%20(1).png)
SDR capacity planner
Work out what one SDR can actually produce in a month once admin, internal meetings, holiday and ramp have taken their share of the day. Then see how many SDRs your meetings target needs, what the team you have today produces, and whether the activity that target implies will physically fit inside a working day.
- A capacity model built from the day that is left after everything that eats it, not from an activity number somebody hoped for
- The headcount your target needs, against what your current team actually produces once ramp is counted honestly
- A straight answer on whether the daily activity your target implies is possible at all, and what each lever is worth if it is not
How to use it
- Set the meetings held you need a month. Held, not booked.
- Describe a real day: working hours, the hours lost to admin and internal meetings, minutes per touch and days off a year.
- Add your touch to conversation, conversation to meeting and booked to held rates.
- Enter the SDRs you have and how many are still ramping, then read the gap and the levers.
How the numbers work
Capacity starts from the day, not from a target. Take the working hours, subtract the hours that go to standups, one to ones, training, CRM admin and list building, and what is left is the only time anyone is prospecting. Divide that by the minutes a touch really takes, including the notes afterwards, and you have the touches a day the job allows. Multiply by the working days left after holiday, bank holidays and sickness, then run your own funnel across it: touch to conversation, conversation to meeting booked, booked to held. That is what one fully ramped SDR produces in a month.
Everything else follows from that one number. The headcount your target needs is the target divided by it, rounded up, because half an SDR does not exist. Your current output is the same number multiplied by your team, with anyone still ramping counted at the share of output they are actually delivering rather than as a whole person. The possibility check runs the sum backwards: it takes the target, divides by your end to end conversion rate to get the touches required, spreads them across the SDRs you have and the days they work, and compares the result with the touches the day allows.
Questions
How many meetings should one SDR book a month?
Between 10 and 15 held meetings a month is the range most B2B teams should plan around, and the honest version of that number falls out of this tool rather than coming from a benchmark. A team quoting 25 a month is usually counting booked rather than held, counting inbound hand raisers as SDR sourced, or running a motion where a touch takes ninety seconds. None of those are wrong, but they are not comparable, which is why this asks for your own rates instead of assuming any.
Why ask for hours lost rather than just activity a day?
Because the activity number is the thing under dispute. If you start from 100 touches a day you have assumed the answer, and the plan inherits whatever optimism was in that figure. Starting from the day works the other way round: it shows what the hours allow, and the activity target either fits or it does not. Most teams find between two and three hours a day disappear before anyone picks up a phone, and almost nobody has counted it.
Is 100 dials a day realistic?
It depends entirely on what a dial costs you. At two minutes each, including the note afterwards, 100 dials is three and a half hours and perfectly possible. At five minutes each it is over eight hours of uninterrupted work, which is not a plan, it is a wish. The minutes per touch field is the one worth arguing about, because it is where the difference between a demanding target and an impossible one usually sits.
Should a ramping SDR count as half a person?
Count them at whatever they are actually delivering, which is what the ramp field is for. The mistake is counting them as a whole person, because that is how a team of six people misses a target set for six people. If you do not know the real figure, 50 percent through a three month ramp is a fair starting assumption, and worth replacing with your own data as soon as you have two or three starters to look at.
What is a realistic touch to meeting rate?
End to end, most outbound teams land somewhere between one meeting held per 80 touches and one per 200, depending on how well targeted the list is and how senior the buyer. The tool prints your own figure under the conversion inputs so you can sanity check it against what your CRM says. If yours is far better than that range, check whether inbound or referral meetings are being counted as outbound sourced.
Our target comes out as impossible. What do we do with that?
Take it to the person who set it, before the quarter starts rather than after it is missed. There are only four real levers and the tool prices each one: more people, a shorter touch, a better conversion rate, or a smaller target. In our experience the cheapest is usually the touch itself, because the time lost to bad lists, manual research and CRM admin is rarely defended once somebody puts a number on it.
Does this work for inbound SDRs?
Partly. The capacity side works for any SDR, because the day is the day. The funnel side assumes you are creating the conversation rather than answering one, so for an inbound queue the touch to conversation rate stops being meaningful. If your team is mostly working inbound, the speed of response usually matters more than the volume of activity.
More free sales tools
-
Sales Hiring Plan: How many AEs and SDRs it takes to hit your ARR target, and when each has to start.
-
Lead Response Time Calculator: What slow follow up costs, and whether your queue is staffed to answer in time.
-
Know Your Pipeline: Work back from your target to the meetings, calls and demos you need.
Activity targets nobody believes in?
We rebuild SDR capacity models from your own dialler and CRM data, so the number on the board is one the team can actually hit and the ones that follow it are trusted.