# Economics vs playbooks *The motion has to fit the economics, not the other way around.* --- You've just taken over a software business. The previous team built an enterprise sales org: an SDR team of three, two account executives, a marketing agency on retainer, the full conference circuit. Professional. Expensive. The product sells for £8,000 ACV. You pull the numbers. Total cost of the sales org, fully loaded: £800k a year. Last year they closed sixty deals. Fully loaded CAC: £13,300. £8,000 ACV at roughly 55% contribution margin: £4,400 of contribution per customer per year. £13,300 divided by £4,400. Payback period: just over three years. Three years to recover what you spent winning each customer, and you haven't even asked yet how long the average customer stays. --- You look at churn. Median customer life in this segment is about three years. So you're breaking even, in theory, right as the customer is thinking about leaving. Every new deal the sales team closes is a three-year loan to the customer, funded by your operating budget. Sixty deals a year means £800k committed annually against contribution that won't cover the investment until 2028. Growing faster makes it worse, because you're writing more loans before the first batch matures. The board sees sixty new logos and a growing pipeline. The bank account sees a business that consumes more cash with every deal it wins. --- You dig into the history and the mismatch becomes obvious. Two years ago, the product was different. Larger implementations, more configuration, bigger contracts. ACV was closer to £50,000. At that price, the same £13,300 CAC produced a payback of roughly six months (£50,000 times 55%, divided by twelve, gives about £2,300 of monthly contribution, recovering £13,300 in under six months). The enterprise sales org made perfect sense. Then the product shifted. New packaging aimed at smaller customers, simpler onboarding, lower price point. The market moved, the product followed, but the go-to-market stayed where it was. Nobody recalculated whether the inherited motion still fit the new economics. A £300-a-year product and a £100,000 deal need fundamentally different motions. That much is obvious. What's less obvious is that an £8,000 product and a £50,000 product also need different motions, and the difference is just as structural. --- So you work backwards. Twelve-month payback is the line where growth starts to fund itself, the [[Customer-funded growth]] threshold where each customer's contribution recovers the acquisition cost within a year and the cash can be redeployed to win the next one. At £8,000 ACV and 55% contribution margin, twelve-month payback means you can spend £4,400 to acquire a customer. That's your total budget: sales, marketing, onboarding, everything. £4,400 per customer. What motion fits inside that number? An account executive on £120,000 OTE needs to close about twenty-seven deals a year just to cover their own cost. Add the SDR who books their meetings, the marketing that fills the top of funnel, the CRM, the tools, and you need fifty or sixty deals per rep before the economics work. That's more than one a week, on a product that typically takes a few calls to close. Enterprise sales cannot fit inside £4,400. The arithmetic doesn't bend. --- A lighter motion fits. Inbound content generates leads without a per-lead cost, a self-serve trial lets prospects experience the product before talking to anyone, and one or two inside sales reps handle inbound enquiries and close on short cycles rather than prospecting into cold accounts over months. You run the numbers on inbound. Content and SEO spend: £80k a year. Generates about two hundred qualified leads, sixty of which convert through a single inside sales rep costing £60k fully loaded. Total cost: £140k. Sixty customers. CAC: £2,300. Payback: just over six months. Same number of customers at less than a fifth of the cost, because the motion was designed to fit the economics rather than inherited from a previous era. --- Eighteen to twenty-four months of payback is survivable with patient capital or slower growth. You can still build a business there, but every new customer is a bet you're funding today against returns that arrive in two years, and the faster you grow, the deeper the cash hole gets. Beyond twenty-four months, something is structurally wrong. Either the pricing doesn't support the cost of sale, or the motion is built for a different product, or you're selling to the wrong segment. Three-year payback is a design problem, not a tuning problem. --- The instinct when [[Rebuilding growth|rebuilding growth]] is to optimise what exists. Train the sales team, improve conversion rates, renegotiate the agency retainer. Squeeze fifteen percent more efficiency from the current motion. Fifteen percent improvement on a three-year payback gets you to two and a half years. Still broken. You're polishing a machine built to the wrong specification. The motion was designed for £50,000 ACV and it's selling £8,000 ACV. No amount of optimisation closes that gap, because the gap is structural. The harder move is admitting the inherited playbook was never going to work at this price point, and starting from the economics instead. --- One more thing. Blended payback hides the decisions. Your sixty customers last year came from three channels. Inbound converted twenty at £1,500 CAC (payback: four months). Partner referrals converted fifteen at £4,000 CAC (payback: eleven months). Outbound prospecting converted twenty-five at £25,000 CAC (payback: nearly six years). Blended across all sixty, the number looks like nearly three years and you conclude the whole motion needs work. Segmented, you find two channels that are already self-funding and one that is destroying value. The action is to stop the outbound spend and redeploy the budget into the channels where the economics work, not to optimise the blend. Three questions, in order. What's the payback by segment? What can you afford to spend per customer, working backwards from payback and contribution margin? Does the motion you've inherited, or the one you're planning to build, fit inside that budget? If the playbook costs more than the economics can support, the playbook is wrong for you. Most companies build the motion first and hope the numbers work out. They don't. ---