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I bet its mostly sales. I had no idea about how much sales ppl you need at certain scale.

by nazgob 10y ago

devonkim 10y ago
Sales persons are necessary when continuing growth requires efforts that do not scale as effectively. Marketing and advertising campaigns work sufficiently well for b2c with 1-2 people but you hit a wall if you want to selling to, for example, the Pentagon because the way those with the deepest pockets buy is nothing like how most efficient individuals and organizations buy. Groupon's massive needs for salespeople is an example of how even lower margin b2b even needs sales due to how scaling out b2b is so much less cost-effective. But for investors, landing a huge contract is not as much about the revenue as much as an indicator of stability in terms of both revenue and market signal (no Fortune 100 will buy some random fly-by-night vendor's stuff without code escrow even if it's the best thing ever because their sourcing overhead is so poor and big companies are immensely risk-averse by design).
- tmnvix 10y ago
  Atlassian's 'b2b without salespeople' approach has worked well for them.
  - devonkim 10y ago
    They definitely have sales roles in more recent years and have a sales ops team [1][2][3]. The Federal channel manager description even acknowledges that there's unique challenges in selling to the government that necessitates someone that knows the different contracting vehicles. What they've done with little turn to sales culture is pretty admirable but at the same time only possible with organic, engineer-to-engineer driven growth Github and Atlassian suites. Salesforce grew somewhat similarly via rogue accounts on expense accounts, but to actually clinch the biggest growth there was no way to avoid salespeople to get over $500MM in revenue probably. [1] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 [2] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 [3] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238
bluedino 10y ago
Yea, looking at the employee page for Stack Overflow shows a vast majority of the staff being in sales.

I bet its mostly sales. I had no idea about how much sales ppl you need at certain scale.

by nazgob 10y ago

I bet its mostly sales. I had no idea about how much sales ppl you need at certain scale.

Sales persons are necessary when continuing growth requires efforts that do not scale as effectively. Marketing and advertising campaigns work sufficiently well for b2c with 1-2 people but you hit a wall if you want to selling to, for example, the Pentagon because the way those with the deepest pockets buy is nothing like how most efficient individuals and organizations buy. Groupon's massive needs for salespeople is an example of how even lower margin b2b even needs sales due to how scaling out b2b is so much less cost-effective. But for investors, landing a huge contract is not as much about the revenue as much as an indicator of stability in terms of both revenue and market signal (no Fortune 100 will buy some random fly-by-night vendor's stuff without code escrow even if it's the best thing ever because their sourcing overhead is so poor and big companies are immensely risk-averse by design).

tmnvix 10y ago
Atlassian's 'b2b without salespeople' approach has worked well for them.
- devonkim 10y ago
  They definitely have sales roles in more recent years and have a sales ops team [1][2][3]. The Federal channel manager description even acknowledges that there's unique challenges in selling to the government that necessitates someone that knows the different contracting vehicles. What they've done with little turn to sales culture is pretty admirable but at the same time only possible with organic, engineer-to-engineer driven growth Github and Atlassian suites. Salesforce grew somewhat similarly via rogue accounts on expense accounts, but to actually clinch the biggest growth there was no way to avoid salespeople to get over $500MM in revenue probably. [1] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 [2] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 [3] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238

bluedino 10y ago

Yea, looking at the employee page for Stack Overflow shows a vast majority of the staff being in sales.