Part 2: Scaling your promotions organization

Also see Part 1: Building an ads sales organization

So you’ve hired the first dozen or so people to run your promotions business. You’re seeing good enough results to scale it further, and now you want to grow your promotions organization. How many is too many? How many is too few? Figuring out how to appropriately scale and invest in teams to support your promotions business is an important step in ensuring your program is profitable, running efficiently, and not over or under staffed.

In our last post we touched on the basic blueprint for a “go-to-market” team. In this post, we’ll cast the net a bit more broadly to cover product & engineering as well. The reason for this is that as the organization grows, you want to be looking at the total profitability of your promotions engine — everything from product, to sales & marketing, to administrative. While there can be a myriad of roles to hire for, they can be usually classified into three major buckets:

Revenue teams are responsible for direct customer contact and are quota-bearing. They are typically assigned to specific accounts or customer segments, and include your account executives, account managers, and campaign managers.

Support teams are responsible for troubleshooting customer issues and keeping the ship running smoothly. They can be customer facing or internal facing only, and include product specialists or marketplace operations.

Foundational teams are responsible for building the scalable infrastructure of the product & its message to the market.

Below is a diagram that illustrates one methodology for how to invest in these teams, and some common pitfalls:

Revenue teams are often the most straightforward to fund because of the direct relationship to revenue growth. However, these teams can also get pretty large and expensive especially if selling to larger and larger accounts. You can get more scale out of these roles by increasing the ratio of revenue heads to customer accounts, and / or pursuing smaller customer accounts en masse, or making your product so darn intuitive, that it sells itself.

Support teams often bear the brunt of customer inquiries and complaints regarding bugs or complex features. These teams are often the last to get funded since their direct contribution to revenue is really hard to quantify. However, these teams can risk severe burnout if they are not resourced quickly enough or if product issues fail to be fixed in a timely manner. Getting to bug-free products and an easy to understand market message is a helpful path to reducing the load on and size of these teams.

Foundation teams typically scale with the number of different promotion products and programs you want to offer. If you’re sure of the direction you want to go in, hire specialists with deep experience in this area who can build the best in class. If you’re unsure, hire generalists who aren’t wedded to a specific approach and can learn and adapt quickly. You’ll usually need at least one person in each role for each product area, but they can provide significant leverage to the rest of the organization.

And there you have it — a basic blueprint for a customer-facing promotions org, and how to scale it.