A common org chart pattern is that in the early days of hunting for product-market fit, a higher proportion of your company’s headcount likely lives in R&D. But as you scale, it’s common that you’ll begin adding sales and marketing hires at a proportionally faster clip, and go-to-market (GTM) thus begins to consume a larger part of the org chart.
Let's go a bit deeper and look specifically at sales team vs marketing team sizes over time as a percentage of total headcount. And how might the trends highlighted below change as the latest Gen AI tooling continues to arm GTM teams with even more automated leverage?
Methodology
For this analysis, we looked at 2,914 Pave customer companies with more than 50 employees.
Pave’s data science team grouped the following job families into the “sales” distinction:
- 'Sales - Generalist'
- 'Sales - New Business'
- 'Sales - Strategic Accounts'
- 'Account Management - Generalist'
- 'Sales Development'
- 'Business Development - Generalist'
- 'Sales Engineering', 'Implementation'
- 'Solutions Engineering - Post-Sales'
- 'Solutions Engineering', 'Customer Success'
- 'Relationship Management'
- 'Sales Operations - Generalist'
- 'Deal Desk Management'
- 'Sales Enablement'
The following job families were grouped into the “marketing” distinction:
- 'Marketing'
- 'Communications and PR'
- 'Product Marketing'
- 'Growth Marketing'
- 'Community Operations'
- 'Copywriting'
- 'Media Production'
- 'Graphic Design'
- 'Brand Marketing'
- 'Content Marketing’
Results
Marketing teams tend to get proportionally smaller as a company scales. Meanwhile, sales teams get proportionally larger.
Here are the median benchmarks by company size:
- 51-100 Employees: 4.2% of company in Marketing, 10.6% in Sales
- 101-200 Employees: 3.8% of company in Marketing, 11.4% in Sales
- 201-500 Employees: 3.4% of company in Marketing, 12.2% in Sales
- 501-1,000 Employees: 3.5% of company in Marketing, 12.4% in Sales
- 1,001-3,000 Employees: 3.3% of company in Marketing, 14.2% in Sales
- 3,001+ Employees: 2.6% of company in Marketing, 15.4% in Sales
How does your company compare to the market median benchmarks? Are you over or understaffed in sales and marketing requisite with the median company for your company stage bucket?
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