[nishnik]

Yes Thiel writes how sales is important.

He gives out a mental model to think how much sales is important for your company, and how much you should invest in it. On a scale from tiktok (viral) to Palantir, you have to increase your sales spendings.

He talks how advertising was important for PayPal (by giving some money(sales spending) for referring).

And he talks why small/medium sized businesses don't use softwares for day-to-day tasks. Because they lie (in his words) a dead zone of sales, the 1000$ per product.

[seem_2211]

I think of sales & marketing as two sides of the same coin, but the tactics change based on your deal size.

Coca-Cola have a field sales team, selling into convenience stores and gas stations and making sure the shelves are full, but that's dwarfed by their enormous marketing budget. It doesn't make sense to have someone making cold calls or doing door to door sales for a $2 bottle of coke.

Oracle has a marketing team, and they sponsor certain things to get visibility in the public eye, but almost all of their spend goes into a large team of salespeople. No Facebook ad, or coupon in the mailbox is going to convince a CIO to spend $5m on a new database solution.