Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

bloomberg.com

65 pointsfrostmatthew36 comments

From Peter Thiel's CS183 class notes:

"People say it all the time: this product is so good that it sells itself. This is almost never true. These people are lying, either to themselves, to others, or both. But why do they lie? The straightforward answer is that they are trying to convince other people that their product is, in fact, good. They do not want to say “our product is so bad that it takes the best salespeople in the world to convince people to buy it.” So one should always evaluate such claims carefully. Is it an empirical fact that product x sells itself? Or is that a sales pitch?"

http://blakemasters.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-...

Atlassian has a sales staff.

Atlassian employs many people whose job it is to be on the phone all day with potential customers.

This is just marketing. Take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/head-of-sales-operatio...

Of course Atlasssian has a sales team.

They have quite a big sales team and 'evangelists/consultants' that will come out to you, give you nerf guns and convince you to buy more Atlasssian products. Hell, when they caught wind that our company ditched Hipchat for Slack, they were over the next day to find out why and how they could get us back.

Of course Atlasssian has a sales team.

> This is just marketing.

I mean... if your assertions are true, this seems more like "straight-up lying."

Yeah, if they don't have a sales staff there are a ton of delusional people on linkedin who pop up for the search "Atlassian sales"

This is one of Atlassian's go to PR pieces - here's one example a year, you can find multiple:

- April 2014 "Australian tech company Atlassian valued at $3.5 billion despite having no sales staff" (1)

- August 2015 "Atlassian ignored bad advice, avoided sales staff and grew fast" (2)

- February 2016 "How Atlassian built a $4.4 billion business without sales staff" (3)

And while it's true that they have a different sales "culture" I wonder if the people they interviewing for Head of Sales Ops, Loyalty Advocacy, and Field Enablement may consider themselves salespeople?

"Head of Sales Ops" - https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/131036087

"Loyalty Advocate" AKA "Sales Retention" - https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/136717830

"Head of Field Enablement" - https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/92170329

(1) Australian tech company Atlassian valued at $3.5 billion despite having no sales staff

(2) http://www.afr.com/technology/startup-war-story-atlassian-ig...

(3) http://www.sugarux.co/blog/how-atlassian-built-a-44-billion-...

When you want to buy 50k licenses of JIRA, there is a "Contact Us" button. The person who is responding to that email is a salesperson.

>Tesla doesn't have sales people, You go into an apple store, [and] they don't have sales people.

God, I love these word games. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Product Specialists[0]. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Specialists[1] and Experts[2].

[0] https://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/careers/job/product-specia...

[1] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=USASP#&openJobId=USASP

[2] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=USAEX#&openJobId=USAEX

The true beauty of those word games is that they don't have to pay their salespeople commission, because they "aren't salespeople"

That's not true.

Sure, Apple doesn't pay their sales staff commission, but they don't 'get away with it' because of the job title.

Palantir doesn't have salespeople. They have forward deployed engineers.

As well as the all-important business cultivation engineers.

I fully expected the punchline to be "hobbits" or something.

Analogously, The title could have been changed to

>"Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no engineering staff"

They just have to change job titles from software engineer to software expert

They don't have a sales team, but don't think for a minute they don't have humans helping out.

They invest heavily in their customers success, and they do this by hiring people to talk to the customers. Yes, on the phone, and sometimes even in person. They're closely in touch with how to sell to developers, and one of the best ways to drop the idea of big-up-front sales. If you can get one small zero-friction sale, the rest of the sales with people become "support upsells" and "customer success", and you can tell the world you don't have a sales team.

They might not be called sales, but there are people at Atlassian who's primary job it is to talk to people and sell them software.

>They might not be called sales, but there are people at Atlassian who's primary job it is to talk to people and sell them software.

And we're through the looking glass...

Atlassian does have a sales team, but it's an external one, their "Experts"[1]. These companies get a cut of each Atlassian license sold, and also charge for setup, configuration, and custom add-on development. Personally, I think it's a brilliant strategy... external, technical salespeople!

[1]: https://www.atlassian.com/resources/partnerList

As a "Platinum Expert" I can tell you our sales are a fraction or a fraction Atlassian's total sales.

This has been Microsoft's model for many years. It's not clear whether it works very well for anyone in the relationship other than Microsoft.

Awesome graph comparison - https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i6bkJnp_y46...

If I were to say my priduct has no sales staff, it would be technically true(it's only me and word of mouth), but it really wouldn't at the end of the day as I try and push it every chance I get.

In the same way, Atlasan doesn't have sales staff, they just go under a different name(reference the comments in this thread).

I couldn't sum it up better than madeofpalk or aresant(from this thread).

It is an interesting view of attempted virul marketing going wrong though :-)

There are at least two kinds of sales but in this case there's "Order taking" versus "product pushing"....

Is the boasting about"no salespeople" suggesting that they do not do outbound sales I.e actively working to drive sales?

Either way, wearing "no salespeople" as a badge of honor seems misguided, only technical people would value that. A well run sales operation is a key component of a healthy company.

I learned that from Lawhorn's books on selling. Always curious if it was his or some long-time categorization in sales.

Idk about Atlassian but this is part of the Costco model. They're at $100+bil a year without direct advertising. They pay the ad budget to staff instead with results getting word of mouth sales.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/reasons-love-costco_n_4275774...

OFC they have, but;

Sales team means, people who try to sell product aggressively or try to convince you with calls, emails etc.

They dont need that kind of team. As they said, product already speaks for itself. They dont need to focus sales.

How many JIRA owners get a mail/call from Atlassian? For sale?

Sales team means different things to different companies. To you it means an aggressive person hunting you down, to me it means a consultative person to follow up a lead.

How many JIRA owners get a direct contact from Atlassian? Every one which is likely to turn into an enterprise client.

To be fair, other companies are taking notice. Oracle is now allowing people to pay for cloud computing with a credit card and no contact with sales staff.

So the guy who sent me free swag was what a developer? I mean I have got some irate bug reports but I never sent no one a tshirt!

Jesus christ the "Sydney tech scene" got absolutely reamed by Bloomberg in this. Was that really necessary? Do we even hold ourselves out to have a tech sector worth mentioning as such (as opposed to a few lucky breaks that would be successful independently of location).

Does this reveal something about how venture capital interacts with software and software business models in general?

This page is the case where HN comments provide better value then the provided article.

It could've been more if they had one ;)

That was then. This is now.

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