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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who is staggered by the amount of stuff here, it's worth noting that they apparently have 1,276 employees (which is a lot more than I thought they had). I'm not sure that really excuses having "an email signature marketing platform used to standardize brand consistency", but it does at least explain ADP, Salesforce, the pro LinkedIn stuff, and all the other things a little startup would never dream of spending money on.

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Most people are only aware of the SaaS products used by their team or department. If you were to list out every single tool or service used across many 100-1000 person companies, it wouldn’t be much shorter than this list.

If you’ve never worked in sales, you’d be surprised at how many different SaaS products and services can go into running a successful sales department.

Sales people tend to be more sticky to their preferred SaaS products than engineers. You may end up with a lot of duplicated functionality across sales tools just because the VP of sales has always used certain tools for certain operations and has no desire to change that.

As the broker of SaaS products for all departments in an all-remote SaaS startup, I agree with you.

Even with only a few dozen employees the inventory is confusingly-large.

> Sales people tend to be more sticky to their preferred SaaS products than engineers.

Maybe sales get to choose their (SaaS) tools while engineers are forced into it by the sales department to a greater extent?

At my last gig Perforce was changed to Gitlab to "save money". Gitlab didn't work too well the legacy mess of 100s of scripts and 1000s of release branches so we got stuck with both. A really industry specific tool was deprecated by IT to save money with a cheaper replacement that did something else, that ofcourse didn't work out so we got stuck with both.

Etc.

Wait, how was it that the sales department made that happen?

I got a wake up call this week in just how much my company spends on “email signature marketing platforms” and it nearly made my hair go white, along with causing a strange series of emotions, none of them very positive-given some of the battles I’m fighting as a manager strapped for funding, and watching my team and other teams go through “covid related pay cuts”.

It's because all of the budgeting has been shifted to Marketing and Sales departments.

Someone complained about a bill from IT and we told the vendor to suspend the account for 1 month... it took three days before that same person had to come to us and ask why it wasn't working.

It's because all of the budgeting has been shifted to Marketing and Sales departments.

I'm sure. It's made for some painful discussions that I've just given up trying to have, and now I just point back to all of the saved email chains when interrogated for answers by superiors.

We're talking in the tens of thousands of dollars for email signatures.

That's per year? Sounds like a lot.

The execs think email signatures are obviously important because that's in front of their nose more often? Or why are they ok with paying a lot for that

I honestly don’t know. I asked my executive about it, and he seemed equally alarmed, but resigned to it? If that makes sense?

As a marketer, why are you so fixated on the cost instead of the comparative value it may add? Do you know what incremental value it is adding to the mix? Has anyone tracked the time saved from sales people and the impact of the touch point from an attribution perspective (presumably with Bizible, GA, or any other tools and data)?

It could very well be negligible lift, but if it stops a large sales team from having inconsistent, inaccurate, and off-brand signatures, automating and centralizing that could be worth it on its own merits.

Be cautious about being so quick to dismiss a tool just because it's expensive.

> (presumably with Bizible, GA, or any other tools and data)

You mean Bizible, GA, AND every other SAAS marketing attribution tool under the sun

Be cautious about being so quick to dismiss a tool just because it's expensive.

How much caution, expressed in dollar amounts is warranted? If you had the visibility into our accounting that I do, would it change your mind?

Well that depends, right? If you’ve analyzed it thoroughly and come to the understanding that the ROI is poor and the budget would have been better spent elsewhere, then obviously you’re probably correct and someone else is not doing their job right.

But if it’s more of a shallow, knee-jerk reaction like ”this much spent on EMAIL SIGNATURES!? This has to be a waste of money!”, then perhaps you’re wrong to jump to conclusions quite so fast. You haven’t really elaborated, so we don’t know which one it is.

I didn't think it was wise, nor really my place to elaborate on the specifics of my company's finances, beyond to express-as a ranking manager-my surprise at the costs incurred weighed against common indicators a bit more relevant to a wide audience such as HN.

So, I made a point about ROI, which could very well justify it in the broader marketing and business context. You haven't addressed that point. Instead you've just made some vague claim about something you have visibility into about cost incurred.

Please elaborate as to why considering the return of the tool in question instead of just its cost is not relevant.

DVTRN is right, even if with attribution every marketing initiative was worth undertaking cash is still constrained from a fixed standpoint so you have to force rank prioritize what to purchase.

I work for a huge multinational corporation and I'm going to count myself lucky that I have absolutely no idea what "an email signature marketing platform used to standardize brand consistency" is. Whatever it is I can't imagine spending money on it.

It's useful for customer-facing roles. From a sales context, it means that you can have a dynamic signature that includes a) up to date logos and branding and b) a dynamic list of upcoming marketing events like webinars, trade shows, recent blog articles, etc. put automatically in email signatures.

We don't use one (just have folks copy over the new signature to Outlook every couple weeks), but it means we have a highly manual process that is prone to error for non-technical users. It's definitely worth some money to get right.

My definition of a "useful" email signature varies highly from anyone who thinks that a list of upcoming events belongs in them. What a waste of bytes.

Look, people spend money on it because people DO look at these things. I don't think a big splashy banner in my signature looks good, but if I get even a handful of extra people attending my webinar then it DOES pay for itself.

This isn't some sort of idealistic view of the "way the world should be", it's just people doing stuff to optimize for their marketing & sales funnel, whether or not it annoys you or is a "waste of bytes"

You realize that Gmail blocks most of that by default, right?

Look, a lot of people insist advertising "doesn't work on them", but the whole hundreds of billions of $ industry works because it DOES have a reliable ROI.

I'm just explaining the world how it is, not necessarily how it should be.

Ah, so that’s where those unsolicited spam snippets at the end of each email come from!

Of those 1,276 employees, over 500 are sales or marketing people [0]. That's why you see emphasis on stuff like brand consistency and marketing. It's a surprisingly large portion of their business.

0: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/

Not that surprising. If you look at a bunch of SaaS S-1 documents at the time of IPO, marketing and sales are a material portion of the P&L and (presumably) an even bigger portion of the total cash outlay. Just seems to be what it takes to grow a public tech company.

Some exec sees an email go out with an old signature, or a signature they don't like, or who knows...

"I want everyone's signature to look like mine"

It then costs $x/month so it gets approved. As a bonus they get link tracking etc.

Typically spend that is tied to an anticipated incremental revenue is easier to approve ("this $20k investment will be worth it if we only get one $50k booking out of it"). That's also why salesperson variable comp tied to sales is easier to approve at higher figures- if a salesperson is driving multiple $M worth of sales, it's easy to justify a salary in the high 6 figures.

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