How Much Should You Invest in Sales and Marketing as a Percentage of Revenue?

Warren Buffett (main picture) is investor extraordinaire and focusses on key metrics that drive profitable growth. He inspired me to dig deeper into WiseTech, a cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) provider for the global freight and logistics industry. They listed on the Australian stock exchange in 2016 and their share price has risen more than 600% in the last 3 years. 99% of their revenue is ‘recurring’ (SaaS) and with less than 1% customer churn. These are all very impressive numbers but here is the jaw-dropper…They invest only 14% of revenue and have only 12% of their people working in sales and marketing.WiseTech operates in 125+ countries and has 6,000+ customers. Here are some relevant benchmark companies for comparison in the illustration below (courtesy of Graham Hawkins and his book, The Future of The Sales Profession). Salesforce and NetSuite are the