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:

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 to let Marketing Max handle it for you. Max is TekStack’s always-on blend of AI agents and human experts that supports your rep with everything they need to fill the funnel:

• Write and launch outbound sequences
• Source and enrich prospect lists, including duplicate management
• Run email marketing and campaign automations each month
• Integrate your website for visitor insights and form submissions
• Set up and manage events, including pre and post-event marketing
• Monitor inbound activity to ensure web inquiries are validated, assigned, and followed up by sales
• Ensure prioritized accounts are assigned to reps and followed up
• Provide monthly marketing insights and analysis

A proven, lower risk approach.

Start with Marketing Max and scale as you grow. Most of our customers find that having AI agents and human experts working alongside their team is more effective — and more cost-efficient — than hiring full-time. When acquirers look under the hood, they see a well-operated go-to-market machine with the data discipline and marketing operations to drive scale.

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