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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

Seems normal that the number of employees in Sales would follow the rate of product sales.

Perhaps. Though I'd be a bit slower to react to the market here. Depending how sales are handled, removing staff can remove the relationships that they have developed. It's a pretty bad sign to be doing this.

Might be different for Intel though, everyone has to drink at the same oasis.

Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren’t prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle.

If you’re at a company and you look at your engineer to sales ratio you might think to yourself “gee, we have so many sales people!”

That’s because there’s not much multiplying factor to sales roles. There isn’t a lot of potential to automate like engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hours in the day and they’re fitting maximum one or two customers into a one hour slot of their time.

There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise). Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to let you customer do the sales job etc.

Ads companies like Google/Meta are good examples. Any small account gets a webpage and that’s it. Still, it must be harder to sell semi-commodities like CPUs.

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