Q1 is Your Last Chance to Get the Hires Done You Need for 2022

This is a pretty basic post, but one so many busy CEOs and founders just miss:

It’s already almost too late to make the hires you need for 2022!

And in sales it’s even worse.  It’s already almost too late to make the hires you need to hit the plan for 2022.

How can this be?  Take a pause and you’ll see it’s true.

• It takes 90 days to find a great hire.
• It takes 60 days to get them scaled up.
• Another 30 days to hit 100%.

So best case, it takes 180 days to get fully scaled hires in place, fully producing.   That already means Q3!

And for sales reps, it’s almost even worse because you likely only have enough capacity to hit the plan for the current quarter.  By the time the end of the year comes, you don’t just need the reps in place to hit the Q4 bookings plan … you also need the ones in place by the end of the year to hit the sales plan for Q2’23.  Or again, you’ll be behind.  And miss the plan.

In fact. you often need 2x as many reps as you might think, when you add in the time it takes to scale a rep and how much headcount you’ll need at the end of the year to hit next year’s plan.  More on that here.

Great VPs, especially VPs of Sales, know this.  They know how to do capacity planning, what it will take to hit the plan for the entire year.  But most founders don’t quite do the math this way, and end up too lean.  And over-relying on top performers.

It won’t hit you hard right now.  But it will hit you hard by Q3.  And if you don’t catch up on hiring, it’s going to be almost impossible to hit the Q4 and CYE plan.

It’s too late to totally fix the fact you don’t have the team in place already you need to hit the 2022 plan.  But you can hire as many as you can in Q1.  And hire at least 1 more great VP in Q1 to take on some of the hiring load.  She’ll help you partially keep up.

And a related post here: