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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

Google didn’t have sales team? Uh who do you think selling all those ads?

Most ads are managed and sold by other agencies. Google redirects all but the largest accounts to its channel partners. And selling media is nothing like enterprise infrastructure.

Just want to say that I always see you post on ad-tech related stuff and your comments belong to the infinitesimal fraction of ad-tech stuff on this site that is informed and not just the result of pure speculation.

Thank you, I appreciate the note. It's based on 12 years and 4 adtech companies worth of experience in the industry, and now trying to change it from the inside.

Like it is and it isn't right?

Some media sales-people would be super comfortable selling enterprise stuff (because a bunch of them started at MS/Oracle/Sun etc).

The front-of-house salespeople would be fine, so you'd just need to hire the back-of-house sales-people (normally the more technical ones).

The real problem is that Marketing and IT are very different departments, and it's hard to change contacts in one area into opportunity in another (I think this applies to both Google and FB).

But mostly, to answer the titular question: it's about margins, nothing else. There's less money in cloud than in ads. So, like Google, they'll probably do something like this when investors start to worry about the ad market.

Sure but it's rare to successfully transition. The ad market is very political and depends on connections, not product. Google salespeople are also known as "order takers" since they don't really need to sell, companies always buy them by default.

It's the opposite in enterprise tech where Google is the underdog and needs to do quite a bit of selling, and base it on the strength of the product and functionality. GCP is hiring strongly for enterprise/software sales experience but struggling with the leadership to use them effectively.

There's plenty of margins in cloud though. AWS has proven it and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads business, but I agree that it's not currently as lucrative today.

> But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.

Paraphrasing OP: Google knew how to sell ads, not how to sell cloud...

And msft sales knew how to sell cloud because they’ve been selling AD and office?

They had been selling infrastructure (Windows Servers). They already knew how to sell infrastructure. In fact, most of the first sales of Azure were just as an add on to their existing enterprise contracts.

- SQL Server

- The Dynamics suite

- Visual Studio / TFS

- Windows Server family products

All of those were "cloud-adjacent" even in their proto-forms as on-premises–only offerings. Even if they weren't "real cloud infrastructure" they were big Capital-E Enterprise products and a lot of selling cloud is still B2B Capital-E Enterprise work at the end of the day.

I remember in the late 90s (I think) articles about how MS just didn't get enterprise and would never break in.

Yeah these are on prem software licenses. Completely different from metered virtual infrastructure.

Sure, but the point remains that this was a sales engine that was very similar. It certainly was a faster path for Microsoft to bootstrap cloud sales teams than whatever Google's long, winding path from ad sales to whatever it is they think they are doing with GCP sales.

(Though it hasn't seemed to work effectively for IBM. That may just be IBM incompetence as old school commodity-priced Mainframe mentality should be exactly the same as cloud sales. There's probably an amusing alternate world where IBM Cloud is using something like 1950s presentations only slightly modified to sell "cloud" in 2020, just because they could.)

You're not thinking big enough. It's not about the specific thing you're selling, it's the skillset.

Microsoft sales has a skillset of going into a company, talking to the CIO/COO/CTO/CEO and selling them infrastructure to run their business.

Google has the skills of going to the CMO or the marketing manager and selling them advertising.

Which of those skill sets translates more directly to selling cloud infrastructure?

Doesn’t matter, it’s the relationships that count. People from Microsoft eat filet mignons with the top 50 IT execs at every major company. That’s why any turd of an MS product can immediately get tens of millions of paying users.

There's a different between selling ads, and selling IT to enterprises.

Google had experience in the former. Microsoft had endless experience in the later.

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