To plan sales capacity for a startup, work backwards from the customers you want: customers needed, divided by your close rate, gives the meetings you must hold; meetings divided by your meeting rate gives the people you must reach; and people divided by working days gives your daily volume. For 50 new customers at a 20 percent close rate and one meeting per 50 people reached, that is 250 meetings and 12,500 people, about 50 new people a working day. Then check each step against what your inboxes, your list and your calendar can actually carry.
Capacity planning in a big company means headcount and quotas. In a startup it usually means a smaller question: can the one or two people who sell, plus whatever software you use, reach enough people, and take enough meetings, to hit the number? The model below fits on one page and takes ten minutes. Its value is in showing which step runs out first.
The formula, and the three rates you must supply
You need one target and three rates.
- Target: new customers in the period. Start from revenue: new annual revenue wanted, divided by what one customer pays you in a year.
- Close rate: the share of held first meetings that become customers.
- Meeting rate: the share of people you reach who end up in a held meeting.
- Working days: about 21 a month and 252 a year.
Then: meetings needed = customers / close rate. People to reach = meetings / meeting rate. If you have no history, use placeholders and mark them as guesses. Two of our pages help you replace the guesses with measured figures: what a good cold email reply rate is and lead conversion rate.
A worked plan: 50 customers at $6,000 a year
Say a company that sells scheduling software to veterinary clinics wants $300,000 in new annual revenue this year. Each clinic pays $6,000 a year, so the target is $300,000 / $6,000 = 50 customers. The founder closes 20 percent of held first meetings, and assumes one meeting per 50 people reached.
| Step | Calculation | Per year | Per month | Per working day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New customers | $300,000 / $6,000 | 50 | 4.2 | |
| Held first meetings | 50 / 0.20 | 250 | 20.8 | |
| People reached | 250 / 0.02 | 12,500 | 1,042 | 50 |
| Messages sent, with 3 follow-ups each | 12,500 x 4 | 50,000 | 4,167 | 198 |
| Meeting hours, at 90 minutes with prep | 250 x 1.5 | 375 hours | 31 hours |
A year has 252 working days, so 12,500 / 252 is 49.6 people a day, and with three follow-ups each, 50,000 / 252 is 198 messages. These are the numbers to hold against your limits.
Four limits, in the order you will hit them
- The pool of buyers. Reaching 12,500 distinct people in one year means a buyer description that returns at least that many, and the first people you contact are the best matches. Count how many people fit before you commit to a number. If your description returns 3,000, either widen it, change the buyer, or accept a lower target. Nothing in the plan helps if the pool is too small. How to build a lead list shows how to count.
- Inboxes. Google's Workspace sending-limits page lists 2,000 messages a day and 3,000 unique recipients a day per user (2,000 of them external), and says limits can change without notice. A personal Gmail account is limited to 500 emails a day, according to Google's Gmail help. Those are ceilings. A new inbox should send far less while it builds its reputation. This plan assumes 60 messages a day per inbox, an assumption you can adjust, so 198 messages a day needs 198 / 60 = 3.3, or 4 inboxes. One inbox sending 198 a day would be a risk to the whole domain.
- Meeting hours. 375 hours a year is 7.2 hours a week at 52 weeks, a real slice of a founder's calendar, but it fits. At a 10 percent close rate the meetings double to 500 and the hours to 750, 14.4 hours a week. That is the point where one person taking every meeting starts to hurt the product or the delivery. This is the capacity signal that when to hire your first salesperson treats as the first reason to hire a closer.
- Reply handling. At 20 meetings a month, you also have perhaps 100 or more replies a month that are not meetings: questions, not-now, referrals and opt-outs. Opt-outs have to be honored. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide for businesses says the law "makes no exception for business-to-business email" and gives 10 business days to honor an opt-out. Someone has to read every reply, daily.
How wrong the plan will be: four scenarios
The three rates are the weakest part of the plan, so test it against worse and better versions. Same target of 50 customers:
| Scenario | Close rate | Meeting rate | Meetings | People to reach | Per working day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base case | 20% | 1 in 50 | 250 | 12,500 | 50 |
| Weaker message | 20% | 1 in 100 | 250 | 25,000 | 99 |
| Weaker close | 10% | 1 in 50 | 500 | 25,000 | 99 |
| Better on both | 30% | 1 in 25 | 167 | 4,167 | 17 |
Each line is customers divided by the close rate for the meetings (50 / 0.20 = 250; 50 / 0.10 = 500; 50 / 0.30 = 166.7), then meetings divided by the meeting rate for the people (250 / 0.02 = 12,500; 250 / 0.01 = 25,000; 500 / 0.02 = 25,000; 166.7 / 0.04 = 4,167). The spread between the best and worst case is six to one. This is the reason to measure early. A plan that needs 25,000 people may be out of reach on its pool, and a plan that needs 4,000 is easy.
Review it monthly with three actuals
After the first month, replace the guesses with what happened. Write down the people reached, the meetings held and the customers signed. Divide to get your meeting rate and close rate for the month, then recompute the people you need. In month one, the figures are noisy: 1,000 people and 5 meetings could be luck. Add months, not decimals. A weekly sales plan gives the routine for collecting the numbers.
Ask these three questions each month:
- Is the pool shrinking faster than the target? (If you have used half the people in a third of the year, change the description.)
- Did meetings per week stay under the hours you set aside for them?
- Which of the three rates moved the most? That is where the next improvement is.
Turning capacity into a purchase
Once you know the people per month, the choice between your own hours, a hire, an agency and software becomes a calculation. The plan above needs 1,042 people a month. By hand, at eight minutes a person, that is about 139 hours a month, more than three full working weeks. A software plan priced in credits per person can be costed directly: the formula is people per month times credits per person.
Rocketship, which we make, charges 4 credits for each person it finds with an email and nothing when no email is found. The example needs 1,042 x 4 = 4,168 credits a month. Frontier ($79 a month, or $780 on annual billing) includes 1,500 credits, up to 210 emails a day from up to 3 inboxes (enough for the 198 a day above, at 66 per inbox) and one teammate, and extra credits cost $45 per 1,000, so the 2,668 credits it is short are three packs, $135, for $214 in all. Mission Control is $1,499 a month and includes 30,000 credits, up to 3,500 emails a day from up to 50 inboxes and 25 teammates, for plans several times this size or for a team sharing the meetings. Compare the plans, or try Frontier for 7 days (card required) and put your own rates in the table.