Personally I don't count "giving it away" as the product selling itself. GSuite - Google Docs, GMail for Business, Google Drive, etc. - has had enterprise sales teams for a long time.

When gmail was included as the email client for their paid office subscription there definitely was salespeople involved, because I heard from them weekly trying to shill it to me. I’d argue that if you take a free product and want folks to pay for it, you obviously need salespeople as Google did.