Here, the “tooth” is the total headcount of your company’s QBSRs, while the “tail” is simply the entire remaining headcount of the company. That’s an important distinction from the military usage. You don’t need to make judgement calls about which non-QBSR employees “support” sales.

The idea is simply to measure the ratio of sales to everyone else. As you’ll see, it gives you not only moment-in-time insight but also a single, easily measured datapoint to align overall staffing and investment over time.

The calculation looks like this:

(Number of QBSRs) / (Total company headcount) = Tooth-to-Tail Ratio (%)

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