5 Reasons Why You Never Get the Headcount You Need
Continuing our 5 Reasons series, this month we talk about why getting headcount approved feels like an impossible feat. You plan, you plead, you bargain, but never seem to get what you need to deliver the results you need to provide. As a result, your team members are burning out, causing even more problems as you need to replace them, retrain, and repeat.
Here are five reasons why you’re always understaffed, with practical solutions you can use in your next budget cycle.
1. You don’t have a relationship with the Finance team
The Finance team will create a budget for your team whether you like it or not. For support, my experience is that Finance will likely (1) focus on case volume, not considering the cost of self-service or automated support and (2) apply rules that are best suited to low-complexity environment, such as each issue being resolved in a single, short interaction. And for customer success, Finance often relies on unsustainable customer ratios, with no distinction made between SMBs and enterprise customers.
The solution is simple: socialize your business to the Finance team. Invite your rep to meetings, and as an observer to customer interactions. The more you share the better. And listen to their questions: anything that’s unclear to your Finance rep is a potential budget trap.
Lesson: cultivate relationships with the Finance team
2. You don’t have a staffing model
Except perhaps in a fledgling startup, you can’t expect to get a budget approved from vibes. Since the vast majority of your expenses is headcount, you need to have a model that links deliverables to staffing.
Having created dozens, maybe hundreds of staffing models, I’ve found that, even in large and complex organizations, it’s possible to create a simple model that delivers reliable results and that you can defend to an outsider–starting with your Finance rep. By “simple” I mean that you can explain the logic in one slide. And by “defend” I mean that you can justify all the working assumption with your historical data. Here are the basic numbers you will need:
- Utilization rate: what proportion of time is actually available for customer work
- Support incident rates
- Effort time: how long it takes to resolve an incident
- CSM:customer ratio
- Individual contributor:manager ratio
- Delivery head:Ops heads ratio
Remember that you are creating a staffing model, not a detailed CSM assignment model, or a scheduling model for support. Stay high-level: use averages across teams, countries, and specialties unless there are significant differences across groups, and use at least a year’s worth of data. (We can help.)
Lesson: create and maintain a simple, data-backed staffing model
3. You don’t understand corporate priorities
If your organization has decided that next year is the year of AI initiatives and you decide that you must invest in an in-house soft skills training team instead, it’s going to be hard to get that budget. But you can spin your story into needing to upskill the team since all the easier tasks will be handled through AI self-service, which may be much more successful. Read the room.
Lesson: articulate your priorities so they match or adapt to the corporate priorities
4. You don’t innovate
Asking for “the same as last year, plus a little more to match the increase in customers” is unlikely to pass muster. You want to show that you are always pushing to do more, or do with less. For instance: your new self-service programs will result in fewer support cases; your new AI-driven QBRs will allow CSMs to manage a few more customers each; your new customer onboarding program will shave a week off onboarding time; your new premium support offerings will generate revenue for services you’re currently giving away, etc.
Your staffing model (point #2) should have all the data you need to model your improvement initiatives.
Lesson: demonstrate ongoing improvements in productivity or outcomes
5. You sandbag
Last year, you were so successful padding your numbers that you ended up with idle staff (clearly visible in the plentiful metrics your team produces). Or you insist that, even though you are deploying a host of expensive AI tools, your individual productivity numbers won’t budge at all for the next 18 months. That’s padding, and the Finance team will be onto you. It’s fine to build in a reasonable ramp for savings to accrue, of course, with appropriate justification, but don’t be so obvious that you will lose all credibility.
That said, I would always recommend adding reasonable caveats to any staffing model. If buggy products are released, if dodgy customers are acquired, your mileage will absolutely vary.
Lesson: be cautious but not wimpy
What are your strategies to plan for and defend headcount? Tell us in a comment.
