Reuters
Now Amazon has confirmed its ambitious hiring plans to us.
And an exclusive study prepared for Business Insider shows that Amazon is adding salespeople at a more rapid pace than any other enterprise business.
The Lions, a startup whose technology analyzes and categorizes approximately 25,000 salespeople, based on LinkedIn profiles and other data, prepared the study for Business Insider.
Since 2011, Amazon has added 200 sales reps, The Lions founder Matt McGraw tells us. 140 of those were hired in the past year alone.
And Amazon has seen incredible retention: Only 10 of those sales reps have left, McGraw tells us, according to the profiles The Lions has tracked.
While Oracle and Salesforce have hired more sales reps in that time period, they have also lost more. And Amazon started with almost no enterprise sales force. So, McGraw says, his data shows that Amazon is No. 1 both in net hiring and in the rate of growth of its sales force.
Approximately 40 percent of the hiring has been in Amazon's home state of Washington, with another 25 percent international. The rest is spread across the United States, with significant clusters in San Francisco, New York, and the D.C. area, where Amazon has both a data center and considerable government customers.
HP, Oracle, Google, and others are getting more serious about selling cloud-computing services—the Internet-rented computing model popularized by Amazon.
But Amazon has the biggest brand name for such cloud services, thanks to its early start. Historically, it has sold directly to customers, often startups. But its hiring shows that it is increasingly targeting larger businesses.
Tera Randall, an Amazon spokesperson, provided the following statement:
AWS is hiring sales and account managers all over the world to support the growing number of businesses and organizations, which include enterprises, start-ups, SMBs and government agencies, who are rapidly adopting AWS.
Additionally, AWS is hiring solution architects, professional services consultants, and business development managers who provide sales and technical support to customers. AWS has hired hundreds of people into these positions over the past year, and we’ll continue to hire at that pace this year as even more businesses and organizations are choosing to run their mission-critical applications on AWS. Today, AWS has sales, solution architect, professional services and business development positions open in US, Europe, South America, Japan, India, Singapore, and Australia.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.