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Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

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Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#131

Post by tylergetsay »

codegeek wrote: post #112
MattGaiser wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't sales people also heavily paid in commission? I.e. for a large part, you only pay if they bring in business?

For a lot of B2B SAAS which sells to enterprise, sales people can get decent salaries. An SDR (finds leads and books meetings) could get anywhere from 50-65k Base salary with commissions and Account Executives (AE, they do demos and close) could even get starting salaries of 100K plus. So yes, they get paid through commissions but at SAAS companies, they also get a decent base to start with. Ultimately though, the to…

at any company the sales person will have a "base", but at none can they take it for very long. even in 100% commission roles if you make no sales you get what's called a draw check because it's illegal to pay less than minimum wage per hour worked

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#132

Post by jjslocum3 »

babyshake wrote: post #29
Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth…

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

This engineer thinks good engineers are much more fungible than good salespeople. The engineer's output is worthless unless someone else can be convinced to pay for it. It will be more difficult to automate the sales function than the engineering function.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#133

Post by hedgehog »

iancmceachern wrote: post #117

For reference, I've worked in companies of 500-1000 total employees where the companies designed, manufactured, sold and dealt with regulators all for things like artificial hearts (lvads), surgical robotics systems, etc. How is docusign 10x mor complicated?

In my experience if the "what the company does" headline seems too trivial then you have to dig deeper to understand what they're really doing. Business at scale tends to have fractal-like complexity and a lot of the work goes into fighting entropy rather than building the really obvious customer-visible stuff. See also why Uber's app is almost 400MB or why Twitter has 7k employees. On the other hand Weyerhaeuser manages millions of acres of land on only around 2k employees. Always in the details.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#134

Post by softveda »

lupire wrote: post #99
simonw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.

"Customer operations" is actually "customer success operations" -- it's the non-customer facing part of sales and support - the IT systems they use. "Success" is just a a smarmy word for "sales and support".

In a very crude way, sales is about landing new deals or expanding. Customer success is about securing renewals for existing customer and increase adoption, prevent churn. It is a post-sales role.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#135

Post by alehlopeh »

hotpotamus wrote: post #100
lupire wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population growth since 1995: 30% Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!

How many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.

Why does Microsoft get to be evaluated in 1994? How many people are working on their OS right now?

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#136

Post by startupsales »

zachthewf wrote: post #44
groby_b wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Willing to make a bet on that? GPT-3 is great at sounding coherent, but much worse at actually reliably solving problems. I absolutely see GPT-3 like things aiding with sales decks, but... it won't replace the sales person. There's also a large component of enterprise sales having a "trust" component where you know your counterparts. You're not spending approval-worthy amounts of money after only having talked to a c…

Correct. The last professions in the world to be automated will be salesperson, politician, and plumber.

as a salesperson, I can confidently say that the change will be on the buyer side that eliminates the need for most salespeople. salespeople are already getting less and less time with prospects. Studies show salespeople only influence about 5% of the buying process. What comes next is automating recommendations for software products based on specific needs, buying criteria, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#137

Post by calvinmorrison »

subsubzero wrote: post #102
babyshake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

I feel like both sides think this, Engineer - Our company is so good word of mouth should be enough to bring in sales, if we need any more lets look to AI for a solution. Sales - We bring in the money, all engineers do is cost the company money, we could probably run the app/develop the product on a skeleton crew, can't wait for AI to make those jobs obsolete! Truth - Both engineers and sales are hugely successful to…

Some boring business book:

Successful businesses must have 3 Successful divisions: good product, good sales and good finance/admin.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#138

Post by startupsales »

KoftaBob wrote: post #53
babyshake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

Think about how complex it is to develop AI that can understand and participate in a human conversation at only a basic level. Now increase that complexity by orders of magnitude, since we're talking about the conversational skillset that a successful salesperson would have. Everything is possible over a long enough timeline, but when AI is advanced enough to function as a successful salesperson, there will be a larg…

you're assuming sales conversations will be necessary in the future. I do not think that will be true for most purchases. It is much easier to match buyers with the right product based on their buying criteria. This is what buyers want anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#139

Post by startupsales »

adamckay wrote: post #119
mrb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate future AI tech (from 10-50 years from today) even more than you think I underestimate sales skills. The tech will completely blow your mind away, and you don't even see it coming ;)

At that point why would you even have AI sales? If this tech is going to be so amazing, it'll be better served by being a procurement/buyer system. "Hey AI, what CRM system should I use [based on all the knowledge you have of my business already]?"

correct, no need for salespeople

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#140

Post by mikequinlan »

razwall wrote: post #7

Per their latest annual report: "As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."

20% of 7,461 is still 1,492.2 employees, which sounds like a huge number.
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