Sales does something nearly as important as building the software: they map a customer's opportunity or problem to a technical solution, and ensuring they're successful with it. Sales (and marketing, which is arguably the evolution of sales at scale) are the field forces in discovering and exploiting product/market fit. No feature list survives first contact with the customer. Sales creates customers, and thus create markets.

You might have a great piece of software but if no one can explain it, no one will understand it, and it won't sell. This is the difference between software that costs $1k and $100k+. The price is reflective of the value it can provide and who is buying it.

Now in very small companies, the engineers are also marketers and salespeople. But beyond (say) 50 people, the divide between engineering and customers gets wider unless you have very good communication between sales, marketing, product, and engineering. There's too much work for everyone to focus on everything.

It's when they started targeting the mass market, getting funding, removing features their early adopters loved (eg. wiki syntax in Confluence) that they needed a sales force. But that was necessary for their plan to scale. They're still not huge ($600 million is excellent but not Red Hat).

I don't how much sales experience you have, at either the management level or the hands-on sales level, but products almost never sell themselves. You're better off changing that to never sell themselves, because of how rare the examples of it are.

It's practically universally agreed that most companies love to squeeze whatever angles they can for another dollar of profit, particularly around employee costs. So why does sales persevere in such a big way across all companies? They're not doing it for fun, they're not doing it because their products sell themselves, they're not doing it to waste large amounts of money. They do it because they have to, all of them; basically every single company on earth has to sell.

One that's bucked this trend lately has been atlassian, they're a 5 billion dollar company without a sales team that operates in a space that typically requires sales teams. Transparent pricing is a huge part of their success.

I heard they have a huge partner/reseller network though

The terminology doesn't refer to which parties did more work to release the product, it refers to which parties are closest to the revenue, and thereby have more quantifiable metrics to be judged upon.

Unsurprisingly, software engineers can make just as much or more than salespeople if they work in roles that happen to be very quantifiably attached to revenue generation, this just isn't the norm.

    > How did the salesperson contribute
    > to building the product?

I note as well that Uber was selling rides quite a time before they had any kind of real engineering backend.

We sell out software to the big banks and we don't have a single salesperson in our team. Everyone call us. The reason for this is that we have been in national newspapers with awesome articles, which is great marketing.

I'm sure we could do even better on the international market with a sales team.

But AWS also often start as a $10/month product, and then one more, and one more. I think that's a huge portion of their success - it's easy to ramp up the cost slow enough and in small enough steps to not trigger any major approvals until it's "too late". People usually move off AWS first when if it gets to be enough of a cost pain-point to make higher ups take notice.

Isn't that the point of cloud computing? So you don't have to worry about datacenter capacity until it becomes a major cost center?

Here's how that works in concept, for example:

Microsoft didn't hand-sell every individual copy of Windows 95 at every individual retail location. They did sell, big time, at the macro level however, which made the micro sales possible. That's how AWS works, Amazon captures the macro, the micro takes care of itself for the most part. If you're AWS and you capture dozens of impressive start-ups and enterprise players, the headlines and blog posts that are written as a consequence will micro sell as a consequence to countless smaller businesses for you. Not to mention, Amazon simultaneously pushes AWS at small businesses in numerous subtle ways, including on their site (which of course happens to be a giant advertising platform that reaches every business owner in the US).

You can sign up and AWS without any customization. Even if you spend $10k/month on AWS, you don't really need to talk to AWS to create a custom deployment (from what little I know of AWS - might be wrong).

But if you're talking about a solution that requires customization, or if you want volume discounts, you will want to speak to a salesperson.

I don't think this is actually true - and in fact I'm loathe to come up with any examples where it was the case. In some cases fewer active sales efforts are required, if the product is really perfect, but even those are exceptionally rare and generally are utilizing pre-existing networks where the high touch process is already done.