The lens of “business development” in web3 has evolved from a disciplined-analytical approach into a loosely-defined networking aficionado. 

Companies track and optimize every single customer interaction in order to achieve the golden 3:1 lifetime value (LTV) to cost-of-acquisition (CAC) ratio. For every $1 spent on acquiring new customers, that customer should return $3 in revenue. 

These calculations are typically made from the top of the funnel (SEO, PPC, etc.) all the way down until customer conversion.

Using 3RM as an example, let’s walk through an example of running a tight process. 

Say that we want to grow new inbound leads by 10% month-over-month (MoM). We know that our cost to acquire (CPA) 1 new lead is ~$3. If we currently have 100 leads in our CRM, then our objective should be to get 10 new leads at a cost of no more than $30.

That is a great measurement for the top-of-funnel. 

Now, let’s say that we acquire those 10 new leads but our salesperson (me) has an average close rate of ~20%. That means that we would only have a net-new 2 converted leads for that originally spent $30. 

Our expectation of these two leads is that before they churn, they should provide ~$90 in revenue for our company. This can be calculated by knowing what your average revenue per account is sitting at. 

This example is the simplest version of building stable business operations because it doesn’t account for the cost of my employment with the company and a variety of other factors. 

All of this matters when you are running a business because “doing things that don’t scale” can be an exhausting process that doesn’t necessarily support product market fit. PMF can be found quicker by installing a repeatable and scalable process that allows you to calculate your growth in order to project success and have clearer timelines for more costly expenses. 

As great as the crypto Twitter (X) and conference circuit are, there is a large chasm of reliability that needs to be crossed by early-stage companies in the space. Once teams are able to discover the ability to fairly calculate the size of their market, the cost of acquiring new users, & the results of their efforts in a scalable way crypto might finally have the opportunity to be realistic about the expectations of changing the world. 

Teams need reliable sales operations instead of interoperability. It would be better to calculate what is or (more importantly) is not working instead of making useless products more widely available to different chains with crypto-native users.