Trying to hire salespeople is the worst. Finding good people is hard, finding great people is nearly impossible.

The pressure on sales managers to have a “fully-staffed” sales team is incredible: They need to have enough people on staff so they’re not missing deals, but they can’t spend too much time hiring and not enough time managing their current employees, and often they don’t even know how many people they need.

Using data to determine staffing levels is not so much an art, as it is a science. There are several influencing factors that go into determining when to hire, and what types of people work best in each environment.

With that in mind, we’ll look at a couple examples that illustrate two considerations we use when helping dealers determine the optimal size of their sales team:

1 – How consistent is your sales team’s performance? (Image 1)
Image 1: Consistency vs. Hitting an All-Time High

This sales manager was prioritizing the store’s highest volume month, to justify a smaller sales team. His philosophy was, “Our best month had 12 sales people, so our perfect sales team is 12!”

For this dealer, we pointed out that while they had their best month with 12 people, it was over two years ago, and sales are exactly expected to increase in 2017. This dealer is more than 2X as likely to sell 100+ units per-month with 13 or 14 sales people, as they are with only 12.

Not only that, but they are equally as likely to have an under 100-unit month at 12 sales people as they are a 100+ unit month. And if they lose one person, the potential to hit 100+ units with 11 or fewer people is nearly zero.

2 – Volume vs. Cost (Image 2)
Image 2: Sales Volume vs. Cost of Sales

Adding additional people to increase sales isn’t always the answer. In our second example, this dealer has 24 salespeople on staff and was looking to hire 3 or 4 more. His justification? He felt like they sold more cars when they had more people.

“Gut feeling” is not something I ever advocate for, so we made sure to illustrate to this dealer that staffing over 24 sales people was only going to result in an increased cost. When they had more than 24 people, they didn’t sell more cars. In fact, when they had 26 or more they averaged less sales per-month!

Even if they lost a salesperson over the course of a month, they are still likely to have a high performing month with 23 sales people. Ultimately, our recommendation to increase sales had nothing to do with staffing. Where they are, is where they need to be.

Further Consideration:
There are several things that can impact how successful your sales people are, and when trying to determine future staffing levels there is a great deal that needs to be considered.

While analyzing Consistency, and measuring Volume vs. Cost are great places start, they can’t be the only things taken into consideration.

The whole point of this, and similar exercises, is to spend the time analyzing your business today so you can be ready tomorrow. Like I said before, hiring is not so much an art, as it is a science. Without a method, your gut will only get you so far.