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by raiyu 3044 days ago
For starters I would separate them out.

Paid I would consider traditional forms of advertising and marketing such as TV, FB, Google, ads, etc.

Organic or community driven advertising has it's costs as well but I would separate that out to a different section. This would include budgets like meetups, some conferences (though many I would actually lump into traditional ad spend), t-shirts, stickers, credits to customers, community expenses and so forth.

Then for non-tracked customers I would assume that percentages work well. Meaning if 25% of my customers come from community, then 25% of my non-tracked organic customers are from community. If 5% are from paid, I would say 5% of my organic non tracked are paid.

If you do the break out this way you will see that old-gaurd paid advertising is 80% of the cost of the entire sales and marketing function, but brings in an overall 5-10% of net new sales.

Now if you are profitable, or near profitability go for it, but if you are losing a sizable portion of yearly revenue, say 50% or more due to sales and marketing and you see it broken out this way you will immediately realize how false this spend is.

Just because something is done a certain way and accepted, doesn't mean that it's correct.

1 comments

Most of the public SaaS companies around today spend a significant part of their S&M expenses on sales reps, and their associated selling commissions, not advertising and marketing. There are exceptions like Atlassian however, where they have managed to make the economics work at scale without a sales rep or any implementation assistance.