Software Sales and Marketing

Joel Spolsky has an interesting (as usual) blog post about the role of sales and marketing in a software company. As someone with an engineering perspective, he used to think that a good software company could have no sales and marketing, only developers. Success was all about the product and its quality based on having good developers.

Now, he argues that “the more sales and marketing people you hire, the more you sell.” Sales and marketing multiply the effect of good quality developers. Product quality is still important: “The best marketing in the world cannot force people to pay for a useless product.”

I agree with his post. I’ve experienced working on good products that were not successful until they had a good sales force. The multiplying effect of good sales and marketing can be astonishing. Joel is absolutely right here.

However, Joel is missing an important effect of the politics of organizations. As sales and marketing grow in numbers and importance in a company, their influence on the features and future directions of products grows. Sales and marketing start having a big impact on product quality. I’m defining quality in the broad sense that quality is how well your product solves a customer’s problems.

Improving a product requires a delicate balance between giving customers what they want and giving them what they need. Customers always know what they want but many don’t know what they truly need. A great product solves the customer’s real underlying need and may solve a problem that the they didn’t even realize they had.

Sales and marketing often start dictating features based on customer prospect’s criticism of your product during a competitive evaluation. Sometimes these features identify important gaps in your product, but often it’s a reaction to claims by competitors. Adding these kinds of feature sets can distort your product into strange, unnatural shapes all in an effort to listen to customers or potential customers. I’ve added features to products that sales people insisted were critical to get more sales only to find that those features made no difference to sales but hurt quality because they didn’t really belong in the product.

The canonical case of sales and marketing’s malign influence on quality is the competitive checklist. You have to have features that match every competitor’s features. You have to have a feature for every item on the checklist. This can lead to implementing features that make no sense. It often leads to quick and dirty implementations to get sales off engineering’s back. The competitive checklist can be a terrible dictator of product direction.

Also, customers often have wants or needs that are peculiar to their own situation but not generally applicable. If you add features for just one (usually large) customer, your product can get distorted and start looking unusable to other customers.

Overall, I agree with Joel. At FogCreek Software, I’m sure that he will never let sales and marketing degrade product quality. However, I’ve seen sales and marketing hurt product quality so many times that I think FogCreek is the exception, not the rule. Every great product needs a visionary to maintain and improve quality, and that visionary usually comes from the people who develop the product, not sales and marketing.