What’s the real cost of building a sales team in 2025?

2024 was the year that put the Predictable Revenue Playbook to rest for good. Past the golden era of Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP), when capital was cheap to obtain, companies found that it was unsustainable to continue having an army of SDRs doing outreach as outbound success rates plummeted.

The rise of generative AI based personalization and AI SDRs have also lead to tighter spam filters on inboxes, making the strategy less efficient for those who wanted to keep running the same playbook but with less humans.

In light of this new reality, here’s how I would build out a sales organization - taking in mind the required costs.

The classic model relies on founder lead sales and hiring 2 additional sales reps. It’s a common mistake to hire a senior salesperson at this stage and hand over the task to them, but I found it’s better to hire two mid-level or junior salespeople at this stage.

The reason is that in the early stages, you can’t be sure if your playbook really works and you risk hiring the wrong individual. Having two of them run the game means you can test both the playbook and the people you hired!

If this works out, that’s when you hire a VP and start building out your sales org with different, specialized teams:

• Lead gen, AKA SDRs and BDRs,

• Inside or inbound sales to focus on leads brought in by marketing,

• A closing team of AEs

• Later on adding an expansion team focusing on partnerships, distribution, etc.

Now in the old days, you would typically have around 3 SDRs for every Account Executive. Post-ZIRP however, these teams are getting smaller, with outbound plays supported by tooling such as Instantly or Salesforge, that can scale the work of a single SDR.

In addition, the changing macro environment is forcing companies to reevaluate pure sales-led motions. With open, reply, and conversion rates dropping to unsustainable levels, marketing is being asked to carry more weight in generating pipelines.

That said, the cost of sales will be determined by choosing between a marketing-led or sales-led play. It’s not an either-or, as both approaches have advantages, but they are better fits for different organizations. For example, high-volume sales will need heavier marketing, while high-ticket items require a sales team of experts.

The cost of sales

Sales organizations live and die by their bonus schemes, which is a topic that merits its own separate article. In line with the above, we can do some napkin math to determine the costs of our sales org: