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Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

bloomberg.com

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Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#31

Post by unimpressive »

joshgoldberg wrote: post #26
stevebmark wrote: post #2

Atlassian has a sales staff. Atlassian has a sales staff. Atlassian has a sales staff. Atlassian employs many people whose job it is to be on the phone all day with potential customers. This is just marketing. Take it with a grain of salt.

What's with the hate?

If by "hate" you mean "trivial and important fact checking", what's 'with it' is that there are a lot of media-fueled myths about startups and business in the world.

A lot of them are hurting actual entrepreneurs in the trench and the parent is doing the good work of nipping this one in the bud early.

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#32

Post by curryhowardiso »

Jesus christ the "Sydney tech scene" got absolutely reamed by Bloomberg in this. Was that really necessary? Do we even hold ourselves out to have a tech sector worth mentioning as such (as opposed to a few lucky breaks that would be successful independently of location).

Does this reveal something about how venture capital interacts with software and software business models in general?

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#34

Post by paulcole »

joshgoldberg wrote: post #28
dantiberian wrote: post #5

When you want to buy 50k licenses of JIRA, there is a "Contact Us" button. The person who is responding to that email is a salesperson.

No it's not....

Who are they and how do you know who's on the end of that button?

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#35

Post by w1ntermute »

hkmurakami wrote: post #30
desdiv wrote: post #8

>Tesla doesn't have sales people, You go into an apple store, [and] they don't have sales people. God, I love these word games. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Product Specialists [0]. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Specialists [1] and Experts [2]. [0] https://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/careers/job/product-specia... [1] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=USASP#&openJobId=USASP [2] https://jobs…

Palantir doesn't have salespeople. They have forward deployed engineers.

As well as the all-important business cultivation engineers.

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#36

Post by madeofpalk »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #29
desdiv wrote: post #8

>Tesla doesn't have sales people, You go into an apple store, [and] they don't have sales people. God, I love these word games. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Product Specialists [0]. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Specialists [1] and Experts [2]. [0] https://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/careers/job/product-specia... [1] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=USASP#&openJobId=USASP [2] https://jobs…

The true beauty of those word games is that they don't have to pay their salespeople commission, because they "aren't salespeople"

That's not true.

Sure, Apple doesn't pay their sales staff commission, but they don't 'get away with it' because of the job title.

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#37

Post by marak830 »

If I were to say my priduct has no sales staff, it would be technically true(it's only me and word of mouth), but it really wouldn't at the end of the day as I try and push it every chance I get.

In the same way, Atlasan doesn't have sales staff, they just go under a different name(reference the comments in this thread).

I couldn't sum it up better than madeofpalk or aresant(from this thread).

It is an interesting view of attempted virul marketing going wrong though :-)

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#38

Post by nickpsecurity »

Idk about Atlassian but this is part of the Costco model. They're at $100+bil a year without direct advertising. They pay the ad budget to staff instead with results getting word of mouth sales.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/reasons-love-costco_n_4275774...

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#39

Post by nickpsecurity »

forgottenacc56 wrote: post #23

There are at least two kinds of sales but in this case there's "Order taking" versus "product pushing".... Is the boasting about"no salespeople" suggesting that they do not do outbound sales I.e actively working to drive sales? Either way, wearing "no salespeople" as a badge of honor seems misguided, only technical people would value that. A well run sales operation is a key component of a healthy company.

I learned that from Lawhorn's books on selling. Always curious if it was his or some long-time categorization in sales.

Re: Atlassian sold $320M worth of software with no sales staff

#40

Post by Grue3 »

hkmurakami wrote: post #30
desdiv wrote: post #8

>Tesla doesn't have sales people, You go into an apple store, [and] they don't have sales people. God, I love these word games. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Product Specialists [0]. Tesla doesn't have sales people; they have Specialists [1] and Experts [2]. [0] https://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/careers/job/product-specia... [1] https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=USASP#&openJobId=USASP [2] https://jobs…

Palantir doesn't have salespeople. They have forward deployed engineers.

I fully expected the punchline to be "hobbits" or something.
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