Sales and marketing draw level with engineering at about 50 people

When a B2B software company first reaches 100 people, the typical one has 1.19 salespeople and marketers for every engineer. At 10 people it has 0.50, one for every two engineers. Sales and marketing draws level with engineering at about 50 people (1.00) and keeps climbing to 1.38 at 250.

Those are medians from Kenso internal data. We rebuilt the teams of 17,571 software companies from the public work histories of their staff, and looked at each company in the quarter it first reached 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 1,000 people, between 2015 and 2026.

The benchmark is wide

The spread around each median is large. At 100 people, the middle half of companies runs from 0.54 to 2.53 salespeople and marketers per engineer. At 50 people it runs from 0.40 to 2.29. At 10 people, 16% of companies have nobody with an engineering title in the data at all, and 29% have no salesperson or marketer.

The ratio stops rising at the top: 1.38 at 250 people and 1.36 at 1,000, where only 85 companies are measured.

The mix tilts toward sales as companies grow

Engineering's share of the team falls from 25.4% at 10 people to 18.5% at 1,000. Sales rises from 10.8% to 21.1%. Marketing stays between 4.6% and 5.6% at every size. Here "sales" means account executives, SDRs, account managers, partnerships, pre-sales, revenue operations and other sales titles. Customer success is counted separately; adding it would raise the ratio at 100 people to 1.41.

About a third of people at every size (34.6% at 100 people) have titles that fit no named function: leaders, finance, design, project managers, and advisors and board members who list the company.

Younger companies run leaner

Companies founded in 2020 to 2024 had fewer salespeople and marketers per engineer than companies founded in 2010 to 2014 when they reached the same size. At 25 people the ratio was 0.70 against 0.86, a difference of -0.16 (95% interval -0.33 to -0.06). At 50 people it was 0.89 against 1.11. The gap is clearest at 25 people; at 10, 50 and 100 people the 95% intervals reach zero.

Timing matters too. Companies that reached 50 to 250 people in 2023 to 2024 had the lowest ratios of any period: 0.81 at 50 people and 0.91 at 100. Young companies could only reach these sizes recently, so age and the hiring climate are tangled. Product-led growth, AI tools for outbound and the push for efficient growth after 2022 all fit the pattern. The data can't tell them apart.

More go-to-market did not clearly mean faster growth

The companies that grew fastest over the next two years, the top fifth by headcount growth, were a little heavier on sales and marketing. At 100 people they had 1.37 salespeople and marketers per engineer, against 1.16 for the rest.

But fast growers differ in many ways, so we compared like with like. We set companies in the top third of the ratio for their size against companies in the bottom third. Each go-to-market-heavy company was matched to up to three engineering-heavy ones with the same industry group, age band, period and size, and similar growth in the two years before. Over the next two years, the go-to-market-heavy companies grew headcount by a median 30.2% and their matches by 27.3%. The gap, 2.9 percentage points, is within the margin of error: the 95% interval runs from -1.0 to +6.1.

Only at 25 people is the gap clearly positive (+9.1 points). In the eight other versions we ran, among them US companies only and funding rounds added to the matching, the gap stays between -3.6 and +3.8 points and no interval excludes zero. Comparing averages instead of medians gives the go-to-market-heavy companies a small edge of 4.1% (interval 1.7% to 6.6%), but two to three years before reaching the size they had grown 3.0% less than their matches, so part of that edge may be catching up.

What we expected

We wrote our predictions down before pulling any data. The ratio would rise with size: it did. Younger companies would run leaner: they did, clearly only at 25 people. Fast growers would have more go-to-market: slightly, yes. A matched gap of 5 to 15 points: wrong, the gap was 2.9 points with an interval that includes zero. And the six-country data would overstate the ratio: it does, as the limits below show.

What it means for founders

• Use the benchmark as a range, not a target. At 50 people, half of all companies sit between 0.40 and 2.29 salespeople and marketers per engineer.
• Expect the mix to tilt as you grow. Engineering falls from 25.4% of the team at 10 people to 18.5% at 1,000, while sales rises from 10.8% to 21.1%.
• Don't hire sellers to force growth. Being heavy on go-to-market or on engineering at a given size did not, on its own, predict faster growth over the next two years.
• Compare with companies of your vintage. Companies founded since 2020, and those that reached these sizes in 2023 to 2024, run leaner than older benchmarks suggest.

What this data cannot show

Three things move the level of the ratio, though not its rise with size.

• Six countries. The data covers people in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. Engineers elsewhere are missing, and offshore engineering is common. Among companies whose counted team is close to the employee count on their company record, the ratio at 100 people is 1.03 instead of 1.19.
• Titles. Teams come from job titles. Counting pre-sales engineers as engineers puts the ratio at 100 people at 0.97. Kenso's own job-function labels, which exist only for current jobs, find more engineers than titles do (29.0% of staff against 22.2%) and give a ratio 28.9% lower for the same companies today.
• Cause. A matched comparison can't rule out that companies hire sellers because they already expect to grow.

So read the medians as an upper end for the typical company. The shape is robust: in every version we ran on B2B software, the ratio at 100 people is at least 1.71 times the ratio at 10.