If you came here for a single percentage, we'll save you the scroll. The answer is that it depends, and anyone who hands you one number without asking how your business makes money is guessing. The good news is that it depends on two things you can actually figure out.
The first is what's really in your sales line today. The second is where your check comes from.
We'll take them in that order, because the first one surprises almost everyone. Most founders believe they spend a sliver of their revenue on sales, and when they count honestly, the number often lands far higher than they expected.
Count what's really in your sales line
Picture a firm with $100,000 in monthly revenue. It has the obvious sales costs: $400 CRM, $300 chamber of commerce membership. That's $700, or 0.7% of revenue, which feels like a low sales cost. But that’s not where the costs end.
A business development rep has a $75,000 salary and a 1.2x burden rate for taxes and benefits, which's $7,500 a month, bringing the sales cost up to 8.2% of revenue.
Then, a last, often forgotten, line. The founder spends about 40% of their working hours on sales, networking, follow-ups, proposals, and closing calls. At a $200,000 salary equivalent, that's $80,000 a year, or $6,667 a month, and the real sales allocation lands at about 14.9%.
Same firm, same month. The number climbed from 0.7% to 14.9% without anyone spending an extra dollar, because the only thing that changed was the honesty of the count.
This is the part that lands hardest in our workshops. The founder is usually the most expensive salesperson in the building, and because that cost never shows up as a line item, sales looks cheap. It also tells you what replacing yourself would cost: a business developer at $75,000 to $100,000 plus commission, your time to train them, and the months they need before they produce. If you're still carrying most of the selling yourself, our post on escaping the founder Freebie Zone shows where that road leads.
What belongs in the number
Use one rule. If an expense helps you find, pursue, or close new clients, it counts, and if it serves clients you already have, it doesn't. Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Your own time. The share of your working hours spent on sales, multiplied by your salary equivalent.
- Sales team pay. Salaries and commissions for anyone whose job is winning new business, with a 1.2x burden rate on top.
- Networking and associations. Chamber memberships and industry groups you joined to build relationships. Count them here or on your marketing line, but never on both.
- CRM and sales software. Count the tool when 80 to 90% of its use is managing leads and deals.
- Outside prospecting help. Outbound vendors, appointment setters, list purchases, and prospecting tools.
- Proposal and estimating time. The share of anyone's hours spent quoting new clients.
Leave out account managers, client success roles, and anyone who delivers your service. A receptionist who routes calls belongs to operations, but a trained intake team that converts leads into clients belongs here. When you're unsure, ask whether the person's job is to close.
Ready to run your own numbers? Pull the last three months of your books and use this worksheet.
Sales Allocation: your number in one line
Sales expenses: $___ ÷ Monthly revenue: $___ = ___% of revenue spent on sales
(That's the whole worksheet. Grab a clean copy and fill in your last three months →)
Then ask where the check comes from
Once your number is honest, the "it depends" gets interesting. The right balance between sales and marketing depends on whether your buyer is a business or a consumer, because the two models fund growth in nearly opposite ways. Our pages on revenue generation for B2B businesses and revenue generation for B2C businesses lay out the patterns, and here's the short version.
In B2B, sales drive most of the leads: events, speaking, referrals, and associations. Marketing supports those actions instead of replacing them, and roughly 80% of B2B marketing effort should go to things that directly help the rep, like collateral aimed at the people who refer you, event support, and one-to-one emails sent from the rep's own inbox. That's why the sales line usually runs bigger in B2B, and why people who know revenue generation talk about demand generation: staying in front of the right people so you're the first call when their timing arrives.
A commercial painting company shows what that looks like. We helped them hire a salesperson who loved networking, and that salesperson joined a construction association full of other trades, including paving, drywall, and gutters. Together they built a tight referral group of five or six companies that passed deals to each other.
Marketing supported the effort with collateral and sponsorships, but marketing alone in that association wouldn't have worked. The sales hire was the engine. So when it came to scaling up revenue, we looked closely at their sales allocation, since sales was their biggest revenue driver.
B2C flips the pattern. Marketing drives the leads through SEO, ads, referrals, and local search, and a sales or intake team closes them. A multi-location gym we worked with got most of its leads from SEO and ads, and a professional sales team closed each person after a trial visit. Marketing carried the lead generation there, the reverse of the painting company, where sales carried it.
Picture two businesses that each commit 15% of revenue to growth. The B2B firm might put 2% into marketing and 13% into sales, while the B2C gym puts 11% into marketing and 4% into sales. Same total, opposite splits, and both can be healthy.
The trouble starts when a business funds the wrong side for how its buyers actually buy. A B2B firm that spends like a gym pays for leads its buyers never wanted, and a gym that spends like a painting company pays for relationship-building when its customers are already searching. For B2B professional services, a combined commitment of 15% to 25% or more isn't unusual, and that range often startles founders who assumed single digits were normal.
Make the two lines talk to each other
Even a well-chosen split underperforms when sales and marketing never connect. We see this constantly: the rep works events and association meetings, while the company runs generic brand ads and broad email blasts. Did anyone the rep met ever see those ads? You don't know, and neither do the ads.
Connecting them costs little. Every contact the rep meets goes on a list, and you run retargeting ads to that list with the rep's face on them, so the people who just shook hands see that face everywhere for the next six months.
The handoff runs both ways. Marketing can only support the rep when the rep feeds it, so reps need to capture contact info at every event, log every contact in the CRM, keep prospect lists current, and add personal outreach like phone calls and typed invitations to every campaign. When both sides do their part, your dollars complement each other instead of competing for credit.
The same lens helps when a vendor pitches you. Look at the logos on their website and ask what share of those clients are B2B, what share are B2C, and how big they are. An agency that works with nothing but hundred-million-dollar consumer brands plays a different game than your three-million-dollar B2B firm, and our guide to what founders need to know before hiring a marketing agency goes deeper.
How to read your number
There's no universal right percentage. If you're hitting your revenue goals, your sales allocation is working, so don't change it without a reason. If you're missing them, the combined percentage usually explains part of the story: either it's too low for your cost per customer, so you can't afford enough new clients, or it points at the wrong side, like funding ads when your buyers respond to relationships.
The percentage tells you how much you spend. Your CAC tells you whether it works, and the path each customer took to find you is the fastest way to find out.
Pair this number with its other half, and you get your total commitment. We walked through the marketing side in How Much of Your Revenue Should Be Allocated to Marketing?, and our post on your revenue generation commitment shows how the combined figure turns into customers and revenue.
Do this week
Pull your last three months of books and add up every sales expense, starting with your own time. Divide each month's total by that month's revenue, then average the three. If your sales cycle runs longer than 90 days, use 12 to 24 months instead, because a short window can make a good investment look like a waste.
Then set the number next to your marketing allocation. Ask which side runs bigger, and whether that matches how your buyers actually buy.
Which line is bigger in your business, sales or marketing, and does that match where your last ten clients really came from?
If you'd like a second set of eyes on your sales numbers, reach out to us, and we'll work through it with you.
