Almost all enterprise software companies have more people in sales than engineering. Microsoft is one big exception but LinkedIn must have more sales than eng.

And they prefer you to be managed by a salesperson over letting you be self-serve as they tie you into a guaranteed spend with them.

I spent years trying to untangle us from their managed services, but couldn't as they batched all discounts company wide. I've never worked anywhere where departments shared budgets (even in a 3 person startup, my marketing "budget" was kept separate to other elements, alas the CEO had other issues...), but they basically enforced us to.

That meant I had to pay for pretty much all the LinkedIn usage company wide out of my budget (to receive the discounts on different products as they only applied to one invoice - huge savings on purchasing separately from different budget lines, but still large sums of cash), but internal systems meant other departments couldn't contribute their share back to us.

And once you're in the door, you're then given about 3 different contacts (your sales contact, a follow up sales contact, and then some kind of "content success" person whose only job I could tell was sharing the occasional case study).

God I hate LinkedIn sales.

Literally everything your company pays for is out of individual departmental budgets? You can't do internal chargebacks, shared services, or move budget around if needed? I've never worked anywhere w/ the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round, personally.

The barriers for shifting cash around were really high, and only allowed at half ends where it had to be returned centrally and then reallocated based on business case.

Less than a certain amount and you literally couldn't move it out of a department (spend it or lose it) - you could shift it inside the department easily enough, but we as marketing and them as HR couldn't do it.

> the kinda crystal ball required to make rigid dept budgets work year-round

Apart from some mild quarterly reforecasting, you mean you've never had the joy of trying to flight out an entire year's marketing spend at the start of the year before? And then have to justify every "variance" ;)

I haven't had that joy, thankfully. But I do routinely have the joy of working with execs to reallocate spend for my products/services. The era of carefully planning out purchases 12 mos in advance is long past. Unplanned, 6-figure software expenditures are the norm now -- and companies that can make that happen without too much bureaucracy are reaping the rewards.

Sounds like LinkedIn only found a way to exploit your pathologically broken budgeting system.

True, though I've spoken to a number of brands who had the same experience as well. Also the same experience of the quality of traffic being terrible for the cost as well.