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You're not gonna replace people who make phone calls all day without something more or less indistinguishable from strong AI. Nobody wants robo-calls.
You don't need chatbot tech to be indistinguishable from strong AI, just indistinguishable from an average salesperson. Like babyshake, I firmly believe that this will happen one day. 10 years? 50 years?
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I have been involved with companies with government security clearances and organizations simply worried about intellectual property theft. As a rule, the most serious of those organizations do not allow subcontractors free rein of the building, which janitors need. (Edit: Yes, I am aware of some high profile failures.)
I think you can get subcontractors that specifically provide cleared janitors. (The same way that for example the NSA famously uses cleared contractors for things like IT.) But anyway, Docusign surely isn't an example of such a company or agency.
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You don't need chatbot tech to be indistinguishable from strong AI, just indistinguishable from an average salesperson. Like babyshake, I firmly believe that this will happen one day. 10 years? 50 years?
FYI for you and other readers, sales is actually hard. Low barrier to entry followed by brutal survival of the fittest. Don't meet your quota? Fuck you, you're fired. People who survive for decades of that aren't trivially replaced.
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I have been involved with companies with government security clearances and organizations simply worried about intellectual property theft. As a rule, the most serious of those organizations do not allow subcontractors free rein of the building, which janitors need. (Edit: Yes, I am aware of some high profile failures.)
I think you can get subcontractors that specifically provide cleared janitors. (The same way that for example the NSA famously uses cleared contractors for things like IT.) But anyway, Docusign surely isn't an example of such a company or agency.
I agree that it is likely that they outsource like other organizations. I still don’t think it is a good idea.
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> 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.
Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!
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I think you can get subcontractors that specifically provide cleared janitors. (The same way that for example the NSA famously uses cleared contractors for things like IT.) But anyway, Docusign surely isn't an example of such a company or agency.
Yes, NSA’s high profile failure with Booz Allen is a great example of why some things should not be outsourced.
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I bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with 50% sales headcount.
I can't imagine a highly successful SaaS company being able to maintain a <10% headcount
How many sales/support reps does your $5/month pay for?
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I've been impressed by Docusign the few times I've had to use it. And I generally hate 95% of the software I come across. Everything seemed to snap into place, was perfectly intuitive. That stuff is easy to get wrong, as evidenced by all the crap out there.
It's not managed to annoy me, which is quite impressive. I never really considered Docusign anything special for usability, until your comment, but that's because it gets out of your road enough not to notice it.
I feel the same way about most big corporations. Tech companies are not immune. I had a FB recruiter once brag to me about their Messenger team occupying a couple floors in Seattle and a couple floors in Menlo Park. Holy hell, what do you do on a project like Messenger with that many devs??