S&M (Sales & Marketing) and other things I swore I’d never do
I used to say “I’ll never get involved with fundraising for a startup. I’ll write code, support users, write marketing material, even sell stuff. But I won’t go begging for cash.”
I’ve started begging for cash. I’ve been looking at government grants. This is just the latest in the a saga of Things I Swore I’d Never Do But Am Now Doing.
It’s a slippery slope. You start out as an elitist coder, laughing at those sales and marketing jocks and how useless they are. I mean, they speak in terms of synergies and paradigms! It’s the NEW PARADIGM that creates SYNERGIES to increase our ROI and improve RETURN RATES so we can INCREASE INVESTOR CONFIDENCE.
Oh yes. We did laugh. And now, such a statement makes perfect sense.
Why do coders start out with such a negative attitude towards sales and marketing? I recall my two big complaints being “they don’t do any real work!” and “how come they get commmissions and I don’t get squat?”
Of course, I’ve learned now. The work is just as real - it’s just in a different form.
There’s a big cultural difference. Sales, in particular, is about building relationships. Developers generally find this sort of approach disconcerting - I think we’re a distrustful bunch in general. So when sales guys come up and are all friendly for no particular reason, we’re sitting there thinking “What is this guy up to? Why is he being my friend?” The sales guy is just being a sales guy.
As for commissions, I think there are two factors here. Salespeople have always received commissions. That’s just how it is. Additionally, them reaching their goal is very easy to detect and measure - they get a purchase order (and preferably some cash). If I fix a dozen bugs, that doesn’t obviously result in increased revenues for the company.
This doesn’t work perfectly in the real world, of course. If programmers were paid by commission - say, they earn $5 for each bug that they fix - then they’d probably start writing a whole lot more bugs. Likewise, salespeople will aim to get just the incentive instead of looking at the bigger picture. They’ll start making crazy claims in order to get a sale at any cost because they’re not the ones who’ll have to make it happen. They’ll get the sale, but it’ll cost the company in the long run due to misallocated development resources.
I think for a second that maybe you could pay programmers for each external support call that they resolve - that way, they can’t just generate cash on their own. But then, they have no incentive to avoid the bugs in the first place - they’ll just ship them out, wait for the support calls to roll in and then ship out a fix. So you want to be paying them for not creating bugs - maybe start with a $500 fixed bonus and dock them $5 for each bug that comes up. Then you’ll see bugs not getting reported and some really cranky programmers. You’re now penalizing them for being imperfect. Most programmers I know already beat themselves up when a bug arises - docking their pay isn’t going to help at all.
I have seen sales commissions work against salespeople, however. It seems to be widely accepted that if you are going to get commissions you’ll also get paid less base salary. This is fine if you’re good at sales and not so fine if you’re bad at it. It also means that the quality of the product you’re selling and plain old luck has a big impact on your livelihood. Happen to find someone who already loves your product and wants to buy a thousand of them? Great! You didn’t have to do any work, but you profit just the same. Some doctor at a medical centre gets regular cash from me due to a referral she wrote a year ago - because she happened to be the first doctor available on the day. In this sense, the commission isn’t really earned.
So now I’m a developer who is familiar with the languages of sales and marketing and business. Just being able to understand what !developers are saying comes in handy, and they definitely notice. Being the optimist I am (hah!) I keep thinking “what’s the worst that could happen” with my business, and being able to communicate well with everyone in an organisation is one of the big plusses.