31–40 of 166 posts
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."
Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.
customer success is probably the long term, proactive activities: keep the customer happy, manage renewals, be proactive. customer operations is probably the short term customer interactions: support tickets, integration support, help desk, etc.
If I -also- recall, When I did an Auth0 integration (a few years before that) I worked with a similar 'Customer Success' specialist while evaluating for an integration.
I think this is the trade-off that's happening; By putting integration support under a 'marketing' budget rather than a 'support' budget, it allows for a happier adopting customer base.
I must add however; those examples stand out to me not because it was 'sales-y' but because they were extremely memorable times of a vendor team working very hard to lead our teams into a pit of success. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between someone on a call giving a vague phrase you have to search through API docs for, vs a direct link to documentation complete with verbose-yet-sane examples.
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.
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 chat bot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head
That is still mind blowing. 1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head
> Eng team of 1,500 then Not quite. 1500 people in "Engineering, product development, and customer success", so not just engineering.
I have witnessed this in corporate, startup, university, and governmental organizations, so it's not much to do with the task to be done. More people requires more people, until and unless something else requires that there be less people instead.
For Docusign, we have apparently just encountered that "something else".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative Ratios like this are fairly common. I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount. A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers.…
I think the confusion comes from... For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.
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.
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…
Also, if your competitors are using GPT-3 to solve customer problems, having an actual, intelligent human can be a formidable differentiator in terms of customer experience.
Large companies have lots of employees not because they need them, but because they can. Many of the people who are good at leadership happen to like empire building and having reports. Every employee in a company is also an evangelist and a marketer, without even trying. Everyone answers the question "where do you work." Having lots of employees gives you slack, and it's easy to get rid of the slack with layoffs.
The economy today is more competitive than it's ever been. Hiring lots of unneeded employees is one of the easiest ways to obliterate your entire profit margin -- you'll go out of business and your competitors will eat your lunch. So no, there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to your statement. Of course companies make mistakes and overhire sometimes, just like they make mistakes and underhire sometimes. Nobody can…
This definitely happens, I'm not saying that is the case here, but to dismiss it outright is pretty nonsensical in my view. Obviously it's not the "company" strategy to hire people and waste money, but company incentives and individual incentives start diverging very quickly in large cash flush companies.
The best thing for the company isn't necessarily the best thing for an individual to get promoted. I have definitely worked on projects that were entirely pointless and only existed to "use up resources" and justify hiring more. Bigger teams require more levels of middle management which results in promotions.
Again, not saying this is the case here.