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> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative Rati
by PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative
Ratios like this are fairly common.
I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount.
A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers. Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.
- acchow 4y agoI bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with <10% sales headcount, and SaaS with >50% sales headcount.
- mikestew 4y agoI think the confusion comes from... For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.
- nradov 4y agoMicrosoft in the mid-90s outsourced the majority of sales and customer support to retailers and VARs. If you add up all the employees working to sell and support Microsoft products in external companies the total staffing was enormous. The same situation applied to their competitors like Novell.
- lupire 4y agoPopulation growth since 1995: 30% Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!
- hotpotamus 4y agoHow many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.
- alehlopeh 4y agoWhy does Microsoft get to be evaluated in 1994? How many people are working on their OS right now?
- hotpotamus 4y agoI don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I don't think the economics of desktop OS distribution have changed all that much in the last 30 years. I'd imagine the marginal unit costs have gone from very cheap to basically nothing now that physical media is a rarity. If modern OSes take more development effort (which seems likely), I don't think that changes the economics.
- Phrenzy 4y agoI for one am on the QA team. No, I do not work at Microsoft or any of its partners. I just use their operating systems.
- calrueb 4y ago
- mostertoaster 4y agoThis is also where companies can save a ton of money if they develop tools that allow customer facing employees to do their jobs much more efficiently.
- fundad 4y agohaha, like developing tools that allow remote document signing...
- saurik 4y ago> Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers. Unless you are Google, which is then again where a lot of people in engineering can get confused as most companies don't hate their users quite as much as Google ;P.