Your GTM (marketing & sales) spend is way out of control!

Unfortunately I see WAY, WAY too much spending to acquire customers.? You have felt you’ve been caught in the hype of buying sales & marketing tools, running campaigns you didn’t understand, and/or hiring an army of business development sellers.? I’ve seen SMB customers with +10 sales & marketing tools and $60,000 business development reps - drowning the business.

You Cost of Customer Acquisition “CAC” = Up, Up, Up.

Your Payback Period (months to make a return on your investment for each new customer) =?Months, Months... and nearly a Year!

Here is what we’ll cover in this newsletter:

1. Your GTM (marketing & sales) spend is way out of control!
2. Case Study - offshoring social media management.? Denver vs. Bangladesh.
3. Don’t wait until you need talent badly to explore outsourcing best practices - you’ll rush and skip steps.

Your GTM (marketing & sales) spend is way out of control!

Problem - all these GTM horsepower is great, but they aren’t creating exponential returns, or even incremental returns in relation to your cost structure.? This is known as Marginal Utility.? The Total Utility is your total spend, but the extracted value per every additional tool/campaign/person (Marginal Utility) starts to have a decay for every addition if you’re not careful.? This is just the reality of sales.? We buy things thinking they’ll be additive (and they are to sales), but not in proportion to cost/ROI.

Here is what I mean.? You’re trying to get to 100 units, or 100% of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL’s) generated from all of your GTM costs to relieve you from achieving 100% of your sales goals.

Investment 1 = 5 units

Investment 2 = 1 unit

Investment 3 = 2 units

Investment 4 = 3 units

Investment 5 = 1 units

Investment 6 = 0 units

Investment 7 = 4 units

Investment 8 = 2 units

Investment 9? = 7 units

Investment 10 = 0 units

Total = 25 Units or 25% of SQL’s driven from GTM spend.

The cost of these 10 tools is $1,000,000 annually, and all you gain for inbound flow is 25% of 100% demand generation inbound!!!

Marginal utility is best told via ice cream.? Scoop #1 is delicious = 10/10.? Scoop #2 is good = 8/10, Scoop #10 is nearly making you noxious = 2/10.

You are spending so much on GTM tools and expensive onshore hires that they are having a detrimental effect / diminishing effectiveness on each other.

Examples:

• Social Media Manager
• Content Maker (blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.)
• Sales Development Reps

You could be saving $10,000’s to $100,000’s per year in these types of hires, and reducing the “opportunity costs” of pressure on your sales team to acquire $1,000,000’s in additional sales to remain profitable.? If you want to calculate this, go to Benchmark Your Talent Costs here.

Case Study - offshoring social media management.? Denver vs. Bangladesh

I was on with a prospective client today and we did an analysis of a specific role.

Current State - they have a full-time employee in Denver making $60,000/annual to manage two major initiatives:

• Develop and maintain a content calendar that outlines all social media posts.? This includes the images/videos + copy for each post.
• Post content on their company website, social media accounts + on their customers accounts.

After diving into the role, it’s clear that the programs executed were “point and shoot” - following a Standard Operating Procedure rulebook set forth by the company + their clients.

Opportunity Cost - this is a tactical, non-customer facing role.? I suggested that we look for talent in Bangladesh.? The equivalent talent would be $800/month ($9,600/annual).? Their role would be following the exact same playbook (SOP) already created.

Financial Impact:

$60,000 onshore salary

• $9,600 offshore salary

—-------

$51,400 gross profit.

I wasn’t the $51,400 of savings that struck this customer.? It’s the optionality of capital deployment that it offered:

“We can hire that sales person to prospect on LinkedIn now”.

“We can pay off that loan this year”.

“We can invest in that ERP solution to better manage projects with our clients”.

But that wasn’t the most shocking part:

This organization has a 30% profit margin.? Reverse-engineering what $51,400 of extra profit meant, equaling $252,000 in reduced sales pressure relieved to achieve today’s profit!? Yes, save and make $51,400 more in profit OR relieve the sales team of $252,000 in new revenue for the year.

Mind blowing!

1 simple change.? The Social Media Manager in Bangladesh.

Don’t wait until you need talent badly to explore outsourcing best practices - you’ll rush and skip steps.

I find some prospective customers have a backwards process:

“let’s talk about offshoring right when I’m about to hire”.

Challenge - identifying talent, hiring and onboarding talent, and THEN + learning a new process (mastering outsourcing) is not a lightswitch.? This is a few months of transformation

• I have to understand my “Why” so I can explain my Why to all stakeholders (internal and external to my company).

• We need an Infrastructure strategy (communication technology, payment processing, employment agreement/structure, perks / benefits, etc.)

• We will need to identify the talent.

• Hire the talent and wait for the talent to give notice in their current role.

• Onboard talent and ensure they become productive.

Last I checked, when you’re “ready” that means that you needed help and production yesterday.? ? You won’t have the patience to execute properly.? You’ll get anxious and take shortcuts.? Trust me, I see it every day.

Suggestion - start learning now.? Start meeting fellow founders/CEOs like you that have successfully outsourced.? Learn from their mistakes.? Be ready to pounce when you need the talent so all you need to do is:

• Find me talent from your pool of talent, based on my criteria.

• Let’s get ready to hire and onboard within weeks, not months.

Time to get prepared.

Don’t Forget – Benchmark your team against offshore talent.

Access it here.

• What is the profit increase you could expect?
• What is the sales relief / reprieve you could expect to generate the same profit?

Get ready to be shocked!