Dear SaaStr: How Many Opportunities Should a Sales Rep Handle?
You sort of need to back into it based on your opportunity-to-closed deal ratio.
The ratio can vary widely … maybe from 5%-20%, and to some extent, can be influenced even by the definition of an opportunity. The competitive landscape will also be a big influencer.
Gong has found mature, enterprise sales can close 25% of opportunities, at an average of $100k per deal:
But in general, a 15%-20% Opportunity Close Rate is considered Pretty Darn Good. And less than 10% just makes sales … start to get even harder.
So:
- if the quota for the rep is say $600k,
- your average Opportunity is $20k in size, and
- you have a 15% opportunity-to-closed ratio …
- your rep will need ~200 opportunities over the year to hit their quota, or about ~15 a month.
Then the question is what is the lead-to-opportunity ratio …
A different way to back into it is that it’s hard for a rep to have too many more than 50 thoughtful, deep, qualified conversations a month, that include multiple demos, follow-ups, etc. 3 demos a day is a lot to prep for, x 20 working days + holidays = 50 good demos a month.
Those conversations can be with leads, or with opportunities. But if you are funneling too many unqualified leads to a rep that take too much work (demos, multiple stakeholders, business process map) … it will break. You’ll need more reps to do more than 50 of these, max, a month.
