The team you need today

What’s holding sales back?

Units of production? The right team?

It’s expensive to hire these roles and disruptive. A better approach is to instill processes and have some success before you hire in. Instead of going from a standstill.

So let’s instead start with another question: What’s the team you need today?

For 1 seller, assume their quota at $500K per year.  Maybe they over perform, but it’s unlikely in the first year. They need opportunities.  Assuming an average deal size is $50K, that means they need 10 deals. And if you have a 25% win rate, then you need 40 additional opportunities.

But where are they coming from?  Good question.  Ignore referral deals – they were already coming in and you don’t want to give your new seller these gifts.  Close them the way you did before they showed up.

Your main channels are:

The days of easy inbound are long over.  Even with the new Agent Engines answering questions and democratizing search results, those results are still going to companies that have armies of people writing non-AI generated content, and already have high authority.  Most inbound needs to be paid inbound. We don’t necessarily mean search ads on Google, but there are other programs like Google Retarget, YouTube pre-roll, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok,etc.

A new seller will need support: They need:

• 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.
• Marketing ops person (now sometimes called a GTM Engineer). Basically someone who can 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.  If you don’t have this role, your sellers will instead be distracted and not doing the thing you want them to do…which is sell!  A seller should be spending 75% of their week in front of buyers.  Much like how you expect your billable consultants to be utilized.
• Marketing support for a decent website, some air cover showing your buyers that you are a legit player, marketing collateral, marketing campaign, etc.

This means for your new seller to be successful, they actually need at least two 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, marketing ops, and 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 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.