5 ms·

How does such a secretive company, mostly dealing with government, spend so much money on sales & marketing? (61% of revenue, "roughly $450 million for both yea

by mrich 6y ago

How does such a secretive company, mostly dealing with government, spend so much money on sales & marketing? (61% of revenue, "roughly $450 million for both years") I mean, just bribing people to get the contracts should be an order of magnitude cheaper, right?

shuckles 6y ago
Is that high compared to other consulting shops with a large enterprise sales teams? IBM or Deloitte Digital?
gambler 6y ago
Bribes? Uh, I mean, the cost of establishing positive relationships?
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  People are downvoting you but I fail to see any other ways for Palantir to spend that much money on marketing products that such a small number of potential clients would both want and afford. For reference Nike only spent 7-8 times that on marketing in the same year.
  - lumost 6y ago
    Enterprise sales can get expensive. They're likely booking R&D/ consulting hours as sales and marketing. It's not necessarily wrong if they hold the customer for decades, but that depends on the stickiness of the contract. I'd imagine for a company like palantir to win in the long run would require the western world to value surveillance at the same level as tanks, ships, and fighter platforms. At which point they look like a digital Raytheon or BAE.
ng12 6y ago
I was confused by that as well. Maybe that number includes the engineers contracted out to customers?
captainmuon 6y ago
Are they marketing directly to local law enforcement agencies? I can imagine if they organize a lot of conferences or sales retreats for police and FBI officers then this is going to be very expensive. A lot of this is also going to be lobbying which is not too far removed from bribing.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  It's newspeak for the same shit.
taywrobel 6y ago
I left Palantir in 2014, so this may be a bit out of date, but back then, a lot of the sales of the product were done by engineers, which was effective but expensive. The general approach would be “give us 2-4 weeks to integrate your data and give you a demo”, and would give organizations a demo of the software using their own data. There were some well known stories internally, of things like police agencies forgetting to ask about the product at all, and instead taking notes on suspects and investigations being shown to them in the demo for further follow up, because it was making connections and breakthroughs on stalled or cold cases. Those were the ones that they knew were hooked. The flip side of this is the cost of deploying anywhere from 2-20 engineers into the field to handle the system setup and integration on the fly.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > taking notes on suspects and investigations being shown to them in the demo for further follow up Not a sales guy, but I would just emailed them the notes later (or printed it beforehand) so they could just sit back and watch it happen.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I used to work for an "AI" company, who claimed (and largely believed) that their main value-proposition was their proprietary secret-sauce (they didn't do anything especially evil like Palantir, but it sounds like the business was structurally similar). However, most of the time the way they won over their (usually enormous) clients was just as you describe: they took a few weeks to pick through the client's existing data hoards, mapped out what were often dozens or hundreds of disconnected databases, found common identifiers for entities, hooked them all up into a unifying system and then just... queried it. Data unification on its own yielded really impressive results for the clients. To be fair, the company had built up some compelling experience/tech around doing said data unification, but that stopped short of any of the "AI" and was never really how they marketed themselves. Some at the company always saw that part of the process as just a prerequisite for "the real product", but in practice it seemed to be the most useful part. It's amazing how inefficient data-usage is throughout so many large organizations.
jessaustin 6y ago
If Palantir is like other firms on "the black budget", there would also be a fair amount of self-dealing. "Why did we spend $20k printing brochures? Oh we had Chad's in-laws' company doing that... It's a good thing we're never getting audited!"
stjohnswarts 6y ago
It sure would be a shame if they went bankrupt.

by mrich 6y ago

shuckles 6y ago

Is that high compared to other consulting shops with a large enterprise sales teams? IBM or Deloitte Digital?

gambler 6y ago

Bribes? Uh, I mean, the cost of establishing positive relationships?

tehwebguy 6y ago
People are downvoting you but I fail to see any other ways for Palantir to spend that much money on marketing products that such a small number of potential clients would both want and afford. For reference Nike only spent 7-8 times that on marketing in the same year.
- lumost 6y ago
  Enterprise sales can get expensive. They're likely booking R&D/ consulting hours as sales and marketing. It's not necessarily wrong if they hold the customer for decades, but that depends on the stickiness of the contract. I'd imagine for a company like palantir to win in the long run would require the western world to value surveillance at the same level as tanks, ships, and fighter platforms. At which point they look like a digital Raytheon or BAE.

ng12 6y ago

I was confused by that as well. Maybe that number includes the engineers contracted out to customers?

captainmuon 6y ago

Are they marketing directly to local law enforcement agencies? I can imagine if they organize a lot of conferences or sales retreats for police and FBI officers then this is going to be very expensive. A lot of this is also going to be lobbying which is not too far removed from bribing.

ta17711771 6y ago
It's newspeak for the same shit.

taywrobel 6y ago

I left Palantir in 2014, so this may be a bit out of date, but back then, a lot of the sales of the product were done by engineers, which was effective but expensive. The general approach would be “give us 2-4 weeks to integrate your data and give you a demo”, and would give organizations a demo of the software using their own data. There were some well known stories internally, of things like police agencies forgetting to ask about the product at all, and instead taking notes on suspects and investigations being shown to them in the demo for further follow up, because it was making connections and breakthroughs on stalled or cold cases. Those were the ones that they knew were hooked. The flip side of this is the cost of deploying anywhere from 2-20 engineers into the field to handle the system setup and integration on the fly.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> taking notes on suspects and investigations being shown to them in the demo for further follow up Not a sales guy, but I would just emailed them the notes later (or printed it beforehand) so they could just sit back and watch it happen.
brundolf 6y ago
I used to work for an "AI" company, who claimed (and largely believed) that their main value-proposition was their proprietary secret-sauce (they didn't do anything especially evil like Palantir, but it sounds like the business was structurally similar). However, most of the time the way they won over their (usually enormous) clients was just as you describe: they took a few weeks to pick through the client's existing data hoards, mapped out what were often dozens or hundreds of disconnected databases, found common identifiers for entities, hooked them all up into a unifying system and then just... queried it. Data unification on its own yielded really impressive results for the clients. To be fair, the company had built up some compelling experience/tech around doing said data unification, but that stopped short of any of the "AI" and was never really how they marketed themselves. Some at the company always saw that part of the process as just a prerequisite for "the real product", but in practice it seemed to be the most useful part. It's amazing how inefficient data-usage is throughout so many large organizations.

jessaustin 6y ago

If Palantir is like other firms on "the black budget", there would also be a fair amount of self-dealing. "Why did we spend $20k printing brochures? Oh we had Chad's in-laws' company doing that... It's a good thing we're never getting audited!"

stjohnswarts 6y ago

It sure would be a shame if they went bankrupt.