To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others Read Online Free PDF Page B

revenue last year was $100 million. But unlike most of its competitors, Atlassian collected that entire amount—$100,000,000.00 in sales— without a single salesperson .
    Selling without a sales force sounds like confirmation of the “death of a salesman” meme. But Cannon-Brookes, the company’s CEO, sees it differently. “We have no salespeople,” he told me, “because in a weird way, everyone is a salesperson.”
    Enter the second reason we’re all in sales now: Elasticity—the new breadth of skills demanded by established companies.
    Cannon-Brookes draws a distinction between “products people buy” and “products people are sold”—and he prefers the former. Take, for instance, how the relationship between Atlassian and its customers begins. In most enterprise software companies, a company salesperson visits potential customers prospecting for new business. Not at Atlassian. Here potential customers typically initiate the relationship themselves by downloading a trial version of one of the company’s products. Some of them then call Atlassian’s support staff with questions. But the employees who offer support, unlike a traditional sales force, don’t tempt callers with fast-expiring discounts or badger them to make a long-term commitment. Instead, they simply help people understand the software, knowing that the value and elegance of their assistance can move wavering buyers to make a purchase. The same goes for engineers. Their job, of course, is to build great software—but that demands more than just slinging code. It also requires discovering customers’ needs, understanding how the products are used, and building something so unique and exciting that someone will be moved to buy. “We try to espouse the philosophy that everyone the customer touches is effectively a salesperson,” says Cannon-Brookes.
    At Atlassian, sales—in this case, traditional sales—isn’t anyone’s job. It’s everyone’s job. And that paradoxical arrangement is becoming more common.
    Palantir is an even larger company. Based in Palo Alto, California, with offices around the world, it develops software that helps intelligence agencies, the military, and law enforcement integrate and analyze their data to combat terrorism and crime. Although Palantir sells more than a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of its software each year, it doesn’t have any salespeople either. Instead, it relies on what it calls “forward-deployed engineers.” These techies don’t create the company’s products—at least not at first. They’re out in the field, interacting directly with customers and making sure the product is meeting their needs. Ordinarily, that sort of job—handholding the customer, ensuring he’s happy—would go to an account executive or someone from the sales division. But Shyam Sankar, who directs Palantir’s band of forward-deployed engineers, has at least one objection to that approach. “It doesn’t work,” he told me.
    The more effective arrangement, he says, is “to put real computer scientists in the field.” That way, those experts can report back to home-base engineers on what’s working and what’s not and suggest ways to improve the product. They can tackle the customer’s problems on the spot—and, most important, begin to identify new problems the client might not know it has. Interacting with customers around problems isn’t selling per se. But it sells. And it forces engineers to rely on more than technical abilities. To help its engineers develop such elasticity, the company doesn’t offer sales training or march recruits through an elaborate sales process. It simply requires every new hire to read two books. One is a nonfiction account of the September 11 attacks, so they’re better attuned to what happens when governments can’t make sense of information; the other is a British drama instructor’s guide to improvisational acting, so they understand the importance of nimble minds