How to structure your initial sales & marketing team to achieve growth

Growing your top line sales results isn’t as easy as hiring an additional seller.  Today, in B2B technology sales, the seller needs to be supported by the right skills and activity.

Think about it as a unit of production. Assume the quota for one added seller is $500K per year in ARR, or $800K per year in total bookings.  Maybe they can over perform, but it’s unlikely, especially in the first year.

Your seller will need opportunities.  Assuming an average deal size is $50K ARR, that means they need 10 deals. And if you have a 25% win rate, then you need 40 additional opportunities.

But where are these deals coming from?  Good question.  Ignore referral deals – they were already coming in and you don’t want to give your new seller these gifts.  Don’t feel bad about giving those gifts to existing reps, or if you are a founder leading sales, keep them for yourself.

Your main channels for new opportunities are referrals, seller driven outbound, and marketing driven inbound or events.  Lets set the following goals:

Days of easy inbound are long over.  

What’s the fastest way to build that funnel?

Partnerships/Referrals:  Find one or two consultant or referral relationships where they can trade information and opportunities. Another good strategy is customer referrals: scour list of customer contacts, look at their LinkedIn connections, and ask for introductions.

Sales Led: Good ol’ fashioned prospecting.  Building targeted lists, running an outbound sequence that includes personalized emails, LinkedIn connections, and cold calls.

Marketing Led: Support your seller with “air cover” marketing.  Social, content, video, events.  If you have the budget, you can also run ads to drive inbound inquiries

It will be hard for a new seller to do all this on their own.  They need support in the form of the following roles:

• Pre-sales specialist – someone who can demo, if your product requires that level of expertise. For this exercise we can assume that this role is borrowed from another department.
• Digital Marketing Specialist: Someone who can create website, collateral, blog content, social, run events.
• MarkOps: Marketing operations, now sometimes called a GTM Engineer. Basically someone who can do the data work like research the right buyer, load that information into your CRM, craft messages that can be sent on the seller’s behalf, identify high intent buyers, and keep the data clean.  It’s a pretty technical role with lots of data analysis.  

This means for your new seller to be successful, they actually need at least three other sets of skills to make it happen.  That’s assuming they are doing their own cold calling, which frankly many sellers will avoid like the plague.

The above diagram illustrates the concept of a Unit of Production.  Every 3 new logo reps will require one FTE Cold caller, one marketing ops, and one digital marketer.  When you hit three sellers, you’ll need to hire a dedicated sales leader.  But only hire that role when you have two of the three sellers hitting quota.  Otherwise you’ll bury yourself in overhead and never get out of it.  These new reps need to work with the founder, get the founder’s stories, get the passion and urgency, and sense the upward mobility to the sales manager opportunity.

A junior digital marketing specialist will set you back around $60-70K per year.  Assume they will need some technical assistance for site design, etc.  A data jockey will set you back a little bit more, probably $80K per year.  That’s a $150K investment on top of the $150K for the rep.  That $300K of people investment needs at least another $100K of marketing spend for events, ads, etc.  So your $400K investment buys you $500K of ARR which is a pretty good deal considering the largest tech companies can spend upwards $5M to get the same $500K added.  That $500K of added ARR nets you about $2M in incremental valuation.  A pretty good return, but…

The alternative is that you could work with TekStack’s R40 Performance Marketing Operations.  We’ll do the work of the marketing specialist and data jockey supporting your rep with as much as they need.  That investment of $40K per year includes:

• Write and launch outbound sequences
• Setup contact views and marketing lists for outbound and email nurture activity
• Email marketing each month
• Integrate your website for visitor insights and form submissions
• Setup and managed new events including pre and post event marketing
• Manage campaigns, campaign automations, and sending emails on demand
• Monitor inbound activity to ensure web inquiries are validated, assigned, and followed up by sales.
• Research and import new prospect lists including duplicate management
• Ensure Prioritized accounts are assigned to sales reps and followed up
• Provide monthly marketing insights and analysis

A proven, lower risk approach.

Run us for a year and then scale up to full-time when you are ready.  The reality is that most of our customers just keep our service until they get acquired.  When the acquirees look into the business, they see a well operated GotoMarket machine that has the data discipline and baseline marketing operations to drive scale.

Learn more about how our Marketing Operations can make an impact, or let’s get started.