Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no…
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
I think you have definitely proved me wrong with Trello. Upon reflection I have been on that platform since perhaps day one of its release (I was reading Joel on Software blog posts usually same day back then). I know for sure since the first month (Sept 2011 Trello tells me that) and I am pretty sure I have had a paid plan for nearly a decade, probably dating back to late 2012 when I authorized Zapier to connect to my boards for automation.
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.