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Revenue at risk

Quota loss vs hiring fast

Every day a quota-carrying seat sits empty, pipeline goes unbuilt and bookings slip out of the year. Model your own numbers, then compare a slow process against a fast one.

Currency

Model a single hire or a whole build-out.

Your current end-to-end time: brief to signed offer, plus notice.

Our shortlist lands within 14 days, with pipelining running continuously.

Bookings the seat is expected to carry over 12 months.

On-target earnings. Base is assumed at a 50/50 split.

Realistic attainment for the seat, not the board-deck number.

Used to show the margin, not just the bookings, that walks out the door.

Months to full productivity. We assume half productivity through ramp.

Share of base salary equivalent burned by peers and managers covering the desk.

Rushed or thin shortlists raise this. Each mis-hire costs base, fee and half a year of quota.

Percentage of base salary. Adjust to your commercial model.

Slow process, 88 days

£381,805

Fast process, 14 days

£223,668

Value of hiring fast

£158,137

Recovered across 1 seat by closing the gap from 88 to 14 days. Net of a £25,000 search fee, that is £133,137 back to the number, an ROI of 6.3x.

Cost driverSlowFastDelta
Lost bookings while vacant£180,822£28,767£152,055
Gross margin forgone£135,616£21,575£114,041
Cover & management drag£7,233£1,151£6,082
Ramp productivity loss£93,750£93,750£0
Risk-weighted mis-hire cost£100,000£100,000£0

Gross margin forgone is shown for context and is a subset of lost bookings, so it is not added into the totals.

£2,885
Quota lost per day
£14,423
Per week
£62,500
Per month

How the model works

Nothing here is a black box. The calculator is deliberately conservative, and every assumption is adjustable so the output reflects your business rather than ours.

260 working days

Quota is spread evenly across the working year, so a calendar day open converts to roughly 0.71 working days of selling time.

50/50 OTE split

Base salary is assumed at half of OTE. Cover cost and the search fee are both calculated off base, not total earnings.

Half productivity through ramp

A new hire is modelled at 50% of daily quota until fully ramped. Longer ramp means the cost of a late start compounds.

Mis-hire is risk-weighted

Each mis-hire is costed as base salary plus the search fee plus six months of quota, multiplied by the probability you set.

Where the days actually go

Most hiring processes lose time in four places. These are the levers we pull on every mandate.

  1. 01

    Shortlist in 14 days

    Continuous pipelining means we start from a warm map of the market rather than a cold search, so the first qualified slate lands inside two weeks.

  2. 02

    Compress the interview loop

    Pre-booked panel slots and a defined scorecard remove the dead weeks between stages, where most strong GTM candidates are lost.

  3. 03

    Assess before you shortlist

    Structured, evidence-based assessment lowers mis-hire probability, which is usually the single largest line in this model.

  4. 04

    Sequence the build

    For multi-seat builds we stagger starts so onboarding and enablement capacity is not the new bottleneck.

Want us to run this against your live roles? Book an intro call or see what we are working on.

Put a number on the delay.

We build the ROI case with you before the search starts, so the decision is about cost of waiting, not cost of hiring.