So a little while ago Naval tweeted this and the internet roared with (mostly) disapproval:
I think he wanted the disapproval, because that gets you virality and more followers, and I really shouldn't be feeding the troll here, but I can’t help it, so here I go anyway.
For as long as I have worked in Tech, I’ve always been horrified with the tendency of software engineers in particular to essentially ignore or discount the contributions made by all other functions toward the success of the product or the company.
This hateful habit takes on many insidious forms. Often it’s engineers asking a product manager: “so what do you actually do?” as a half joke. Another common form is when a development manager tells engineers they can dismiss the QA team and just make sure their code works themselves. One more example? How about when it’s time to make product documentation and the engineers can’t be bothered to answer the questions from the technical writing team. and on and on.
If you’ve worked in this business for a while you’ve run into this many times. Feel free to comment your own examples. :-) I’d love to hear the horror stories. They are all terrible each in their own special way.
And then there’s what Naval said. He’s hardly the first to say it.
I think in order to treat this evil idea fairly, I have to make the case for it as best I can. It goes something like this. If you build a product that answers a clear need in the market, that fills a gap in the offerings currently available, in a way that is good value for money, then people should be buying it like hot cakes. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door! and all that. It’s also a way to instill accountability in the product team — i.e. they can’t make excuses and blame some one else if the product doesn’t sell. That in itself is all to the good.
But Emerson should have stuck with his transcendental philosophy. His marketing system is not something that really works in the real world. Great products need to be marketed and sold, same as mediocre products. You know how I know? because of Google (which I hope we will all agree is a great product both for searchers and for marketers).
There’s this story I can't find a link to a source of, but I remember very well being told this story many times while I was working at the GOOG. So I think it’s probably not all made up. Please send a comment or a tweet if I got it wrong.
Story goes like this: When Google was first started, Larry and Sergey decided they wouldn’t hire any sales people. They would not fail at Product, as Naval colorfully said. They would succeed! and their product would be so good advertisers would just lap it up! and some of them did! there were sales coming in in the early days, some early adopters were buying ads. it was all good up to a point.
The only catch was scale.
If you want to become a company that sells a quarter of a trillion of dollar worth of goods and services every year, you need to reach everyone, not just those ax holding Trail Blazers who would beat a path to your door.
But I’m getting ahead of myself - back to the story. at least the version I was told over free donuts in Charlie’s cafe.
Larry and Sergey didn’t want many sales people around, but they did bring in one legendary business guy, called Omid. Omid wanted, with foresight, to hire more sales people. Larry said no. Omid insisted. They kept talking about it. Someone came up with a formula to settle the argument in a data driven way: If we bring in a sales person, they have to bring in an incremental $1 million in sales to prove their worth. less than that - and google would just go back to making sure the product was good. more - and they would hire more sales people, until the marginal one failed to bring in $1 million in revenue. and so an experiment was born.
You can guess where this is going. the first batch of experimental sales people brought in (much much) more than a mil per head. so more were hired. they made the bar too. and so it continued. before you knew it there were thousands of sales people. the rest is history.
So that’s the first thing horribly wrong with what Naval said. It’s simply poor advice for startups to tell them not to make such high ROI investments as bringing in good sales people.
But it doesn’t end there.
I would be sort of OK with “you’re doing sales because you failed at product” as a management philosophy, if it were just a way to motivate the product managers, designers and developers to build something awesome and own it. But the thing is — Naval should know, sales and marketing people go on Twitter too. How are they supposed to feel when they read something like that? Let’s say I’m a marketing guy working in a company Naval invested in. Do I walk away from reading Naval’s tweet feeling a sense of belonging and motivation? Do I feel included? Will I jump out of bed the next morning to give 150% for the cause?
I think we all know the answer to that. Sales (and marketing) people are people too.
After googling who @naval was I think your last point is just right, evidence shows marketing and sales are people too.
I think a better tweet will be more nuanced, along the lines of bad product can't succeed with good marketing or sales, but I don't think this would be as viral as the original tweet