The Challenge: Headcount ≠ Growth
Many B2B companies aim for revenue growth over the next few years. The obvious path? Hire more salespeople. But is that really the smartest move?
Let’s look at the math.
Hiring additional sales reps increases fixed costs immediately: salaries, bonuses, travel, onboarding, support systems. In a typical setup, that’s soften more than €180,000 per additional person. If the market weakens, those costs remain – while order intake drops. And finding qualified people isn’t easy, especially for complex technical sales.
In contrast, increasing productivity inside your existing sales team avoids many of these risks.
The Alternative: Invest in Productivity, Not Headcount
In a recent scenario at a company, two growth paths were compared:
- Path A: Hire new people to achieve additional order intake.
- Path B: Improve win rates, cut internal inefficiencies, and increase sales time – without hiring.
The results were clear:
By improving qualification, reducing the number of proposals, and boosting active selling time, the existing team created the equivalent of 600 additional sales hours per month – comparable to 3.5 extra full-time salespeople. No recruiting, no onboarding. Just better structures and smarter tools.
Even better:
This shift also reduced Cost of Sales, increased EBIT margins (from ~6% to ~10%), and made the organization more resilient to market fluctuations.
The Insight: Buying Growth vs. Enabling Growth
Hiring is a cost. Productivity is a capability. While adding headcount might buy short-term growth, it rarely fixes the underlying problems in sales execution.
That’s why we encourage clients to start with a productivity audit:
- Where is time being lost?
- How are opportunities qualified?
- What bottlenecks can digital tools remove?
If your team is only spending 15% of its time in direct customer interaction, there’s a lot of untapped potential – hidden in plain sight.
Your Next Step: Shift the Question
Before planning your next sales hire, ask a better question:
What could our current team achieve with more focus and time?You might be surprised how much growth is already within reach
