SDR Capacity & Inbound Quota Planner
Set the lead load per rep before follow-up quality falls apart.
You're over capacity, 900 leads against room for 563. Either leads get worked poorly or dropped. You'd need ~8.0 SDRs to cover it at full cadence.
"Quality touch" time is where plans break, padding cadence with low-effort touches inflates capacity but not results.
About this calculator
SDR headcount decisions usually get made on gut feel, "we're drowning" or "we have room", when the real question is arithmetic: how many leads can a rep actually work at a real cadence, and does that multiply out to cover your inbound volume. This planner builds capacity up from selling hours and touch time rather than down from a headcount target, so you can see exactly where the ceiling is.
How to use it
- Enter SDRs on the team, selling hours per day each (after meetings, admin, breaks), and working days per month.
- Enter minutes per quality touch, the real time a properly-worked call, email, or LinkedIn touch takes, and touches per lead, how many touches your cadence requires before moving on.
- Enter inbound leads per month.
- Read leads worked per rep per day, team monthly capacity, capacity utilization, and reps needed to cover the current inbound volume.
Methodology
Touches per day is (selling hours × 60) ÷ minutes per touch, how many individual touches a rep can physically execute in their selling hours.
Leads per rep per day is touches per day ÷ touches per lead, since a full cadence spreads several touches across each lead rather than one touch per lead.
Team monthly capacity is leads per rep per day × SDRs × working days per month, total leads the team can properly work in a month. Capacity utilization is inbound leads ÷ that capacity, as a percentage.
Reps needed is inbound leads ÷ (leads per rep per day × working days), the headcount required to work every lead at full cadence, given as a decimal so you can see how close you are to needing a full additional hire versus a partial capacity gap.
The model assumes every touch is a genuine quality touch at the stated minutes-per-touch figure. Padding cadence with low-effort touches to hit an activity number inflates capacity on paper without improving actual results, the ceiling this tool computes only holds if the touch quality is real.
FAQ
It means inbound volume exceeds what your team can work at full cadence, leads are either getting a lighter touch than planned or dropped entirely. The reps-needed output tells you how many additional SDRs would close that gap at the same cadence standard.
Time an experienced rep through a real cadence step, a properly personalized call attempt with notes logged, or a genuinely tailored email, not a templated blast. Eight to ten minutes per touch is a common range for outbound-style touches on inbound leads.
Not automatically, more touches per lead raises the bar for how thoroughly each lead gets worked but directly lowers how many distinct leads a rep can cover in a day, since the two are inversely related in this formula. The right number depends on how much a touch typically moves conversion versus how much unworked inbound volume costs you.