What is headcount

One of the common use cases of scenario planning is to determine the capacity needed in terms of headcount or more simply the number of salespeople needed to make a goal. Headcount items can either be a variable expense and therefore part of the COGS or can be part of operating expenses. It’s important to classify it as such.

Existing Headcount

The number of headcounts in a particular role can be calculated based on:

• Either the number of people in the role
• Or the number of assignments already made in the system
• This may or may not include existing TBH and TBR

Existing headcount can also be represented as net ramped resources – which is essentially a net FTE headcount based on currently ramping resources. This can easily be calculated from assignments already in the system and the respective productivity profiles.

Additional headcount

Models for Arriving at the number of people needed can be calculated using various models – very similar to the additional revenue needed. Below are some of these models:

• Workload based models
• Funnel Conversion rate-based models
• Ratio Based Models
• Potential based models
• Budget Based models
• Providing the number of people

For more details and implementation details see the section on Capacity Models.

Churn

Expected number of people to churn and its expected seasonality