at precisely the right moment—has been a major focus for the fast-growing company. But like in many companies, sales headcount planning at CallidusCloud can be a little involved. The company’s sales force is divided between enterprise and volume sales, then further fragmented by geography, product line, industry sector, and other dimensions that in the past had complicated attempts to develop a plan that reliably forecasts sales capacity. Because some aspects of the process had yet to be modelled in Adaptive Planning, the FP&A team was left without timely or accurate answers to questions that were fundamental to the business.
“Every time sales asked for a headcount, we had no visibility into how much those new sales reps could generate in bookings or when those bookings were likely to happen,” recalled Han Kim, senior FP&A manager at CallidusCloud. “So in turn, we had no good way to estimate how much revenue generation we could expect from that rep. The whole thing was an educated guess.”
