I second this one…
I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
(There's nothing wrong with it, it just veered a bit offtopic.)
In a sense it's the perfect advertising (by both being 'free' and 'covert'), supporting the perfect industry, perfect only in the sense of a feedback mechanism ostensibly designed to stamp it out, only ends up perpetuating its profitability, by squeezing the product between its free advertising and its illegality, inflating prices and profits.
I know this is a potential flamewar topic--I'm sorry. I tried to just state what I think about it here. If you downvote/flag I'll delete it...I don't want to start another flamewar.
I do agree that virtually every product needs marketing, and many need salespeople as well. But for plenty of products, salespeople don’t make sense - for example high volume, low price SaaS.
Fits the MS culture perfectly.
So it was third party selling instead of first party selling.
“Hi I’m thinking of upgrading my Apple Watch 1 but the 7 is quite expensive”
“Can I speak to your daughter for 30 seconds”
(Yes there’s a salesperson in the story but in my case there wasn’t and I know I’ll need another one of these things one day. For her.)
Fiat currency.
Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark
If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.
There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.
Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.
Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.
Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.
You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.
Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.
I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
They have an enormous B2B sales team.
Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.
Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.
Sales is part of this.
You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.
What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is?
What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are?
Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.