Cases per Detective
In the land of my birth the public has lost confidence in their police.
Just search how many phones are stolen in London each day.
Burglaries, car thefts and shoplifting all go uninvestigated. But hey, you get a crime number for the insurance, if you have it.
Not to mention the frauds, harassments and assaults that also fail to stir them into any action.
Pointing this out, I heard a former Commissioner suggest this serious decline in public standards was in part due to workload strain.
They claimed that the British guideline recommended cases per detective was currently 15. Yet in practice presently runs at 40.
Several other factors, more egregious, culpable, and damning, apply. But this huge swamping cannot help.
Whatever the actual optimum, such figures are always open to dismissal as arbitrary.
Any blanket number unable to reflect nuances of the local environment, force size or existing workload pattern profile.
And so it is when selling.
Each patch, every team, all marketplaces. They hold variable contexts. Different deal value, cycle and complexity.
Yet for any given product patch or salesperson, there tends to be an ideal workload.
When setting out in cubrep days, my then big boss advised me on this.
He used the analogy of a motorway. Slow lane, middle lane, fast lane. Suggesting what the mix ought be to achieve the destination of quota-busting.
A touch later a broader mark was stated, as simply "seven".
In that it mattered less the make-up of each one, as that was the limit of individual Sales capacity for that particular Enterprise effort.
Any deviation from this perceived volume sweet spot would mean not doing enough or having too much. Either way prevents exceeding 100%+.
Part of the skill of a solution seller being the management of your mix of deals you place and pursue on your forecast.
Such volume and composition happy mediums ought be a component of any Sales endeavour's rubric.
Parameters under periodic review too. As markets, tech and buying habits evolve.
To know this is also to streamline your selling and make it more efficient. To optimise its productivity. Ensure you have a grasp of this to get the most out of how you try to solve beating Target, time and again.