Dear SaaStr: How Many Deals Can a Sales Rep Close Per Month?
A successful but not top 5% sales rep in SaaS typically can close:
- 20–50 deals a month if $0.5k-$2k ACV, i.e., very transactional 1–2 call close. Usually all inbound.
- 10–15 deals a month if $5k-$25k ACV (i.e., transactional, but not 1–2 call close)
- 1–3 deals a month if enterprise, $50k-$1m ACV
There are a number of factors here, including just the number of leads.
But in the end, you can only do so many qualified calls and demos a day.
- Maybe 3–4 discovery calls with new prospects. Max.
- Maybe 3–4 demos max for deals in-process a day. And each might take an hour with prep, more if enterprise.
- And that doesn’t leave 2 hours a day for follow-up, admin, etc.
Think about an SMB rep doing small-but-not-tiny deals — say $2k ACV. They’d have to close 25 deals a month to hit their OTE. That means every day they have to close 1 deal. That works with a quick, 1 call close that takes 10-20 minutes and a decently high close rate (higher than 10%). It’s really tough if it takes more than 2 calls to close a deal, and more than 1 demo.
You can then also use this to basically back into standard SaaS sales comp plans (you can tweak the OTE and quotas, but it won’t make that much of a difference):
You can also see from this math that too few leads to each rep leads to starvation. They can’t hit their plan. But too many leads to each rep results in leads not being followed up on. You can only follow up with so many. More on that here:
Getting this just right can lead to a +20% boost in revenue per lead right there. A bit more on that here:
deals image from here