The best Go-to-Market splits?

After our Top Ten ‘Go-to-Market’ Mistakes Made by Federal Contractors (click to watch webinar and download slides) webinar, we received a number of follow-up questions from viewers.

Q: What’s the best split? Percentage of budget and staffing? Sales, marketing, BD, capture, proposal development?

A (Kevin Young):  Good question. Budgeting here is as much an art as a science. Broadly speaking, budgets, investments, and splits—with the major swim lanes being people, infrastructure, and programs—have everything to do with your products and services, industries and markets, geographies and regions, competitors, positioning, etc.

As broad brush models, I’ve seen marketing budgets as little as 0.5% and as high as 5.0% of the company’s annual gross revenues. I’ve seen Selling, General, and Administrative expense (SG&A) spreads from 12% to 24%, and I’ve been on capture teams where our budgets were well north of $350K. …An art as well as a science.

For some Go-to-Market context, here’s Kevin’s Washington Technology article on 10 Ways Marketing Drives Your Company’s Success (click to read more) .