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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I'd fully expect many of those 4,000 to be sales staff, each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed.

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Twitter was massively overstaffed before they began to meaningfully grow sales. It goes back to the days of their faster user growth when they were anticipating competing with Facebook and having over a billion users. They built the company ahead of time for that outcome rather than restraining employee growth and focusing on profitability.

They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.

Sales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.

>On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even.

Likely this is true for engineering as well. 25% of the team pulling the weight of the department.

Yes, but it makes sense for things that like to occur because when you think about it, firms care about the total contract value - meaning it might be a 50k contract per year for 2-3 years. Companies are looking at the longer term. At least that's how it is at my company. Clients generally sign a 2 year contract at $X per year. So if a sales person only sells 50k in a given year but every contract averages 2 years that's really 100k.

Right. As you said, companies aren't optimizing just for this year's sales; they're going to be balancing acquiring customers this year, the cost of each sale, and the retention of those customers year over year. So if a sales guy gets a huge commission and salary for the first year for his acquired customers, but the company's retention rate is high, then that sales person's salary could be paying multiples in revenue over several years.

Are those numbers from a study or something?

Probably just anecdotal numbers from experience. I've seen similar things as well. The division of prospects/accounts is kind of a big deal, and usually defaults to geographical area or industry as the primary dimension, with size/revenue of prospect as the secondary.

Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross).

All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises.

So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study.

Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.

I see, thank you for the reply. I guess someone might want to make similar claims about an engineering team, but eng teams probably don't have hard numbers to judge with.

How's that been working out for them? All the sales staff in the world hasn't made them ANY profit.

> each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed

Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.

Add one zero.

Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well.

1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.

I would agree, but I think their sales is doing a terrible job if they have that many and are not bringing the appropriate amount of money.

I would blame management/top more, than sales. Sales can work only with products they were given. AFAIK Twitter was pretty aggressively hiring 2-3 years ago sales reps across the globe and they were stealing top employees from FB and co.

I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.

I agree again, I think there is a lot of blame to go around in Twitter, also another reason why I think they could have a healthy purge and move forward with some fresh vigor.

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