punctuative! by Matt Winn

In the midst of conversation with an investor/entrepreneur out of Dallas, I mentally stumbled over his musing, “Good tooth to tail ratio.” 

This one was new to me, though the startup world is full of bizarre analogies. 

I’m used to baseball metaphors (e.g., single, double, triple, home-run returns), horse racing (entrepreneur as “jockey”), food (”this one’s all sizzle and no steak” meaning hype without the substance), fights (”saber rattling,” often to indicate noise-making with no intent to actually battle), even fire (”he’s trying to boil the ocean with a Bic lighter” meaning thin resources applied towards a giant goal).

For whatever reason, we tend to focus on the primitive.

And I guess “tooth to tail ratio” is no exception.  As it turns out, the phrase is an old military expression that compares frontline (”tooth”) and support (”tail”) assets.

Historically, we’ve seen a massive drop in tooth to tail ratio within the US military - from 90/10 (Civil War) to 40/60 (World War I) [via, pg 39], to what I suspect is much lower still today (consider the last couple decades’ focus on air operations to win a war), though I’m no military expert. 

I wonder if we’ve seen/are seeing/going to see a similar trend in business.  Seen?  Yes.  For certain types of business, the Internet has enabled an automated sales process that’s been a resource game-changer, altering frontline (i.e., salesforce) needs.  As it relates to retailers, this shift has benefited the consumer, leading in large part to lower prices rather than higher margins.  Interestingly, though, some of the very high margin media businesses we’ve seen emerge of late benefit from historically high gross margins as well as headcount efficiencies, but may spend significantly (relative to other expenses) on salesforce in order to drive advertising. 

Offline, the sales automation gains will take time.  We’re seeing these kinds of gains organization-wide such that sales teams have improved lead mechanisms and back-end support (i.e., fewer salesfolks should deliver similar results) but the element of human interaction often remains critical, especially in a B2B context where consultative sales predominate.

The virtual sales avatar has a ways to go for tooth-to-tail to show less bite.

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Photo credit: A perfect set of teeth, originally uploaded by Everything is Permuted 

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