"#Groupon is now in 46 countries and has about 8,000 employees, up from 1,500 just a year ago." Andrew Mason, CEO @ #D9—
Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) June 01, 2011
Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason just revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. That means it grew headcount by 433 percent.
About half of its employees are sales people. Signing up local businesses to offer group discounts requires a lot of hand-holding and sales calls across many local markets. Groupon is now in 46 countries.
Groupon is a selling machine, so it needs a lot of sales people. But these aren’t door-to-door salesmen. The only way Groupon can scale this sales organization is through centralized call centers with different teams focussed on different markets. (Yelp does the same thing).
And you thought it was all about Groupon’s comedians-turned-copywriters and the “Groupon Voice.” (The company employs a lot of copywriters also, but they don’t have thousands of them). It’s a sales culture through and through. Facebook or Google would be bragging about how many engineers they have. Groupon crows about sales.
Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in more than 565 cities around the world. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, Groupon can offer deals that aren’t available elsewhere. Groupon brings buyers and sellers together in a fun and collaborative way that offers the consumer an unbeatable deal, and businesses a large number of new customers. To date, it has saved consumers more than $300 million and claims it...
Andrew Mason is the founder of Groupon as well as The Point, the collective action platform from which Groupon was born. Andrew is originally from Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Mason moved to Chicago in 1999 to attend Northwestern University and graduated with a degree in music. He went on to attend University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy only to drop out three months later.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
