Hire salespeople for growth only to match the flow of customers the company can take through to a purchase. Calculate staff numbers from the time needed for enquiries and current deals, then compare them with specialists’ availability at the required stages. If a buyer is waiting for a trial lesson, another salesperson will not give the teacher a free evening.
For our client in online education, the schedule limited growth before customers even made a purchase. At a meeting with our head of sales and business development director, the owner explained: most new customers ask for evening slots. Training was sold through individual trial lessons; attempts to bring participants together in a group ran into limits on the quality of attention each person received. “We tried up to five — we were already losing focus.”
The owner suggested discussing a presentation for a large audience as another way to introduce people to the training. That is where the confirmed account ends: there is no information about whether it was launched or about sales following presentations. But there was already a reason to reconsider the sales approach. An hour of a specialist’s scarce time was needed before the company gained a new buyer.
The salesperson replies quickly, but the buyer still waits
Hiring more salespeople looks like a straightforward investment: each will talk to more people. But here, a conversation with a salesperson does not complete the sale. Before deciding, the customer needs to see a specialist at a time that suits both of them. If all available evening slots are already booked, the sales team’s response speed does not change how many people complete the trial stage.
This is an awkward reason to stop hiring. The salesperson is there in front of you, and their workload is easy to discuss. Teachers’ schedules seem to be a matter of organising the teaching. But in this model, they already determine what sales can achieve. You cannot give the team a sales plan as though it had an unlimited number of these hours.
You can recognise your situation by the point at which the customer has to wait. The customer has received a reply and agreed to the next step, but there is no suitable time for them. This is different from someone never getting a call back. In the second case, extra staff are worth discussing; in the first, you need to change availability at the next stage. A general note saying “did not buy” hides this difference.
Staffing calculations need to include two different people’s time
To answer the question of how many salespeople you need in your sales team, the person in charge must provide two estimates: how much time the salespeople’s work takes and how many customers the specialists can see. The owner does not need to time every call. They need to see what work they are being asked to pay a salary for and where people will go after the conversation.
Add up the time spent on new enquiries, follow-up contacts, handling current deals and paperwork. Divide this weekly workload by the hours one salesperson actually devotes to those tasks. For example, there are 50 hours of work and one salesperson has 25 available: 50 / 25 = 2 salespeople. Time for meetings and other duties has already been excluded from these 25 hours. Round any fractional result up, then check separately whether there are enough people when enquiries surge.
Now do the calculation for the next stage. For example, 60 new customers need a trial lesson in a week, but there are 40 suitable slots in the schedule. The gap is 20 people. A third salesperson cannot fill that gap with their working hours: they have not been assigned to teach lessons. First, you need to know where extra slots will come from, or what kind of introduction can work without them.
You need to count slots at suitable times. A daytime slot does not replace an evening one if the buyer is not willing to attend during the day. And booking a lesson is not yet a purchase: the number of slots shows the limit at this stage, while expected payments are calculated separately, using the share of your customers who buy after attending a lesson.
Here is a table you can use to discuss spending before opening a vacancy.
| What to spend money on | What should change | What to show before increasing spending |
|---|---|---|
| One more salesperson | Customers get replies and follow-up conversations sooner | Enquiries that have not been dealt with while specialists have free slots |
| Extra hours with a specialist | More people complete the trial stage | Demand for those specific hours and the ability to maintain quality |
| Moving some lessons to the daytime | Evening slots that are in demand become available | Customers’ agreement to the proposed daytime slots |
| A different format for the introduction | Less of the expert’s time is spent on one future buyer | How many individual lessons are still needed after the introduction |
A presentation for a large audience can still leave a queue
The owner’s suggestion is worth discussing precisely because it changes how scarce time is used. But calling a meeting a presentation is not enough. If every participant still needs a separate trial lesson afterwards, the original limit will remain. There will be one more step before customers face the same schedule.
The point of the new format depends on why someone attends a trial lesson. People can find out how the training works and ask general questions alongside others. Getting individual feedback on their work is a different task. If that is what helps someone decide, it cannot simply be removed to increase participant numbers.
So testing the new format requires two related figures: how much time the specialist spent on the whole introduction, including subsequent individual lessons, and how many participants then bought the training. Set the observation period based on how long customers usually take to reach payment. If the presentation attracted more people, but all of them are once again waiting for an individual lesson, there is no basis for expanding advertising yet.
When I would go ahead and hire a salesperson
I would approve hiring if specialists have suitable slots available but the current team cannot keep up with replies and getting people booked in. Here, the employee really does open up access to a resource that already exists. The same applies when preparing to expand: a new expert’s start date and schedule have been agreed, and the salesperson needs time to settle in before more customers start coming in.
Another limit is the quality of the individual introduction. If it determines the buyer’s choice and sales support this, it makes sense to preserve it. Then it is worth calculating the cost of extra evening hours with a specialist. I am also not prepared to give up an effective sales approach just because a format for a large audience looks cheaper.
At RENTROP, the “turnkey sales management” product includes working with the existing sales team. Building a sales system is linked to the same task here: choosing a way of working that the team can follow every day.
A request to hire a salesperson deserves approval when it is clear who they will pass the next customer to. In the trial lesson case, that answer depended on the evening schedule. I am ready to discuss spending on growth when there is a clear place for the buyer as well as a new vacancy.