Team Size Benchmarks for Sales & Marketing

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.

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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?

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Methodology

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For this analysis, we looked at 2,914 Pave customer companies with more than 50 employees.

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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'

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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.

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Here are the median benchmarks by company size:

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• 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

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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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