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.
> 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.
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...
They just recycle this same story every year and get tons of press for it.
Their sales costs are low, but maybe not having more sale people is negatively affecting revenue growth?
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.
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.
Beyond that, it's not idiotic. It's just stuff the programmers don't care about. Price you pay for getting a paycheck.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -- Henry Ford.
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.
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.
Never met a salesperson who was deterred from selling something by the trivial detail that it doesn't actually exist. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
Salespeople "actually do things". The problems come when you make a stupid compensation plan or don't fire the ones who consistently underperform.