Why a Salesperson Can Pull a Growing Product Backward

At conferences I see the same picture — founders and a batch of salespeople around them, always busy. After all, every startup needs a founder, a developer, and a sales manager, right?

And when revenue takes a hit, the first question is almost always if the salesperson doesn’t do their job. The product is rarely the suspect.

The truth is, a salesperson is not a necessary asset to every project. A salesperson is a one of distribution channels with a salary, a quota and a process built around the role. Put that person on a product that can sell itself, and the funnel starts moving backward. The manager works to imitate work, not to bring profit.

The final question is: do you even need a salesperson for your product?

Are Salespeople Profitable to Hire?

An IT product can be too expensive to sell just through ads, but too cheap to justify sending a person to every deal. Peter Thiel and Blake Masters call it the “distribution doldrums” in Zero to One. In the end, the deal sits in a dead zone.

It’s not a problem of whether an employee can see, but whether they can sell enough to pay for their seat.

A fully loaded salesperson is more than a base salary. It is commission, tools, management time and the process built around the role.

In a quick internal experiment, we asked five AI models what new minimum monthly income makes the sales seat worth having. Only one answer came back near $1,000. The rest suggested much higher amounts: $5,000 a month.

There is, of course, nuance to it. The point is that a sale can bring in revenue and still fail to pay for the time spent closing it.

Very cheap products can move without a person. Complex deals justify one. In the middle are companies that hire out of habit and then wonder why there is a productivity theater, but barely any profit.

I am not arguing that sales is fake work. Complex sales is real. Large deals are closed by people, sometimes by the CEO. The mistake is copying that system for a $100 product.

How the Seat Digs Itself In

You have written to a company ready to pay. Then you have a meeting. They send pricing. Then an email. Then a spreadsheet. Then another explanation of how to buy or onboard, which leads to another call.

The buyer came to buy a product, but the company gave a presentation. You can’t call it a service.

Two problems usually sit under it.

The website doesn’t help visitors. On a good website, a buyer does not need to ask about pricing and terms. Repeated questions are a product bug. Paying someone to answer them keeps the bug in place.

The process is not automated. Where a customer could download and sign a deal, a person is inserted as a middleman. It looks like help. It also makes the role appear necessary. Every manual step is a reason the seat still exists next quarter.

Self-Service Already Won

Mailchimp and DigitalOcean let customers sign up and find help without a sales call. They also offer personal assistance, but only where it makes sense. The funnel was built so that small purchases do not require a meeting.

Smaller companies often do the opposite. A $50 task requires a human. The salesperson guides the customer through a path that should have been simple enough not to need guidance.

Competition does not leave that model alone. Either the funnel gets simpler, or a competitor with a cleaner checkout takes the customer who did not want a call.

At the Domain Summit’26 in Germany I said on stage about AI that many of these seats will not be needed. The pushback was loud. People argue hardest when the claim threatens them, but know it’s real.

How to Optimize the Sales

Do not start by firing every manager. You can start by pricing seats and making overly complicated processes easier for your clients.

A salesperson on the right accounts is distribution. A salesperson on the wrong accounts is a process that bills you to stay complicated. The business either keeps that seat and slows down, or it fixes the funnel and lets the product sell.