The Importance Of Selling

I met an entrepreneur yesterday who mentioned how surprised he was when he visited Google's offices in London and asked his host why they had so many floors, ie what job functions were there, that the (amused) answer he got back was: 'sales!'.  We think of Google having such a scalable, low-touch, money-minting model but don't realize that a lot of their revenues, in fact probably the majority of it, is based on old-fashioned sales & account management.  Of course their revenue or productivity per employee is probably better than other companies and sites but it's a myth that it's easy to come up with a self-service model for businesses that doesn't involve direct sales of some sort to generate a signficant portion of the revenues.  I think this is something startups underestimate.  The biggest exception to this is probably Craigslist but perhaps they are the exception that proves the rule.