How many accounts should a rep own? Derive it, do not borrow it.

Benchmarks are the wrong starting point

Every article on this gives a range. Fifty for enterprise, two hundred for mid market, five hundred for SMB. Those numbers come from someone else’s motion, cycle length and product, and applying them to yours is guessing with a citation.

The number you want is derived from three things you already have: how long a deal takes, how many touches it needs, and how much time a rep actually has.

Work backwards from touch capacity

Take the real selling hours in a week after internal meetings, admin and travel. Divide by the average touches a deal needs to progress a stage. That gives you concurrent active opportunities.

Then apply your conversion rate from account to active opportunity. If one in six accounts becomes an active opportunity in a year and a rep can carry twelve active at once, the book is somewhere near seventy, not two hundred.

Coverage is not the same as ownership

A rep can own more accounts than they can cover, and most do. The question is whether the uncovered ones should be in the book at all, or whether they belong in a nurture motion until a signal fires.

Splitting owned from covered makes the capacity conversation honest, and it usually surfaces a large tail of accounts nobody has touched in a year.

Check the answer against attainment

Once you have a number, test it against last year. Reps with books near the derived size should show better attainment than reps far above it. If they do not, the constraint is somewhere else and the book size is not your problem.