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> a quarter of the staff totaling more than 7,000 > After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,
by novaRom 4y ago
> a quarter of the staff totaling more than 7,000
> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000
that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?
- jdm2212 4y agoUnless the sales people are bringing in more than that in sales.
- ehnto 4y agoForgive my ignorance, what are they selling? Is it to bigger advertising clients? Or maybe Twitter has some commercial services I'm not aware of.
- makestuff 4y agoI have a friend who works in sales at a tech company and since all of this accounts are long term customers he really doesn't do much. They like the service so it is basically an auto-renewal. So I guess Elon thinks that advertisers will just auto renew because they like the ROI they get from their spend on twitter. However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> However, what he fails to realize is the media buyers love to be wined and dined with fancy dinners. If you fire all of your sales staff they will just take their spend to the next company who can take them to five star meals and other cool outings. Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
- hparadiz 4y agoThis is all true and yet certain people can extract way more money out of a deal just because they are able to communicate better.
- jupp0r 4y agoIsn't this the definition of corruption?
- jupp0r 4y agoNot sure why this gets downvoted. IANAL but it every compliance training I've ever done, basing company business decisions on being invited to fancy dinners raises all sorts of red flag when it comes to compliance with anti corruption laws.
- bombcar 4y agoYou don't base your decisions on fancy dinners, but you do get invited to fancy dinners! It's all part of the game and those who know how to play it play it well.
- marcosdumay 4y agoYep. The GP is saying that advertisement spending is decided by corruption. On in other words, all the middlemen in those agencies that will "optimize" your spending are corrupt. I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
- gwd 4y agoUsually salespeoples' pay is highly incentivized: I doubt the base salary of those salespeople is $300k. Those $300k people are probably bringing in millions of dollars of revenue apiece. Firing them will reduce operating expenses some, but drastically reduce income as well, unless they're replaced with something else.
- akira2501 4y agoSales managers will just hand the accounts to new executives. It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore. They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them, not to do favors for their favorite executive.
- ketzo 4y ago> It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore. I mean, not all of the business -- but businesses can and will sever contracts because they lose their favorite point-of-contact. > They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them What if those benefits are already pretty slim, and they've been thinking of dropping Twitter entirely, but for the efforts of their Twitter AE? I don't understand this mindset that all salespeople are fungible drones.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago> It's not as if the business walks away because their AE isn't there anymore. They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos. With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
- conductr 4y agoI found the first part confusing to parse. It reads to me that 7000 is the 25% getting layoffs and made me think they had 28000 employees. They actually have ~7000 before layoffs.
- lm28469 4y agoThey can also fire everyone and switch off the servers Boom 0 cost, infinite money hack Tomorrow's news: "HN business man solved the recession"
- mapme 4y agoEmployee salaries is only 1.5B of their 4.5B annual costs. Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly