In boardrooms and planning meetings across the globe, a familiar scene plays out. The head of sales confidently commits to an ambitious revenue target for the upcoming year. The number is bold, the ambition is high, and the pressure is on. But this commitment is built on a crucial assumption: that the right people will be in the right territories, ready to sell at the right time.
And that’s where the plan often falls apart.
Sales leaders have been in countless meetings where they're told they need 53 new reps to hit the number, but by the time the fiscal year kicks off, only 13 have been hired. The result of this is that revenue targets are at risk from day one. It’s no surprise that only 47% of sales reps are expected to hit their quota. Sellers start the race two months behind, their ramp-up time is delayed, and months of potential selling activity are lost forever. This isn't a people problem; it's a planning problem. It’s the result of a systemic disconnect between the teams that set the revenue goals (sales), the teams that fund them (finance), and the teams that must execute the hiring plan (HR).
The high cost of disconnected planning
Traditionally, the go-to-market (GTM) capacity plan and the operational workforce plan exist in separate worlds, managed in a flurry of spreadsheets, emails, and PowerPoint decks. This siloed approach is a significant liability, especially when you consider that 78% of executives cite skills and talent availability as a major source of risk to growth.
The process typically unfolds in three disconnected stages:
- Sales and revenue operations build their capacity model. They determine how many people they need, in which roles, and in what locations to hit the revenue target. This plan is often built with optimistic, and sometimes uninformed, assumptions about how quickly they can hire.
- Finance gets the headcount request. They scrutinize the budget, often without full visibility into the revenue impact of delaying or denying a specific hire. The approval process is slow, disconnected from the strategic urgency.
- HR and talent acquisition receive the approved hiring list — often late, and with no prior visibility into the pipeline of demand. A staggering 78% of recruiting executives lack visibility into their hiring needs for the current year. They are left scrambling to find specialized talent in a competitive market, with no ability to proactively source or plan their own recruiter capacity. Inevitably, this reactive scramble can lead companies to engage costly external recruiting channels to augment their internal teams, causing hiring costs to skyrocket.
This siloed approach creates friction, delays, and chronic lack of agility. By the time a hiring delay is flagged, the plane is barely at the end of the runway when it should be in the air. The business is forced into a reactive cycle of catch-up, putting revenue predictability in constant jeopardy.
The bridge to agility: Connecting GTM and workforce planning
What if you could systemically connect your GTM strategy directly to your workforce execution? This is the power of linking the Anaplan Go-to-Market Capacity Planning application with the Anaplan Operational Workforce Planning application. It creates a single, shared source of truth that breaks down the silos and aligns sales, finance, and HR around a unified plan.
Here’s how it works:
When the GTM leadership team builds their sales capacity plan to meet revenue targets, that plan doesn’t just live in a silo. The demand signal — the specific roles, locations, and start dates needed — is systemically passed to the Operational Workforce Planning application.
This simple connection is a game-changer, providing your business with:
- Early visibility for HR: Talent acquisition (TA) teams no longer wait for a final, approved list. They get a real-time preview of what’s coming down the pipe. They can assess the feasibility of the plan against real-world hiring data, like availability and time-to-fill benchmarks for specific roles. If sales want to hire four specialist pre-sales engineers in January, but market data shows a 90-day hiring cycle, that reality check happens at the planning stage, not two months into the quarter. This allows TA to plan their own recruiter capacity and begin proactive sourcing.
- Intelligent budgeting for finance: Finance gains a clear line of sight connecting headcount requests to revenue targets. They can see the direct cost of delaying a hire — not just in salary, but in missed time building relations and lost productivity and potential revenue, reinforcing the strategic value of HR and TA delivering timely hires to the GTM organization. Budget approvals become faster and more strategic because everyone is working from the same set of assumptions.
- Data-driven decisions for sales: Sales leaders can now build their capacity plans with greater confidence. By incorporating realistic time-to-hire and attrition forecasts from HR, their models become more accurate and defensible. They can run scenarios to understand the impact of different hiring approaches, finding the right balance between cost, speed, and sales performance.
From reactive to resilient
Connecting your GTM capacity plan with your operational workforce strategy moves your organization from a reactive to a resilient footing. It ensures your hiring strategy directly supports and enables your revenue goals. As noted by McKinsey, "Strategic workforce planning (SWP) offers greater fluidity of resources and increases efficiencies by allowing organizations to understand their future capacity and capability gaps."
The benefits are clear:
- Spot talent gaps early and proactively address them
- Accelerate onboarding and boost productivity by having sellers in their seats and ready for kickoff
- Align sales, HR, and finance for faster, more intelligent budget approvals
- Build a resilient talent pipeline that can scale with business growth and adapt to market changes with agility
It’s time to stop treating your sales targets like a wish list. By creating a direct link between your revenue ambition and your people plan, you can finally build the agility and predictability your business needs to not just compete, but win.
