[razwall]

Per their latest annual report:

"As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."

[PragmaticPulp]

> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative

Ratios like this are fairly common.

I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount.

A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers. Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.

[mikestew]

I think the confusion comes from...

For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.

[nradov]

Microsoft in the mid-90s outsourced the majority of sales and customer support to retailers and VARs. If you add up all the employees working to sell and support Microsoft products in external companies the total staffing was enormous. The same situation applied to their competitors like Novell.

[calrueb]

I wasn't around then but is it possible that we have learned more about B2B SaaS since the mid-90s through trial and error? And the conclusion the industry has come to is Microsoft would have been better off at that time with more sellers and customer ops hires?

[Spooky23]

Microsoft always sold through the channel. There were probably a half million people selling Microsoft stuff in the 90s.

[lupire]

Population growth since 1995: 30%

Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!

[hotpotamus]

How many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.

[alehlopeh]

Why does Microsoft get to be evaluated in 1994? How many people are working on their OS right now?

[hotpotamus]

I don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I don't think the economics of desktop OS distribution have changed all that much in the last 30 years. I'd imagine the marginal unit costs have gone from very cheap to basically nothing now that physical media is a rarity. If modern OSes take more development effort (which seems likely), I don't think that changes the economics.

[Phrenzy]

I for one am on the QA team. No, I do not work at Microsoft or any of its partners. I just use their operating systems.

[acchow]

I bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with <10% sales headcount, and SaaS with >50% sales headcount.

[ummonk]

I can't imagine a highly successful SaaS company being able to maintain a <10% headcount

[lupire]

B2B vs low-price B2C.

How many sales/support reps does your $5/month pay for?

[ummonk]

Which highly successful SaaS company does exclusively low-price B2C?

[saurik]

> Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.

Unless you are Google, which is then again where a lot of people in engineering can get confused as most companies don't hate their users quite as much as Google ;P.

[mostertoaster]

This is also where companies can save a ton of money if they develop tools that allow customer facing employees to do their jobs much more efficiently.

[fundad]

haha, like developing tools that allow remote document signing...

[petesergeant]

Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head

[PragmaticPulp]

> Eng team of 1,500 then

Not quite. 1500 people in "Engineering, product development, and customer success", so not just engineering.

[pwinnski]

Right, so maybe 750 developers? If that? Some companies are heaver on product and customer success headcount than others, but I would not be shocked to find out they had quite a few less than 1000 developers and developer managers.

[cosmotic]

That's 300 5-person teams, seems like still a lot.

[fundad]

all the heads create value

[brianwawok]

That is still mind blowing.

1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.

[suzzer99]

I've been impressed by Docusign the few times I've had to use it. And I generally hate 95% of the software I come across. Everything seemed to snap into place, was perfectly intuitive. That stuff is easy to get wrong, as evidenced by all the crap out there.

[collyw]

It's not managed to annoy me, which is quite impressive. I never really considered Docusign anything special for usability, until your comment, but that's because it gets out of your road enough not to notice it.

[olyjohn]

And to their credit, I've been able to sign documents on Linux via Firefox without hassle. Half the time, some shitty SaaS apps will just sniff my user agent and block me.

[ghaff]

And it may be worth noting that the alternative is often to go physically into an office someplace or get various notorizations or Medallion Signatures through your bank.

[collyw]

I was suspicious of the legality when I first got asked to sign, but I assume a legal team makes up a part of such a large workforce.

[ceejayoz]

They do substantially more than the click-to-sign part. ID verification, contract management system, electronic notarization, APIs for automation of the whole thing, mobile apps...

[kube-system]

Competitors have also done it with 1% of their revenue or less.

[mikequinlan]

20% of 7,461 is still 1,492.2 employees, which sounds like a huge number.

[simonw]

I wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.

[lupire]

"Customer operations" is actually "customer success operations" -- it's the non-customer facing part of sales and support - the IT systems they use.

"Success" is just a a smarmy word for "sales and support".

[softveda]

In a very crude way, sales is about landing new deals or expanding. Customer success is about securing renewals for existing customer and increase adoption, prevent churn. It is a post-sales role.

[kube-system]

customer success is probably the long term, proactive activities: keep the customer happy, manage renewals, be proactive.

customer operations is probably the short term customer interactions: support tickets, integration support, help desk, etc.

[to11mtm]

IIRC (It's been a while since I've worked with their teams) Customer Success was handled by the 'integration support' at Docusign.

If I -also- recall, When I did an Auth0 integration (a few years before that) I worked with a similar 'Customer Success' specialist while evaluating for an integration.

I think this is the trade-off that's happening; By putting integration support under a 'marketing' budget rather than a 'support' budget, it allows for a happier adopting customer base.

I must add however; those examples stand out to me not because it was 'sales-y' but because they were extremely memorable times of a vendor team working very hard to lead our teams into a pit of success. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between someone on a call giving a vague phrase you have to search through API docs for, vs a direct link to documentation complete with verbose-yet-sane examples.

[quickthrower2]

Customer success: Churnbusters

Customer operations: ?? No idea never heard the term

[mrguyorama]

One gets paid big sales commission bucks and the other does the actual work and is told "we can't afford a raise this year"

[tomcam]

Unfortunately those numbers only increased my confusion. The breakdown of that 67% as baffling to me