[nrmehta]

This was a good post by Chris and I think there are a number of companies who are shifting in this direction. Overall, I think Marketing is getting a bigger share of spend in enterprise IT vendors vs. sales from previous days. That being said, I also note that several of the most prominent enterprise startups of recent times (Box, Splunk, WorkDay, etc.) have made huge investments in traditional, direct sales. My 2c is a lot of this is driven by the ASP (average sales price). In a market where the ASP is low (< $10K/year), you need a marketing driven approach to grow cost-effectively. But for businesses with ASPs > $100K or > $1 MM, direct sales is often still very cost-effective. I'm not making any comments on the "goodness for the world" of sales here, just its efficiency as a growth engine.