6 ms·

>An engineers actions are so far removed from revenue that they can't make a claim so directly. Really? I see it the other way around. How did the salesperson

by ugh123 9y ago

>An engineers actions are so far removed from revenue that they can't make a claim so directly. Really? I see it the other way around. How did the salesperson contribute to building the product? A well built technology solution can sell it self in many scenarios. If we didn't have sales people, we could still build a product and push it into the market. Of course all of this depends on the type of product, but still... I'm actually in favor of of commissions, and engineering bonuses for the same reasons from this article. But it cannot be said that engineers are so far removed from the revenue.

parasubvert 9y ago
I've been working in software for a long time, and other than inexpensive / simple consumer software or inexpensive departmental IT software, I've never seen products that sell themselves. Marketing at the very least is required, and for anything remotely complex, that's what sales is for. Sales does something nearly as important as building the software: they map a customer's opportunity or problem to a technical solution, and ensuring they're successful with it. Sales (and marketing, which is arguably the evolution of sales at scale) are the field forces in discovering and exploiting product/market fit. No feature list survives first contact with the customer. Sales creates customers, and thus create markets. You might have a great piece of software but if no one can explain it, no one will understand it, and it won't sell. This is the difference between software that costs $1k and $100k+. The price is reflective of the value it can provide and who is buying it. Now in very small companies, the engineers are also marketers and salespeople. But beyond (say) 50 people, the divide between engineering and customers gets wider unless you have very good communication between sales, marketing, product, and engineering. There's too much work for everyone to focus on everything.
- gaadd33 9y ago
  Didn't Atlassian grow to a pretty big size before they even started hiring a sales team?
  - parasubvert 9y ago
    I think so, but it depends on "big". You probably can get to $20-50 million without much in the way of sales. They did have reasonable marketing. It's when they started targeting the mass market, getting funding, removing features their early adopters loved (eg. wiki syntax in Confluence) that they needed a sales force. But that was necessary for their plan to scale. They're still not huge ($600 million is excellent but not Red Hat).
puranjay 9y ago
You're not going to sell to large businesses without salespeople. A $10/month product? Sure. But when you're selling a $10,000/month product, you need salespeople.
- olavgg 9y ago
  Not always. We sell out software to the big banks and we don't have a single salesperson in our team. Everyone call us. The reason for this is that we have been in national newspapers with awesome articles, which is great marketing. I'm sure we could do even better on the international market with a sales team.
  - bspn 9y ago
    Out of interest, who speaks to them when they call if you don't have a sales team?
    - olavgg 9y ago
      We have 3-4 people that take care of that and that works with closing. But sales is not their primary role.
- mdale 9y ago
  What about AWS ? I often see spend 10k+ Without much of a conversation with salespeople. But this is probably the exception rather then the rule. And of course there is high touch to grow accounts after they reach certain threasholds.
  - adventured 9y ago
    AWS's large clients make up the majority of the AWS business, as is typical in a business like that. AWS has a dedicated sales team that manages those customers. Here's how that works in concept, for example: Microsoft didn't hand-sell every individual copy of Windows 95 at every individual retail location. They did sell, big time, at the macro level however, which made the micro sales possible. That's how AWS works, Amazon captures the macro, the micro takes care of itself for the most part. If you're AWS and you capture dozens of impressive start-ups and enterprise players, the headlines and blog posts that are written as a consequence will micro sell as a consequence to countless smaller businesses for you. Not to mention, Amazon simultaneously pushes AWS at small businesses in numerous subtle ways, including on their site (which of course happens to be a giant advertising platform that reaches every business owner in the US).
dsacco 9y ago
I think you're getting hung up on the difference between product work and product revenue. Think of this like the terms front office and back office. The back office (engineers, product managers) build the core software and the front office (traders, salespeople) use or sell that software to bring in revenue for the company. The terminology doesn't refer to which parties did more work to release the product, it refers to which parties are closest to the revenue, and thereby have more quantifiable metrics to be judged upon. Unsurprisingly, software engineers can make just as much or more than salespeople if they work in roles that happen to be very quantifiably attached to revenue generation, this just isn't the norm.
adventured 9y ago
> A well built technology solution can sell it self in many scenarios. If we didn't have sales people, we could still build a product and push it into the market. I don't how much sales experience you have, at either the management level or the hands-on sales level, but products almost never sell themselves. You're better off changing that to never sell themselves, because of how rare the examples of it are. It's practically universally agreed that most companies love to squeeze whatever angles they can for another dollar of profit, particularly around employee costs. So why does sales persevere in such a big way across all companies? They're not doing it for fun, they're not doing it because their products sell themselves, they're not doing it to waste large amounts of money. They do it because they have to, all of them; basically every single company on earth has to sell.
- flukus 9y ago
  I've come across a number of products that sell themselves because they've solved a problem I was having. A lot of these went on to unsell themselves with things like "contact us for pricing". A sales team might be better at maximizing sales, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. One that's bucked this trend lately has been atlassian, they're a 5 billion dollar company without a sales team that operates in a space that typically requires sales teams. Transparent pricing is a huge part of their success.
  - tarsinge 9y ago
    > One that's bucked this trend lately has been atlassian, they're a 5 billion dollar company without a sales team that operates in a space that typically requires sales teams. Transparent pricing is a huge part of their success. I heard they have a huge partner/reseller network though
    - notahacker 9y ago
      They also hire for lots of sales roles which don't have sales in the title https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/743999657351399 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/743999657351399
peteretep 9y ago
> How did the salesperson contribute > to building the product? I've worked at several companies where we've sold things we hadn't yet built in order to finance building them, generally with the client's knowledge. I note as well that Uber was selling rides quite a time before they had any kind of real engineering backend.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
A well built technology solution can sell it self in many scenarios. I don't think this is actually true - and in fact I'm loathe to come up with any examples where it was the case. In some cases fewer active sales efforts are required, if the product is really perfect, but even those are exceptionally rare and generally are utilizing pre-existing networks where the high touch process is already done.

by ugh123 9y ago

parasubvert 9y ago

I've been working in software for a long time, and other than inexpensive / simple consumer software or inexpensive departmental IT software, I've never seen products that sell themselves. Marketing at the very least is required, and for anything remotely complex, that's what sales is for. Sales does something nearly as important as building the software: they map a customer's opportunity or problem to a technical solution, and ensuring they're successful with it. Sales (and marketing, which is arguably the evolution of sales at scale) are the field forces in discovering and exploiting product/market fit. No feature list survives first contact with the customer. Sales creates customers, and thus create markets. You might have a great piece of software but if no one can explain it, no one will understand it, and it won't sell. This is the difference between software that costs $1k and $100k+. The price is reflective of the value it can provide and who is buying it. Now in very small companies, the engineers are also marketers and salespeople. But beyond (say) 50 people, the divide between engineering and customers gets wider unless you have very good communication between sales, marketing, product, and engineering. There's too much work for everyone to focus on everything.

gaadd33 9y ago
Didn't Atlassian grow to a pretty big size before they even started hiring a sales team?
- parasubvert 9y ago
  I think so, but it depends on "big". You probably can get to $20-50 million without much in the way of sales. They did have reasonable marketing. It's when they started targeting the mass market, getting funding, removing features their early adopters loved (eg. wiki syntax in Confluence) that they needed a sales force. But that was necessary for their plan to scale. They're still not huge ($600 million is excellent but not Red Hat).

puranjay 9y ago

You're not going to sell to large businesses without salespeople. A $10/month product? Sure. But when you're selling a $10,000/month product, you need salespeople.

olavgg 9y ago
Not always. We sell out software to the big banks and we don't have a single salesperson in our team. Everyone call us. The reason for this is that we have been in national newspapers with awesome articles, which is great marketing. I'm sure we could do even better on the international market with a sales team.
- bspn 9y ago
  Out of interest, who speaks to them when they call if you don't have a sales team?
  - olavgg 9y ago
    We have 3-4 people that take care of that and that works with closing. But sales is not their primary role.
mdale 9y ago
What about AWS ? I often see spend 10k+ Without much of a conversation with salespeople. But this is probably the exception rather then the rule. And of course there is high touch to grow accounts after they reach certain threasholds.
- adventured 9y ago
  AWS's large clients make up the majority of the AWS business, as is typical in a business like that. AWS has a dedicated sales team that manages those customers. Here's how that works in concept, for example: Microsoft didn't hand-sell every individual copy of Windows 95 at every individual retail location. They did sell, big time, at the macro level however, which made the micro sales possible. That's how AWS works, Amazon captures the macro, the micro takes care of itself for the most part. If you're AWS and you capture dozens of impressive start-ups and enterprise players, the headlines and blog posts that are written as a consequence will micro sell as a consequence to countless smaller businesses for you. Not to mention, Amazon simultaneously pushes AWS at small businesses in numerous subtle ways, including on their site (which of course happens to be a giant advertising platform that reaches every business owner in the US).

dsacco 9y ago

I think you're getting hung up on the difference between product work and product revenue. Think of this like the terms front office and back office. The back office (engineers, product managers) build the core software and the front office (traders, salespeople) use or sell that software to bring in revenue for the company. The terminology doesn't refer to which parties did more work to release the product, it refers to which parties are closest to the revenue, and thereby have more quantifiable metrics to be judged upon. Unsurprisingly, software engineers can make just as much or more than salespeople if they work in roles that happen to be very quantifiably attached to revenue generation, this just isn't the norm.

adventured 9y ago

> A well built technology solution can sell it self in many scenarios. If we didn't have sales people, we could still build a product and push it into the market. I don't how much sales experience you have, at either the management level or the hands-on sales level, but products almost never sell themselves. You're better off changing that to never sell themselves, because of how rare the examples of it are. It's practically universally agreed that most companies love to squeeze whatever angles they can for another dollar of profit, particularly around employee costs. So why does sales persevere in such a big way across all companies? They're not doing it for fun, they're not doing it because their products sell themselves, they're not doing it to waste large amounts of money. They do it because they have to, all of them; basically every single company on earth has to sell.

flukus 9y ago
I've come across a number of products that sell themselves because they've solved a problem I was having. A lot of these went on to unsell themselves with things like "contact us for pricing". A sales team might be better at maximizing sales, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. One that's bucked this trend lately has been atlassian, they're a 5 billion dollar company without a sales team that operates in a space that typically requires sales teams. Transparent pricing is a huge part of their success.
- tarsinge 9y ago
  > One that's bucked this trend lately has been atlassian, they're a 5 billion dollar company without a sales team that operates in a space that typically requires sales teams. Transparent pricing is a huge part of their success. I heard they have a huge partner/reseller network though
  - notahacker 9y ago
    They also hire for lots of sales roles which don't have sales in the title https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/743999657351399 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/743999657351399

peteretep 9y ago

> How did the salesperson contribute > to building the product? I've worked at several companies where we've sold things we hadn't yet built in order to finance building them, generally with the client's knowledge. I note as well that Uber was selling rides quite a time before they had any kind of real engineering backend.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

A well built technology solution can sell it self in many scenarios. I don't think this is actually true - and in fact I'm loathe to come up with any examples where it was the case. In some cases fewer active sales efforts are required, if the product is really perfect, but even those are exceptionally rare and generally are utilizing pre-existing networks where the high touch process is already done.