Category
- Band stories
Written by
Son Yang (Director)
Date
Empty
I think sales is the most underrated function in the tech industry . In an era where product owners, engineers, and performance marketers are in the spotlight, the job title of 'sales' is often seen as strangely unsophisticated, lacking in professionalism or excitement. It's almost like the kind of work that a liberal arts graduate barely breaking into tech would be given. Looking back, when I was about to graduate, I don’t think anyone around me ever said they wanted to work in sales at any company. Most people wanted to go into strategy consulting, become financial analysts, work as service planners, or join consumer goods marketing. There were even people who, after getting into Samsung Electronics’ sales/marketing division and being assigned to the sales team, would simply quit on the spot.
However, after experiencing the field and actually seeing how tech companies make money, I began to feel that sales has always been a very important function, and its importance is only growing . If you look at Google’s case, despite being a software company, they have 150,000 full-time employees worldwide, and over 30% of them work solely in sales. Also, most of Google’s local branch leaders aren’t engineers or marketers, but the heads of their national Google sales teams—and this isn’t just true for Google, but for many foreign tech firms as well. So, why is the sales role considered so important at these leading global companies?
At its core, it’s because ‘sales’ is literally the team that brings money into the company. Most of the cool-looking departments in a company are cost centers, and to sustain these costs, you absolutely need someone making revenue. Sure, if every tech company simply made money by selling digital goods straight to end-users in a B2C structure, this sales department might not be as crucial. But if you think about it, that's not actually how most tech business models are set up. Over 95% of Google and Meta's revenue comes from advertising, and that advertising revenue is the result of sales teams constantly introducing new ad products to clients, sharing optimization know-how, and doing all sorts of things to win over advertisers. In other words,even if a company's service model is B2C, the business model itself is much closer to B2B. Sure, if you make a great product, users will come on their own (B2C); but even if you have users, someone has to turn that into actual revenue (B2B). It would be great if customers just paid for good products without any effort, but in reality, that's rarely how things work.
When I first set foot in tech in the mid-2010s, I honestly didn't have a good grasp of how things worked. But as Korea’s startups became more and more specialized and their business models more advanced, it became clear that strong B2B and sales capabilities were increasingly essential, and sales specialists started to make a bigger contribution to companies' growth. Here, 'sales' doesn’t just mean selling ad products or what your company built—it includes a much broader range of partnerships. For example, the team sourcing fresh foods at Kurly, onboarding rising creators at Sandbox, or cutting great accommodation deals at MyRealTrip—all of these are essentially selling or partnership work in a broad sense. And if these examples sound perfectly natural to you, then it really means that sales and partnership work has become important for startups as well.
Still, tools and solutions for better sales—like CRM (customer relationship management)—don’t seem to have changed much compared to a decade ago. Sure, there’s the behemoth CRM, Salesforce, with a market cap over 200 trillion won, but it’s heavy, expensive, and hard to onboard for startups. Plus, CRMs like these are really only used within the sales team, which doesn’t fit the situation of early-stage startups that need to solve problems collaboratively across different functions.
Relate was made to help startups tackle sales and partnerships a little smarter, more efficiently, and faster in today’s landscape. As their slogan says, “The collaborative CRM your whole team uses,” the Pixelic team behind Relate believes that sales isn’t something one department can tackle alone in modern times. They built this SaaS tool so teams like sales, product, and marketing can actually talk to each other and solve client issues together in real time. Everyone in the company—not just sales—shares client challenges instantly, making it easier both to improve the product and to respond to client needs. Put simply, it’s like the Figma for sales: a tool that helps teams quickly and accurately share client issues and solve them more effectively and efficiently together .
Since VC is ultimately where sales and investment intersect, the moment I saw Relate’s pitch deck I thought, ‘Wow, I want to use that too.’ Afterward, I met with CEO Jeong Sang-yong, Directors Kim Hyun-joon and Chae Soo-bin, and I was completely drawn in by their stories—how the team pivoted 5 times over the past 3 years, the lessons they learned along the way, and how, for this product, they secured 8 paying customers with just their deck. Even more impressive was the enthusiasm customers showed despite such an early-stage product, as well as the vibrancy of their 1,000-member B2B startup community.
That’s how Base Investment became Pixelic’s lead investor in the last round. This was one of those deals where we really agonized over things—so much so that I used my ‘challenge boat’ (think of it as a kind of reviewer super-pass). After the deal closed, the team went to the US, got accepted to YC S22, have been rapidly improving their product, and are building out an amazing startup community, basically becoming the textbook for B2B SaaS. Of course, their dream is much bigger than even that.
The modern startup scene really is a race against time. Time is the most crucial resource, and the real moat is not giving competitors time to catch up . We believe that just using the right solution to boost speed and efficiency for the whole organization can itself become a company’s competitive edge—and especially so if that tool helps you make money more efficiently and effectively. There’s still a long way to go, but seeing a team dig deep with this kind of will and ability, I really believe Relate can get up there with the likes of Google Calendar, Google Docs, Slack, Notion, and Figma—and, at the same time, set the new standard for how global companies do sales.
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