Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

The thing about salespeople is that you can objectively determine their value over any given time period. That's how they should be paid: a very small base salary that wouldn't cover their mortgage, coupled with a clear and unambiguous bonus structure that gives them a reasonable amount of money when they hit the targets that make the company profitable.

Salespeople "actually do things". The problems come when you make a stupid compensation plan or don't fire the ones who consistently underperform.

View on HN

The counter-point is that without something to sell, the sales people wouldn't make any money.

They don't make the company any money, they're middle-men. The value comes from the product.

I would argue it's equally hard to objectively measure the value of a salesperson, but as there's already specific figures one can latch onto, it's easy to think it's easy.

"The counter-point is that without something to sell"

Never met a salesperson who was deterred from selling something by the trivial detail that it doesn't actually exist. ;-)

Heh, "But it could, theoretically exist right?"

"Sir, I promised the client that it would have Feature X, and the developers are refusing, saying it will take too long!"

This is consistent with my impression of how sales work. You sell a feature, product, capability, etc that won't be ready for at least 6 months (for example). Then you kindly encourage an engineer to build it.

> The counter-point is that without something to sell, the sales people wouldn't make any money.

> They don't make the company any money, they're middle-men. The value comes from the product.

It is supposed to be a symbiotic relationship. Sales staff can't make money if they have nothing to sell, and engineers can't build product if they have no customers.

The sales staff is just as critical as the product development staff for the company making money. Rare is the product that can sell itself.

In fact, a great way to increase your reputation as an engineer at your job is to talk to the top sales people at the company and help them improve the product in ways that will help them selling more. It will open up very interesting career options that are normally not available to most engineers.

I agree, there's a balance. I don't personally think that sales people have no value.

I think my point is that with sales people, there's usually actual numbers involved (that the salesperson has visibility of), which can help anchor perceived value. But it's still potentially hard to actually determine value.

Sales staff are out there, talking to customers. Since no product is truly complete, they are the best source of information about what customers actually want.

Too many programmers are smugly crossing their arms, saying they know what's best for customers without ever talking to them. Programmers are generally far more responsible than sales people for poor product quality.

True.

But there are also many cases when sales people force the product development team to implement the most idiotic "feature", because "we think the client is ready to sign the check and this is really important to them". The bad side of commission-based compensation is that they want to close the sale, no matter how harmful (in the long term) it can be.

The only thing "idiotic" about customer-requested features, especially on high-ticket items, is when they introduce excessive technical debt. This can come in the form of code instability, disrupting development schedules, etc. Features that do more harm than good to the product and the business.

Beyond that, it's not idiotic. It's just stuff the programmers don't care about. Price you pay for getting a paycheck.

Not every request from the customer makes sense.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -- Henry Ford.

That's where "excessive technical debt" comes into play.

My spouse actually deals with this more than I do. She's a product owner/analyst in international e-commerce, a very deep subject/domain expert in a narrow field. Customers, not really understanding the complexities of the domain, ask for things that are often technically impossible, illegal, or self-destructive. But she's serving as a first line of defense for engineers, educating sales reps and customers (and executives) about the nature of their business, and what can/should/shouldn't be done.

This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff

Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-18/this-5-bil...

Good for them. How many other companies have tried the same thing and failed?

They have sales people.

They just recycle this same story every year and get tons of press for it.

A single anecdote disproves "rare"?

Depends how you define "sales staff". They need to sell their product in order to make money and they certainly have employees who provide a conduit for customers to buy JIRA.

Their sales costs are low, but maybe not having more sale people is negatively affecting revenue growth?

Supply and demand are two sides to the same coin.

Sales and marketing generate demand. Engineering and manufacturing generates supply. Both must exist for a product to be meaningful in the market.

The labor theory of value, you see, is bunk. The product is worth only what the buyer will pay for it. And much of the time, a salescritter can convince someone to pay so much more for a product above cost that the difference pays for the salesperson's work, and still leaves some left over for R&D, or other nice things.

Don't get me wrong. I still hate smarmy, schmoozing salesfolk with the passion of one ten-thousandth of a sun. But they aren't entirely useless. They do add value to a company in their own right. It is as a value multiplier, though. There still has to be some value added before you can multiply it.

it also helps attract the better salespeople if there are higher tiers of "somewhat unreasonable" payouts for spectacular results. but again, as you said, all targets must be clear & unambiguous. it should be extremely hard to hit top bonus tiers quarter over quarter. and if they do, your company should be on its way to an IPO. watch out for the ego on that account exec :)

Except those things they "actually do" tend to make my life miserable, as they overpromise to the client and then expect engineering to save their ass. It's never sales that has to sacrifice their time to meet deadlines.

If we had a just world, any salesperson who did that would be forced to forfeit their commission to the engineering staff who's saving their ass.

For the sake of lucidity, I wasn't thinking of excluding (most) sales roles from "people that do things" - but as an engineer, you should still be looking for "basic" parity in remuneration between the top sales and the top engineers (even if it's structured differently.). If the two figures are completely untethered from each other, then it's a good sign the place either doesn't value business acumen (if engineers are paid highly and there are not good incentives for sales) or technical systems (if salespeople are all driving a Lexus' and they are stiffing developers). Both are deadly. I was merely pointing out that the latter fallacy tends to be indicated in mock conversation described.

When you tie someone's compensation to performance, you don't always get the results you're looking for.

It seems to promote short-term gains over long term goals.

See IMSAI in the 1970s for a great example of needing to hit goals at all costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com