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Sales. Being a sales company requires a lot of salespeople. That's frankly a small number considering the number of companies that advertise.
by Touche 13y ago
Sales. Being a sales company requires a lot of salespeople. That's frankly a small number considering the number of companies that advertise.
- alphakappa 13y agoBut they are also an Internet company where the ad signups are done online, so it's not immediately obvious why they would have all those salespeople. (Not saying that they don't need a large number of salespeople, but that it isn't an immediately obvious need)
- extesy 13y agoThey are not selling accounts. They are selling advertising opportunities to businesses.
- hoka 13y agoYes most signups are done online via a self-serve system; however, there is a lot of money to be made if you can produce custom deals, content, and ad placement with bigger partners.
- Touche 13y agoSales isn't about doing the paperwork of getting you signed up for a service. Sales is about convincing you to buy the service. Twitter doesn't have an automated system to convince companies to spend millions buying ads, they have salespeople, like every other sales company.
- judk 13y agoGuess how many salespeople Google has.
- ggreenbe 13y agoAny chance you know? Would be interested to know their numbers vs twitter.
- dangrossman 13y ago"Several thousand" according to WSJ.
- rhizome 13y agoThe result of this appears to be the occasional Coca-Cola promoted tweet that I scroll past. Maybe it takes that many people to convince large companies that this experience is worth whatever they're being charged?
- nimble 13y agoCan't we automate sales?
- mkr-hn 13y agoComputers can't write sales copy or do a great in-person pitch yet.
- wmeredith 13y agoHooo boy, we wish we could. Sales, much to my own inner-hacker's chagrin, is something done best by building relationships in person. You can put some of it off to a nice self-serve web experience a la Adsense, but if you ever want to make the big bucks (enterprise fuck-you bucks) you have to have sales people talking to real people who can write big checks and aren't Googling for self-serve solutions to their equally big problems.
- rhizome 13y agoYou can, but the margins are much, much lower.
- reuven 13y agoMaybe a sales company needs a lot of salespeople... but what are these people selling? Advertising? I've been using Twitter more and more over the last year, and I am hard-pressed to remember any ads that I saw. Who is advertising on Twitter? And is it really effective? And do they need 2,300 people to sell these advertisements?