It was typically true that engineers have high leverage, productivity and scale, whereas sales people do not. When traditional enterprise software was sold, it was done primarily through the "hunter" sales model and sales people were compensated accordingly to bringing in big deals. Sales grew revenue, which meant that if you hired more sales people at an established company, you'd have more revenue. This is why in the 1990s, if you met a tall white guy at a bar in San Carlos driving a nice car, he was probably an Oracles sales person (a bit of hyperbole).
The nature of enterprise sales is changing, not just because it's gone to SaaS/subscription. One of the key changes in the last few years is the growth of measurable analytics in marketing. You see, marketers and sales people are not the same. In the old days, marketers couldn't measure the impact of their marketing investments. There were loose correlations between marketing and the leads they generated for sales. But now, because of analytics derived from marketing software, you can actually draw conclusions on which marketing campaigns were the most effective from impression to conversion.
What does this mean for this post? 1. I think we're going to see fewer sales people per engineer. We likely won't see a huge growth in R&D spending; we will see less dollars spent on expensive sales people. 2. Marketers will become more hybrid product-sales-analytics people (like growth hacking), which means there's a great opportunity for data-driven commercially-focused engineers to transition towards this greenfield area in marketing.
TL;DR: Selling enterprise software has changed so the ratio of sales:engineers will go down in the next 10-15 years.
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Warning: Some generalizations and hyperbole...
It was typically true that engineers have high leverage, productivity and scale, whereas sales people do not. When traditional enterprise software was sold, it was done primarily through the "hunter" sales model and sales people were compensated accordingly to bringing in big deals. Sales grew revenue, which meant that if you hired more sales people at an established company, you'd have more revenue. This is why in the 1990s, if you met a tall white guy at a bar in San Carlos driving a nice car, he was probably an Oracles sales person (a bit of hyperbole).
The nature of enterprise sales is changing, not just because it's gone to SaaS/subscription. One of the key changes in the last few years is the growth of measurable analytics in marketing. You see, marketers and sales people are not the same. In the old days, marketers couldn't measure the impact of their marketing investments. There were loose correlations between marketing and the leads they generated for sales. But now, because of analytics derived from marketing software, you can actually draw conclusions on which marketing campaigns were the most effective from impression to conversion.
What does this mean for this post? 1. I think we're going to see fewer sales people per engineer. We likely won't see a huge growth in R&D spending; we will see less dollars spent on expensive sales people. 2. Marketers will become more hybrid product-sales-analytics people (like growth hacking), which means there's a great opportunity for data-driven commercially-focused engineers to transition towards this greenfield area in marketing.
TL;DR: Selling enterprise software has changed so the ratio of sales:engineers will go down in the next 10-15 years.