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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

I saw a provocative question on Twitter this afternoon:

"What exactly does Twitter need 2300 employees for?"

Sales. Being a sales company requires a lot of salespeople. That's frankly a small number considering the number of companies that advertise.

But 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)

They are not selling accounts. They are selling advertising opportunities to businesses.

Yes 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.

Sales 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.

Guess how many salespeople Google has.

Any chance you know? Would be interested to know their numbers vs twitter.

"Several thousand" according to WSJ.

The 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?

Can't we automate sales?

Computers can't write sales copy or do a great in-person pitch yet.

Hooo 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.

You can, but the margins are much, much lower.

Maybe 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?

Hoarding engineers.

Copy-cat to the old google strategy. Hire way, way too many engineers than your core business requires and maybe they'll figure something out.

Worked out good for goog, but I feel bad for engineering talent that goes to twitter.

Wake up! Yeah you'll get your proverbial "gold star" you've been chasing since kindergarten , but you are being warehoused and hoarded according to some mba's "strategic plan"

Come work for a small company and make something happen!

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