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Comment by rubiquity | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem remotely true. Look at the sales and marketing spend of ServiceNow, Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and countless others. There's tens to maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars being spent every year on selling software. All that money is being used to ram software down throats at the CISO/CIO level. It's another conversation as to whether it's worth it to spend all that money on sales, but it definitely doesn't translate to software the end users are choosing.

This feels like the 2000s again with the annoying enterprise software companies of that era. Perhaps the hangover of this will be another decade of new comers making software people actually want to use.

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But how did those companies start?

Sure, you'll eventually need a salesforce when you get to that company size (330M in revenue in one quarter in 2022 for Snowflake: https://investors.snowflake.com/news/news-details/2021/Snowf... ).

The same is true with the other ones you mentioned. This post does a great job of explaining why: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-...

But for most companies starting out you can't hire an enterprise sales force (nor would they be effective). I don't know what size it makes sense to start hiring sales folks (don't have a ton of context) but my guess is by the time you have $10M/year in revenue, you have some kind of sales team.

But how can you drive adoption at the early-mid stages of a business? That's the question this post answers.

It depends on your field. If you're a services company (as in, consulting and subcontracting) you're dead in the water unless you have a sales team day 0, even if that sales team is just the founder working over time. Those places live and die by their contracts.

There's a large number of small (<5) person companies that work entirely like that. They're not _sexy_ and they're never going to be unicorns, but they make a good amount of money for the people involved when they inevitably get purchased by some larger group.

That is a good point. I would say that this post is not aimed at consulting companies, which typically don't have a community strategy (unless they are a participant in another organizations community as a way of driving business).

I know a couple of consulting companies that are doing just fine, but I agree, they'll need a sales team. Will they need an enterprise sales team? Probably not, it'll be the founders and once they get to a certain size a sales team. But not the kind of sales team that Snowflake has.

I've worked for a few sales driven companies in the past and usually there were two sales forces. There was an internal group focussed on telephone sales (they would probably be more email now). They were really just a step up from administration, accepting orders, sending out quotes, possibly generating leads.

Then there would be the real sales team who were out visiting customers and supported by the internal team. A lot of their work is keeping existing customers happy.

My gut feeling is you wouldn't have much success selling consulting via an internal team. Because of the nature of the work it is always going to be closer to the second group, more like enterprise sales.

What I find interesting now is how big some companies can get on the back of the first example. Google seems to be built on that.

Usually the founder is handling sales (as well as everything else) until it gets big enough.

For others I guess VC money will be used to jump start the business although I have no experience of that.

Really depends on your industry, the size of your company, etc.

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