You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. So it's very much different than a traditional sales guy in the Oracle sense.

You have to bring on dedicated high-touch sales people to "scale" the business. So it's very much different than a traditional sales guy in the Oracle sense. Some companies brand them as Customer Success Advocates or "coaches" or something similar. You aren't asking for "the sale" per se -- the customer is generally pretty onboard that they want it and will often have given their credit card already. You're just making sure that they actually get to using it successfully. This involves handholding, counseling, motivating, and being organized and persistent rather than bashing down objections, consultative sales, and always-be-closing. In addition to it not reading like "traditional sales" from either side of the telephone, the background/inclinations/etc of the employees who do this are quite different. One obvious example: at many companies, these folks tend to run towards ladies, much like e.g. marketing teams or customer support and in contrast to how engineering teams or sales teams in B2B companies rarely tend to have large concentrations of ladies. (Positive claim not a normative claim, guys: regardless of the optimal state of the world, it is an objectively true statement that the average number of Y chromosomes per team member varies widely across departments in B2B software companies.) As to avoiding it corrupting the flavor of the company: I'm pretty sure 37signals has a corporate culture which isn't going to turn into Oracle anytime soon, and it's unlikely that this would radically change the character of my business either. (Money generally doesn't affect people nearly as much as people expect it to.)