Startups that Make Big Revenue without Salespeople
In the last month, I’ve seen several examples of startups making big revenue without building a sales force.
First, at a lunch during Founder’s Fables, Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp and Hitan Shah of Kissmetrics both clicked on the idea that neither of their startups have sales teams. They do a lot of sales, but it is all self-service through their websites. They also do a lot of customer support, but that is post-sales.
Additionally, there was a tweet earlier this week that Atlassian has over $100m in sales with no sales force. We use Atlassian’s JIRA heavily in our office, so that was particularly interesting.
Maybe some of this has to do with the reputations of salespeople being at an all-time low.
Maybe it is just that B2B customers are much more willing to buy online by themselves today than they were 5 years ago. With a meticulous focus on streamlining the customer acquisition process, many companies are finding ways to build awesome revenue based purely on inbound marketing and awesome after-the-fact customer support.
That is not to say that all businesses should avoid building sales teams. Most businesses still need great sales teams. But startups with easy-to-understand SaaS-based products are starting a trend to avoid hiring salespeople.
What examples have you seen of startups building big revenue without a sales team? What are the things that differentiate startups that should build a sales team from those that should not?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Kyle Porter
Thanks for the ping back on this. Another one I love is SEOMoz. They’re doing a hell of a job sans sales professionals. The funny one is Hubspot, who is leading the charge of inbound but has an army of sales professionals. This video about lack of sales people at Atlassian is awesome:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/20/ceo-supper-club-is-atlassian-the-only-software-company-on-the-planet-that-doesnt-need-a-salesforce/
Craig Hyde
I’ll agree that having a self-service system can be a powerful way to generate revenues, but would put a few asterisks behind the point:
* It still requires a lot of hard work to acquire customers – Nobody is wandering around on the Internet looking for paid services to sign up for. e.g. SEOMoz has spent an amazing amount of effort in building their inbound machine.
* There is no replacing talking to a lot of customers – A/B tests are useful, but you can’t rely purely on analytics if you expect to make something great. e.g. MailChimp spent a decade with consulting with customers before the app as we know it took off.
* Make sure the math works – Great post on the topic by Steven Wagner http://saasceo.me/post/44703758416/
craighyde
I’ll agree that having a self-service system can be a powerful way to generate revenues, but would put a few asterisks behind the point:
* It still requires hard work to acquire customers – Nobody is wandering around on the Internet looking for paid services to sign up for. e.g. SEOMoz has put an amazing amount of effort into their inbound machine.
* There is no replacement for talking to customers – A/B tests are useful, but you can’t rely purely on analytics if you expect to make something great. e.g. MailChimp spent a decade consulting with customers before the app as we know it took off.
* Make sure the math works – Great post on the topic by Steven Wagner http://saasceo.me/post/4470375…
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Excellent points!
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Thanks for the SEOmoz example and for the Atlassian video. In our business, we need a sales force, but we can still learn a lot from the inbound tactics of those that don’t.